Earlham was among the first colleges to field a soccer team in the Midwest when the program began in 1949. Originally, the Hustlin’ Quakers completed the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics and most of the players came from Quaker boarding schools on the East Coast. But by the 1990s the team was a member of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division III and was dominated by Midwesterners.  

What made Earlham soccer so successful – both on and off the pitch – were the coaches and the players themselves. Between 1954 and 1978, Charlie Matlack, an All-American mid-fielder at Haverford College in the 1940s, led the Hustlin’ Quakers to 169 victories, six conference titles, two state and seven district crowns and a national championship in 1963. His successor, Roy Messer, amassed 278 victories in a 34-year tenure as head coach. Messer’s teams won three conference titles and qualified for seven national tournaments.

Impressive as those achievements are, they hardly define Matlack and Messer. Both coaches used soccer as a vehicle to cultivate intangible life lessons in their players. They taught their players to be accountable to each other and to the team. They didn’t care about winning as much as they did about their players as human beings and building unity within a team composed of blacks and white, Christians, Jews and Muslims, Americans and foreigners.

Of the more than 830 student-athletes who played for Earlham’s soccer team between 1949 and 2017, there are a dozen All Americans and nearly 100 others who earned All-Conference, All-Region and/or All-State honors. Still others were colorful characters, who entertained their teammates with their idiosyncratic rituals and zany personalities. All of us however played mostly for the personal reward of being part of something much larger than ourselves. We understood that  “winning” is the easy part once a team disciplines itself to give the extra effort, to care about one another and to  place team success above individual achievement.

Based on contemporary newspaper accounts, college records and dozens of interviews, Between the Touchlines recounts the memories – on and off the pitch - of those student-athletes who played for Earlham Men’s Soccer between 1949 and 2017.