Men's Soccer January 21, 2021 Story by Christine Bedell, senior alumni engagement specialist

CSUB Alum Jeremy Gunn Among the Best in His Field

CSU Bakersfield Product to be Inducted into CSUB Alumni Association Hall of Fame in 2021

Jeremy Gunn was walking down a corridor at Stanford, where he'd just been hired as the head men's soccer coach, when he first met the university's athletic director.

"Are you going to win a national championship?" AD Bob Bowlsby asked him.

The smart answer, Gunn says now, would have been "I'll try!" or maybe a "meek yes." Instead, Gunn went all in — and immediately regretted it.

"I said, 'Uh, yes. And then I'll win another one,'" Gunn recalled. "Then I walked away and said under my breath, 'You &*#%!@? idiot!'"

But Gunn made it happen. Not a two-peat, but a three-peat. The Stanford Cardinal won the national men's championship in 2015, 2016, 2017, making Gunn just the second NCAA soccer coach to win three titles in a row.

That and a string of earlier, oft-improbable successes make Gunn one of the most revered collegiate soccer coaches in the nation.

Gunn is one of only four soccer coaches with NCAA titles at both the Division I and Division II levels. He's been named National Coach of the Year three times. His career record of 297-93-59 (.727) in 21 seasons makes him the fifth winningest active coach at the Division I level by percentage.

Gunn got his collegiate start at CSUB, where he's still the university's all-time top goal-scorer. And as legendary coach Simon Tobin's assistant, he helped lead the `Runner men to an incredibly unlikely Division II national championship.

"He really is a top alumnus, whether in the world of sports or academics or politics or philanthropy," said Tobin, who now coaches the San Jose State Spartans. "He's brilliant. What he's achieved is incredible. And he absolutely gives credit to the lessons he learned at CSUB."

Crossing the pond

Gunn is the youngest of four children born to parents who split up when he was young. He moved around the UK a lot while being raised mostly by his mother, but most identifies with being from picturesque Yorkshire. (Think scenes of rolling hills from Pride and Prejudice).

"When I meet English people, they sometimes can't figure out where I'm from," he said. "I'm just a bit of a mongrel, really."

Gunn played cricket, soccer and rugby , and it gave him structure he's grateful for today. How he ended up at CSUB is a story involving injury, poor map reading skills and worse English weather.

A knee injury exacerbated by a poor national healthcare system took Gunn out of the game for a year while in high school, dashing any hopes of a professional apprenticeship by his senior year. He had been focused on cricket, having played for his country at under 17 level, but wanted to play one last soccer game in mid-December before his winter cricket training started.

Rainy weather pushed the game to the week between Christmas and New Year's. Tobin happened to be at the game to check out other players.

Tobin liked what he saw in Gunn, a competitive, attacking player with smarts and a background not unlike many of his players at CSUB.

"He was almost like my first-generation kids who ended up at Bakersfield, just from another country," Tobin said. "He was a fighter on the field and a worker off the field."

Tobin lured Gunn to Bakersfield with his talent for selling a vision. It helped that when Gunn looked at a map, Bakersfield didn't seem far from the ocean.

"I had something like Santa Barbara in my head," Gunn said, laughing. "But that's OK."

Balls in the net

Tobin was in the process of turning the `Runners around when Gunn got there in 1989. The next year, the `Runners made it to the NCAA Division II Tournament for the first time. Gunn, a forward, had a rough first year but went on to become CSUB's all-time leading goal scorer.

"Soccer being a pretty low-scoring game, someone that can put that ball in the net is worth their weight in gold," Tobin said. "And he certainly was."

Gunn has fond memories on the field, especially competing against arch-rival Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, but fonder ones just being around his teammates, naïve and broke like he was. Gunn paid his way through school coaching club teams, working in the library, ushering at athletic events and picking up odd jobs.

Gunn earned bachelor's and master's degrees in business from CSUB in 1993 and 1999, and credits lessons learned in the classroom as much as on the playing field with shaping the coach he became. A professor of organizational behavior taught him to back up assertions with fact and recognize people are a product of their environment.

"So if you want competitors, create a competitive environment," Gunn said. "If you want people that love to train, make a great training environment."

The `Runners really hit their stride during Gunn's six years as Tobin's assistant coach beginning in 1993. The team made the NCAA Division II tournament in 1994, 1995 and 1996, and won the national title in 1997, beating both Division I and II schools along the way, something often overlooked.

And it did so as a woefully underfunded program. Tobin had to run community soccer camps to raise money for scholarships and paid for recruiting trips out of his own pocket, all because he couldn't settle for mediocracy, Gunn said.

Tobin and Gunn (though mostly Gunn) were also leading CSUB's new women's soccer squad. It all taught him to dream big, lead with courage and stay humble.

"If you went to a big school with an incredible budget, then you become an assistant at that school, and then a (head) coach at that kind of school, you would probably never understand how hard it can be to make things happen," Gunn said.

"I'm very spoiled where I am today. People look at me and say, 'Well, you have this incredible position.' But I think the reason why I got this position is because of that grounding I had at Bakersfield."

A Midas touch

Gunn brought that mentality to Fort Lewis College in Colorado, where he coached for eight seasons beginning in 1999. He'd have players and staff repair the sod and paint the goal posts as lessons in taking nothing for granted.

