Q&A with CC soccer coach & AFA tennis coach

Before current players at Air Force and Colorado College were born, Rich Gugat and Horst Richardson were leading those teams to victory. The Gazette got the two coaches together to discuss their careers and changes they saw during those long tenures.
Gugat, a California native and retired Air Force major, has been the Falcons’ tennis coach since 1974. He’s the winningest coach (730-268) in academy history and ranks No. 3 among active Division I coaches in dual-match wins. He announced his retirement this week and was honored by former players with a dinner Saturday.
Gugat played basketball and tennis at UCLA before transferring to San Jose State. He was part of UCLA’s basketball squad in 1961-62. After entering the military, he won the 1967 Air Force World Wide doubles championship. He was inducted into the Colorado Tennis Hall of Fame in 2004.
Richardson, in his 44th season at CC, ranks No. 3 among active Division III men’s soccer coaches in victories (503-279-59). He’s led the Tigers to the NCAA playoffs 18 times, including nine of the past 17 years. The best season was 1992 (18-2-2, national semifinals). Richardson played four seasons at California-Riverside and earned a Ph.D. from Connecticut in 1976. He was a professor in CC’s German department until retiring in 2006.
Richardson was born in 1941 in Nazi Germany and his father was a corporal in Adolf Hitler’s tank corps. Richardson has written a book “Your Loyal and Loving Son,” based on family letters from his father during World War II. Richardson’s mother married a U.S. soldier she’d met at the end of the war and they moved to California. Horst was adopted by his new father and became a U.S. citizen.

Q: How did you end up in Colorado Springs?
Richardson: I almost ended up at the Air Force Academy but the timing wasn’t right and it didn’t work out. I was hired by Colorado College to replace someone on sabbatical and I had one-year appointments for a while. In 1965 Mr. (Bill) Boddington was coaching the soccer team but his son was on the team and he didn’t really like that idea and he asked me to coach. That’s how I fell into the job. And I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it all these years.

Q: What’s the secret to maintaining success after being on the job for such a long time?
Gugat: Just try to maintain consistency, and you can’t back off. You have to work as hard or harder as you ever did.

Richardson: A sense of caring for your players and building an environment of trust. The legacy that former players have left for the current players to achieve contributes to success.

Q: What coach do you emulate or pattern yourself after in your coaching style?
Gugat: I was fortunate enough to be recruited to play basketball at UCLA by John Wooden. At UCLA, J.D. Morgan was the tennis coach and he’s the most powerful man I ever met.
Richardson: Soccer is a much more recent phenomenon in this country. Not many people were playing it when I took over in 1966, at least at a competitive collegiate level. When I arrived, the locker room was the coal cellar in the old gym. We even had a tough time getting tape or attention from the trainer, who dealt mostly with traditional U.S. sports. The coach before me was Bill Boddington, a local businessman who funded the sport and provided transportation. He kept the thing afloat.

Q: Rich, what do you remember taking most from Wooden?
Gugat: Basically, keep things simple and pay attention to detail.

Q: Did you grow up playing soccer in Germany?
Richardson: All the kids played, but it wasn’t anything organized, no formal coaching. When I played at California-Riverside, the coaches were professors, usually from Europe, who knew the game.

Q: How has recruiting changed and what’s changed the most?
Gugat: Technology, and that’s my weak spot. That’s probably one of the smaller reasons I’ve decided to retire. I really haven’t kept up.
Richardson: Innovations can also be a distraction to focus on a given task because the kids tend to multitask so much. At the same time they are a miracle of convenience. Gosh, I don’t know how we ever recruited before without the Internet and e-mail. Instantaneous communication really allows you to keep track of hundreds and hundreds of candidates annually. At Colorado College, we’re in a position where we need to find athletes that are like a needle in a haystack with academics and costs.

Q: What was a turning point for your program?
Gugat: When we got indoor courts in 1989, it helped our program tremendously. Before that we had three rubber mats we hit on. That helped recruiting a lot. Even with the biggest snowstorm in the world, you could have a quality practice.

Q: What are similarities or differences between the two schools?
Gugat: Both have very high academic standards. In college tennis, probably 75 of the top 100 players are foreign students and we cannot recruit foreign athletes. And they probably have to be in the top 20 percent of their class and willing to serve three years of active duty. So that limits us.

Richardson: We attract different clientele. The liberal arts free spirit may not be as happy and content as those in a disciplined military environment.

Q:Horst, did you ever serve in the military?
Richardson: I did not. I had this Air Force opportunity but missed it. I was drafted, and this is a great Colorado College story. I got this letter from Uncle Sam during the Vietnam War. I had no compunction to go and serve. I went to see the dean and he said, ‘We can’t let you go,’ because teaching German at the time was teaching a critical language because you had East and West Germany back then. We monitored East German activities, it was critical to know the communist view, and you had to speak the language. So that gave me a deferral.

