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Coach Geib.
No matter how far removed we were from playing soccer at Amador Valley in the late 1970s, I was never comfortable calling Mike Geib, “Mike”.
He always was and will forever be Coach Geib or Mr. Geib.
When former teacher Mike Geib passed away recently, a big chunk of the history of Amador Valley High School, as well as a big part of his legion of former players, went with him.
What made Mr. Geib a great coach? It wasn’t his soccer coaching tactical ability as he wasn’t a soccer player. In fact, when he retired as a coach, he gifted me a book by iconic soccer coach Hubert Vogelsinger that had passages highlighted throughout.
In those pages I found lessons he told us, verbatim to what was written in the book.
What made Mr. Geib a great coach was that he didn’t try to reinvent the wheel.
There was no secret as to how much talent Mr. Geib had at his disposal at Amador and that left his coaching plan straightforward – condition and motivate the talent.
He gave us a masterclass.
From the time we started preseason conditioning on through the last week of practice, we worked – and we worked our butts off.
We knew we had the best team; we just needed to make sure we did our jobs. He made sure we did.
One overlooked angle of Coach Geib’s methodology is that he built on team unity and brought us even closer together. There were a lot of strong personalities in my years on the varsity at Amador, but Coach Geib made sure it was one strong unit.
We had players-only meetings the night before every game where we went around the room speaking about the game and what our responsibilities were for the next game.
During practices Coach would absolutely destroy us with conditioning – anyone remember the grinder? It seemed like we were beaten into the ground. What that did was bond us even closer together, often uniting us a team, cursing our coach behind his back. It was bonding, but with a sense of comic relief.
Then there were the catchphrases, some of which my buddies and I still use today.
“It’s all about mind over matter – I don’t mind and you don’t matter” was often said in the middle of conditioning drills.
“I’m not getting tired one bit,” I recall came in the middle of the grinder.
Those two phrases resonated with us back then and they still do today. One thing I can guarantee is that no team outworked us. One more guarantee – we all slept well each night after practice.
He held us accountable by re-enforcing a simple plan – work hard and good things will happen.
It worked as we had one run of 55 games without a loss. At the time, it was the record for all high school sports in the United States. That mark was later crushed by the De La Salle football team.
My senior year we were 20-0-1 and allowed like 5-6 goals for the entire season and finished as the No. 1 team in the United States.
One final thing I think gets overlooked about Coach Geib is his ability as a teacher. He was a tough teacher and one that most soccer players avoided taking.
He was brutally honest in the classroom, but that was the type of teacher I liked. The tougher the better, as I knew it would prepare me for college.
I remember walking into his classroom on the first day of school, getting a glance from him, followed by “what are you doing in here?”
You did not want to answer a question wrong in his class!
The older we get we may not remember a lot about our high school years, but I remember plenty that Coach Geib taught us. Lessons we have carried with us for years – lessons that made us better people.
RIP Coach – you were a difference maker.
Funeral services have been set for March 12, 11 a.m. at St. Joan of Arc in San Ramon.
Amador boys’ basketball
The Dons took a pair of games to advance to the semifinals of the North Coast Section Division I playoffs.
In the first game, the Dons beat Redwood 70-44, with four players scoring in double figures.
Jaylen Smith had 17, Cade Krueger 14 and Elijah Stanley 13 for the Dons. Eli Pace had 11 points and had six rebounds for Amador.
In the second round, the Dons gained revenge for an early season loss, beating Livermore 56-31. Smith went wild on offense, finishing with 26, nearly half of the Amador points. Krueger and Stanley added eight points each.
Amador boys’ soccer
Amador Valley’s postseason journey came to an end this past week in a hard-fought 3-0 NCS D-I playoff match against Tamalpais in Mill Valley.
The game was close in the first half as the score was 0-0 at the break. With 19 returning players, the Dons seem poised to make another run to the postseason next year.
Editor’s note: Dennis Miller is a contributing sports writer for Embarcadero Media Foundation’s East Bay Division. To contact him about his Pleasanton Preps column, email acesmag@aol.com.
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