BLS Soccer girls & boys varsity head coaches

Coach Jon Rudzinski, known as “Coach Rud” to Wolfpack players, will take the helm of the Boston Latin School Girls program this fall for his 14th season as Varsity Head Coach. During his tenure, the program has developed into one that can compete in the high-powered DCL. The team qualified for the MIAA tournament in five of the six seasons prior to the canceled Fall ’20 season – the only such tourney qualifications in program history. In the one-of-a-kind “Fall 2 Season” held in the spring of 2021, the Wolfpack completed an undefeated season and rolled to the Boston City League crown. For the last two seasons, the team progressed out of the preliminary round of the MIAA tournament, which is an unparalleled achievement for the BLS Girls Varsity program.

As Head Coach, Coach Rud views his role as a caretaker of a community asset; as a facilitator of a love of the beautiful game; and as a nurturer of developing soccer talent. Coach Rud has been a soccer fanatic since the age of ten and learned to play on the dusty fields of Phoenix, Arizona, where he started his career playing “inside right” in a 2-3-5 system (!). He achieved all-Conference honors in high school and is old enough to have played JV soccer at a Division 1 college (when there was such a thing as JV college soccer).

Coach Rud is a die-hard supporter of Liverpool FC (mostly the men’s team); he also enjoys international women’s football. His most thrilling experience as a fan was to travel to the 2015 World Cup to see the French Women’s National Team, featuring Louisa Necib, play in person. His favorite American players are Julie Ertz and Rose Lavelle.

Coach Rud holds various coaching licenses and certificates, including a D License from Mass Youth Soccer. He has coached girls of every age from U8 through High School. He is a long-time board member and past President of Jamaica Plain Youth Soccer, where he volunteered as the Girls Travel Director for 17 years.

Coach Rud and his wife, Ellen, are long-time residents of Roslindale, where they raised two kids, one of whom is a BLS alum (’12).

As Head Coach, Coach Rud views his role as a caretaker of a community asset; as a facilitator of a love of the beautiful game; and as a nurturer of developing soccer talent.

Coach Rud has been a soccer fanatic since the age of ten and learned to play on the dusty fields of Phoenix, Arizona, where he started his career playing “inside right” in a 2-3-5 system (!). He achieved all-Conference honors in high school and is old enough to have played JV soccer at a Division 1 college (when there was such a thing as JV college soccer).

Coach Rud is a die-hard supporter of Liverpool FC (mostly the men’s team); he also enjoys international women’s football. His most thrilling experience as a fan was to travel to the 2015 World Cup to see the French Women’s National Team, featuring Louisa Necib, play in person. His favorite American players are Julie Ertz and Rose Lavelle.

Coach Rud holds various coaching licenses and certificates, including a D License from Mass Youth Soccer. He has coached girls of every age from U8 through High School. He is a long-time board member and past President of Jamaica Plain Youth Soccer, where he has volunteered as the Girls Travel Director for 17 years.

Coach Rud and his wife, Ellen, are long-time residents of Roslindale, where they raised two kids, one of whom is a BLS alum (’12).

Coach Nick DiCicco has been a resident of Boston for 13 years. He started coaching soccer during the summers while in school at Suffolk University where he played division three soccer. For five years he was a staff coach with SoccerPlus Camps traveling to sites across the country every summer. When he graduated, he began directing those camps and continued to work with SoccerPlus for another five years. Additionally, he has been fortunate to have the experience of running soccer outreach programs in Kenya, Haiti, and Chile. Throughout his travel experience, soccer has always been a powerful and joyful way to connect with people across cultures. From 2016 to 2018 he had the privilege of working with some of the best young players in the country through his job as an equipment manager with the United States Soccer Federation. For two years he hauled equipment around the country and the globe supporting several fantastic coaches and extremely talented players.

He joined the coaching staff at BLS in 2018 where he worked with the freshman team for two seasons before moving into the varsity assistant position, and then, the head varsity coach position. He looks forward to continuing to work with our BLS student-athletes and challenging them to be excellent leaders on and off the field.  

My mother’s direct ancestor, Anthony Morse, came to this country from southwest England in 1635 (during the so-called “Great Migration” of religious dissenters) an auspicious date for that is the year Boston Latin School was founded. Anthony was a cobbler and with some other settlers founded the town of Newburyport, Massachusetts. A cousin of mine, visiting our ancestral parish in England, was spooked because so many people there looked just like me. My father’s parents arrived in this country from London, England in the 1880s and settled in Brockton, Massachusetts. Grandpa Nelson worked as a payroll clerk in a suspender factory and was secretary of the Brockton Cricket Club, which also fielded a soccer team. Grandma (who lived to be a hundred) confided to me that Brockton “Twern’t London at all, but I lived it down”.