Gunn moved to the beautiful but isolated mountain town a bit trepidatious about leaving his home of 10 years and leading his own team. But he need not have worried professionally. He took the Skyhawks to the Division II national championship game in 1999, 2005 and 2006, winning the top title in 2005.

That same year, Gunn was named Division II National Coach of the Year.

"Coach Gunn is a natural leader of young men who created a soccer culture that is unmatched to this day at any level throughout the NCAA," Fort Lewis College Athletics Director Brandon Leimbach said when Gunn and the 2005 team were inducted into the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference Hall of Fame in 2019.

"His victories speak for themselves, yet it was his proclivity to build relationships to inspire student-athletes and engage a local community that made him the hall of fame coach and hall of fame person that we enthusiastically celebrate tonight."

Gunn's Midas touch followed him to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, to which he moved in 2007 looking for a new challenge at a Division I campus. The 49ers were 150th out of 200 teams when he got there; five years later he led them to the NCAA Division I championship game.

Gunn coached at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for five seasons, during which time he led the team to 64 wins, a national championship appearance, an Atlantic 10 regular-season title and two NCAA Tournament bids.

Though Charlotte lost the national championship 1-0 to its sister campus the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, it was huge just to be competitive with the Atlantic Coast Conference, Gunn said.

"We managed to take our team from looking up to those teams to getting onto the stage where we were looking them square in the eye, and often beating them," he said.

Picked up by Palo Alto

Major universities including Kentucky, Michigan and Stanford were looking for new head coaches the year Charlotte reached the championship game, and so they naturally set their sights on Gunn. He chose Stanford.

Gunn had a lot of work to do making good on his promise to win a national championship. Despite its enormous resources, Stanford ranked 100th.

He says he set out to create a culture "that brings out the best in each person and a greater output of a group.," which sounds a lot like making people work harder. He admits his approach didn't go over well with everyone.

"I had to survive people trying to, you know, get me out of a job. And those are things that really take a toll on you as a person," Gunn said.

"I made plenty of mistakes along the way, and there are things I would have done differently, but I am proud that I didn't get bullied into lowering standards."

One could hardly argue with his success. When The Cardinal won the national championship by defeating Clemson 4-0 in 2015, Gunn became only the fourth soccer coach to win titles at both the Division I and II levels.

Then Gunn faced a new challenge: sustaining success. He not only found the right players to round out his team after losing superstars including Jordan Morris, he studied how multinational companies stayed hungry after big wins.

"When you have some success, you suddenly start to think everything you did was good," Gunn said. "The truth is, you did enough good things but maybe you were a bit lucky. Maybe the climate was right. Maybe the timing was right. So you have to be introspective and constantly seek out ways of improving, and that's what we really did well as a staff and what the student-athletes did."

They did it so well that Stanford beat Wake Forest 5-4 in penalty shootouts in 2016 and Indiana 1-0 in 2017 to secure two more titles. Only Gunn and Virginia's Bruce Arena (1991-1994) have won three consecutive NCAA men's soccer championships.

"He was always the hardest working person in the room, the first guy in and the last guy out," said Tanner Beason, a Stanford defender from 2015 to 2019 who now plays for the San Jose Earthquakes. "Anyone who knows and spends time around Coach Gunn knows that he's extremely passionate and loud and into whatever he's doing."

Gunn also created an "accountability-based environment" in which all the players knew what their jobs were, what their teammates' jobs were, and were expected to set and meet the highest standards. Beason called it the "Stanford mentality."

"It's about giving all that you have, making sure that you're pushing yourself and in so doing, pushing those around you," he said.

Beason was quick to add that off the field, Gunn is a loving, family-oriented man who cares deeply about his players, current and former.

Tobin said it will be "almost impossible" to replicate the three-peat. It's all the more remarkable, Tobin said, because Gunn didn't have the most talented teams at the time. Gunn's incredibly sharp, analytical mind and his refusal to tolerate players not working hard are among his "gifts," Tobin said.

"In most sports, if you've got the best players you're going to win," he said. "He has a gift where that doesn't have to be the case."

Gunn wishes he could go back and enjoy that moment more. At the time, he was simply exhausted. Gunn and his wife, OB-GYN Janet Wiese, have two young sons, Tomás and Sebastián, and Gunn was trying to balance work and family.

"And I was kind of worrying about, 'OK, what do we do next?'" he said. "I kind of wish that I'd taken more time to reflect and smile at a few more people and be happy for a moment."

Under Gunn, Stanford won a Pac-12 record of five straight conference titles. Gunn is the only coach in league history to win more than two consecutive championships. He's one of only two coaches to win three consecutive NCAA men's soccer titles.

Gunn is still focused on the future, which right now means trying to plan for play after COVID-19. Stanford's last game was a Dec. 13, 2019, loss to Georgetown in the national semifinals.

Cancellation of the 2020 season was a heartbreaker for Gunn because he felt the team had a "wonderful" future ahead. Gunn said that while he's wasted a lot of time on plans that haven't materialized, he's been able to put a lot of thought into what he could do differently.

"I strongly want to keep evolving, but it's such a hard balance between sticking to what you know, what you think is right, and being able to adjust and evolve into a new future," he said. "The people who figure out which things to leave behind, what to keep and which things to change, they're the smart people."

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