Q: Rich, you were in ROTC at UCLA but did you ever serve in the active military?
Gugat: I had 21 years of military active duty. Seventeen of those were coaching at the academy and I was in San Francisco for 2½ years and also stationed in the Phillipines. Normally you go to the academy and you serve three or four years. I came there in 1970 and coached basketball at the prep school for two years. The tennis coach resigned and I was playing tournaments, so they made me tennis coach. A few years later, the old athletic director called me and Joe Robison, the longtime baseball coach, and Reggie Minton, the basketball coach, into his office, out of the blue. We were all captains for about six years and he said he had permission to keep us all here until we retired. He said he would guarantee us major and nothing else, but we had to decide by noon tomorrow. We all signed within about six seconds.

Richardson: That’s great for both of us to be able to stay in the same jobs for such a long time. That’s an unbelievable luxury.

Q: Did your book sell well in Germany?
Richardson: No, it was just a journey of personal discovery from letters that I discovered in my mother’s attic. I was half-a-year old when my father was killed. He never saw me and I never saw him.

Q: Do you have any memories of Nazi Germany?
Richardson: We lived in a little village outside the city of Nuremburg. I remember just at the end of the war a big railroad bridge was blown up in our town and all the windows were blown in from the blast in our apartment. I remember the American soldiers coming to town. I remember looking out from the attic and seeing the town of Nuremburg burn 20 miles away. I didn’t understand, I was only 4 or 5 years old. I remember the generosity of the American soldiers after the war, handing out candy and chewing gum. Mr. Richardson, who met my mother at the end of the war, came back to the U.S. to finish his education and we thought we’d never see him again. He’d send us a care package every two weeks. Without that we probably wouldn’t have survived. He was 101st Airborne and he became my dad. I grew up on the Newport (Calif.) pier, learning English talking to the fishermen there, which you couldn’t do anymore there because all the fishermen are Vietnamese.

Q: What has made you successful?
Richardson: Success, to me, is having a group of people, having an objective, attempting to overcome obstacles along the way, surviving all sorts of ups and downs and then at the end of the season — or tour of duty, if you like — still being a group, and still enjoying what you’ve accomplished, celebrating the season and the glorious victories and being able to live with the defeats along the way. And growing for it. It is an education, going through a season.

Q: Rich, how did it make you feel to be honored with a dinner Saturday?
Gugat: It’s neat. Tennis doesn’t get a lot of attention at the school. But the academy’s always treated me well. You get older, you get more emotional. I normally don’t like attention but it’s nice.
Richardson: This young gentleman is retiring, and I’m thinking about it. But I still have a fire in my gut.
Gugat: I never saw myself retiring. But I’m having some medical issues. I’m just not at 100 percent any more. People say when it’s the right time to retire you’ll know it. And I knew it.

Q: How hard was the decision to retire?
Gugat: For me, it wasn’t. I love my job so much. I’d spend seven days a week on my job. But it was a great environment for my family and my daughters to grow up in. It’s like they have 100 brothers.

Q: How hard has it been to deal with kids in a military environment?
Gugat: In some ways it made it easier, because they’re learning discipline. Being an athlete, at whatever sport, definitely enhances your leadership abilities. And these kids are getting leadership opportunities at a very young age.
Richardson: Here (at CC), kids tend to kind of question everything you do. I’ve tried to be about as democratic as I can. There’s certainly an amount of buy-in I allow the players to have. I think that’s a good coaching style for our institution. Engage them along the way. I reserve the right to supervise it and make final decisions. They are smart and bring a lot of experience to the table. We’ve got to value that and use it.
Gugat: Our coaching styles are probably very similar. I take a lot of input from my kids. When I select the lineup for doubles teams it’s me and my assistant coaches and my captains. They buy into it and support it.

Q: Were you always that way or a product of you maturing as a coach or maybe of the changing times?
Gugat: Coach Wooden had rules but he always took input. He was a lot more open than people probably realize.

Q: Is there a game that comes to mind first?
Richardson: I definitely remember an Air Force game in 1975 for the league championship, the old Rocky Mountain Intercollegiate soccer league. I have a huge poster in my office, a moment from that game where two Air Force players and two Colorado College players are framed. That picture basically says it all: the competition, the struggle, the engagement, the physical activity, the will to win. That’s the motto I’ve hung up on the wall all these years.
Gugat: The one match that I’ll always remember is when we upset Colorado, back in probably ’93. They were in the quarterfinals of the NCAA and we played them indoors and it got down to a doubles point. Our No. 1 doubles team beat the No. 4 doubles team in the country. I go down to third doubles and we’re down 5-2 in the third set and the kids win five straight games. All the fans in there — and we had probably 500 fans that day — were going wild. Another time, we’d won like 50 matches in a row at the academy and we’re playing Baylor and they beat us in the last match of the day to cost us the match. My No. 3 player lost close and he was playing a guy I thought should’ve beat him 6-1, 6-1 and he lost like 7-5 in the third and he comes to me later and apologizes. I felt for him and told him that was one of the most courageous efforts I’d ever seen and here he was apologizing.