I was born in 1937 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, I attended the Browne & Nichols School for boys. In my sophomore year, I switched from American football to soccer. By my senior year, I was captain of the team, which tied in points Tabor Academy for the independent school championship. Since Tabor, led by Chad Tubman, son of the ill-fated president of Liberia, had beaten us in regular season play, we did not earn the trophy. The tactical formation of most schools and colleges in those days (the ’50s) was an exuberantly attacking 1-2-3-5, i.e., five forwards – they had all the fun. I played left midfield. My other sports were wrestling and crew.

On graduating in 1956, I decided to fulfill my military obligation before going to college. This was fine with Harvard College, so I joined the U.S. Navy, serving two years + in the Mediterranean Fleet as a quartermaster, that is to say, a member of the bridge crew, signalman, helmsman, and navigators’ assistant. Since I was deemed literate, my battle station was to stand at a desk and write down every order given by the captain. The ship, a radar picket destroyer, visited many ports, but my favorites were Palma de Mallorca, Barcelona, and Santillana del Mar. 

On leaving the navy, I did not enter college and would not return as a freshman for another fifteen years.  In the interval, I played a lot of soccer with friends, eventually organizing a team called the Harvard-MIT Graduate School Soccer Team, of which I was player/manager. Our uniform was all white, except for the jersey, which sported bold red horizontal stripes. We played college teams: Dartmouth, Harvard, Tufts, B.U., and played against teams mustered by various visiting foreign naval ships – something my grandfather Nelson’s cricket Club did during WW1. We won these games, even beating the Boston Minutemen, our City’s second attempt to field a professional team. Our team’s greatest success came from winning the Eastern Massachusetts Soccer League title. In short, your coach in the 1960’s and ’70s had put together a top-notch side of American and foreign graduate students. In the ensuing years, I both played defense and managed in the “Over the Hill League” for Cambridge and Wellesley until retiring from active play in my 60’s.  During my playing career, I had no interest in goal-keeping, for constant hard running was the joy of my life. I will add that before returning to college in 1973 at the age of 36 I had also worked as a laborer in a tree nursery and then on the state-wide maintenance crew of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, stationed at Drumlin Farm in Lincoln, MA. 

Now, I am entering my 17th year as a goalkeeper coach at Boston Latin.  In 2006 the girls’ varsity and JV had no players with any goal-keeping experience. The Friends of Soccer thought it might help the girls’ coaches at the time if they engaged someone to teach their keepers. The girl’s JV coach was an acquaintance and neighbor of mine. She said she could provide such a person, namely me. I had just retired from coaching youth teams in Cambridge, probably too old and cantankerous for U-14 girls. When she proposed BLS, I at first refused. I was in retirement mode. But two weeks into the season, I called her back and said, “Yes, I have to do this”. Thus, I started; using the back of one of the goals for training, because that’s all there was available. The field players had the front of it. As for the equipment bin we now enjoy, I finally told my coaches, you have to get a bin. I can’t load my car up every day with a ball cannon and everything else I need. Behold, a bin materialized. The AD, John McDonough, came through. 

I became interested in goalkeeping as a youth coach in Cambridge. You have a bunch of kids, none of whom want to play the position. Once you convince someone to take the job, how do you train her and pay attention to the rest of the team? I learned that the more attention I was able to give my keeper, the happier she was. Frankly, I found making a kid happy, who by the nature of her task was something of an outsider, rewarding. 

My greatest revelation regarding goalkeeping came when I decided to take one of my young charges to a keeper clinic at MIT. It was offered by a young man named Tony DiCicco, of whom neither I nor anyone else had ever heard. It was an inspiring session, for I had no idea that a keeper had to learn such an array of skills and techniques to be effective. I also learned that training for the position required exhausting physical effort. From being a team player/manager fascinated by tactics and formations, I became even more interested in the complexities of goalkeeping.

I should probably be in retirement mode again. Yet in sickness and in health, I have gleaned over my years at BLS many cherished memories. In closing,  other than soccer, I loved mountain hiking, winter hiking, and camping. In the pursuit of such, I’ve traveled to many countries and enjoyed countless sublime moments, but I have rambled on enough.