Stephan Teodosescu
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Ask a Cal Poly student about Wolfgang Gartner and they’re likely to point to the famous DJ who’s garnered playing time at music festivals such as Coachella and become a staple in the electro house music scene in recent years.
They wouldn’t be wrong. But they wouldn’t be entirely right, either.
The original Wolfgang Gartner isn’t a DJ — he’s a man with strong ties to Cal Poly, long rebellious hair, a fiery personality on the sidelines and a record 28 years’ history of coaching the men’s soccer team through thick and thin.
Gartner is where the story of Cal Poly soccer begins.
The Gartner years
The Cal Poly coach was gumptious enough to inspire DJ Wolfgang Gartner’s stage name.
The DJ, a San Luis Obispo native, was born Joseph Youngman and has gone by his pseudonym since 2008, according to an interview he gave vegasseven.com in 2011.
“I used to always go to those Cal Poly games with my family, and he was just this crazy old German dude with long hair and he’d be running around yelling at people, all animated and shit,” Youngman told the Las Vegas publication. “He was just a character and had a cool name so I just took it.”
The original Gartner, Cal Poly’s head coach from 1978-2005, finished with a 223-221-55 record in his years at the helm. But his modest on-paper record doesn’t begin to describe the impact he had on the men’s soccer program for nearly three decades.
Cal Poly’s soccer history dates back to the 1960s, before Gartner was around, when the Mustangs played Division II ball.
Enter Gartner. After establishing Cal Poly as a perennial contender at that level for more than a decade, he helped the program transition to Division I in 1994 but didn’t see nearly as much success near the end of his career.
He was let go in 2005 after suffering a losing record in five of his last six years and finishing 6-14 overall and 1-9 in the Big West Conference play during his final season. In 2006, Gartner was replaced by Paul Holocher, who recently resigned before the 2014 season to take a job with Maui United Soccer Club.
Gartner hails from Stuttgart, Germany. He moved to the Central Coast as a high school exchange student and went on to play nine seasons of professional soccer in Asia, Germany and the United States before joining Cal Poly’s coaching staff. Gartner, now 65, still lives in San Luis Obispo.
His former players recognize the culture of soccer he helped instill.
“He was a 50-year-old guy with a 19-year-old mentality,” former midfielder Michael Nelson (1991-94) said. “That was his mentality, he thought he was one of the players.”
Nelson was among a group of Gartner’s former players who sent letters to then-Director of Athletics Allison Cone protesting the decision not to renew his coaching contract. Ultimately, it didn’t work.
Under Gartner, Cal Poly flourished in the early ‘90s, even reaching the Division II Final Four championship in 1991. Gartner called those teams the ones that “put Cal Poly soccer on the map.”
The 1995 team advanced to the NCAA Tournament, the first men’s athletics program at Cal Poly to accomplish the feat. Many of Gartner’s most successful teams played well despite operating on relatively limited scholarships, Gartner said.
Players from those squads still litter the record books: Clay Harty is top three in career points, goals and multi-goal matches. Ryshiem Henderson, who Gartner called “the fastest soccer player I have ever seen in my life,” is top three in most single-season categories, including a program-record 37-point showing in the 1994 season.
“They made the Cal Poly soccer program get recognized,” Gartner said.
Even current women’s soccer coach Alex Crozier, a 1984 Cal Poly graduate and 23-year veteran at the helm, played under his tutelage.
According to Nelson, Gartner’s style of coaching was unique and lent itself well to the identity of the team in the early ‘90s.
“He was really a San Luis Obispo free spirit,” he said. “He was well-known by everybody in the community. Very social, ridiculously social.”
Nelson tells a story where, fresh off a national championship his freshman year at then-Division I powerhouse Santa Clara, he transferred to Cal Poly, still a Division II program at the time. Coming from a championship-caliber team, Nelson expected to start and even earn a scholarship with the Mustangs, but Gartner had other plans and cut the prospect after tryouts, he said.
“Wolfgang is one of those guys who’s like, ‘I don’t care who you are, where you’re from, you’re the bottom of the barrel in my book,’” Nelson said.
Gartner eventually asked Nelson to come back after several injuries to crucial players opened up roster spots, and Nelson wound up having a career year in his senior campaign where he led the team with nine goals and 20 points in 1993. He also led the team with three game-winning goals that year.
Gartner, the ultimate player’s coach, even challenged his players to pickup basketball games after practice and “talked trash the whole time,” Nelson said.
He was also known for being unafraid to talk back to raucous fanbases from the bench, especially in games against UC Santa Barbara.
“Soccer has never been a job for me,” Gartner said. “Even when I was playing it wasn’t a job for me.”
The Klinsmann connection
While Gartner isn’t the most famous person with his name, he has a friend who certainly makes up for the lack of notoriety.
Gartner and U.S. men’s national team (USMNT) head coach Jurgen Klinsmann are from the same town in Germany and have remained relatively close acquaintances since both moved to California.
Klinsmann helped lead the United States to a round of 16 berth in this year’s FIFA World Cup in Brazil before bowing out to Belgium.
His claim to fame doesn’t stem from his gig at the helm of the USMNT, though. The striker notched 47 goals in 108 appearances with the German national team spanning three World Cups (1990, 1994, 1998), including a title in 1990. Those feats helped establish him as a legend in his soccer-crazed home country.
In his now-home state of California, Klinsmann enjoys relative anonymity. According to Nelson, Klinsmann regularly helped Gartner and Cal Poly players run summer soccer camps for local youth in San Luis Obispo and played in the seven-a-side fundraising tournaments the team held. Along with Klinsmann, women’s national team player Abby Wambach also played in the program’s spring time fundraiser in the late 1990s.
Klinsmann would even join Cal Poly players in friendly games of beach soccer, where almost no one outside soccer circles recognized him.
“Jurgen played with us many years,” Nelson said. “We would figure out when it was low tide and we would go down there and put stakes in the ground and we would play on the hard sand … That’s when I was like, ‘I understand why he’s a big deal.’ That was the first time I really saw him play.”
The rivalry
Fast forward to the 2000s, and Cal Poly soccer makes headlines for a reason most current students are familiar with: the Blue-Green Rivalry.
Under Holocher, Cal Poly gained acclaim as a solid West Coast soccer program and really made a splash when matchups with UC Santa Barbara escalated in the late years of the past decade.
Now, Cal Poly and UCSB are considered to have the top rivalry in NCAA soccer, and their games continually break attendance records. The rivalry has drawn 13 of the top 36 NCAA regular season crowds, including four straight sellouts at Alex G. Spanos Stadium.
Entering this season since 2007, an average 8,675 spectators per game have packed in to watch the Mustangs and Gauchos clash. And the product on the field has delivered, as 13 of the last 15 matches between the teams have been decided by a goal or drawn.
It’s even spurred conversation of whether Cal Poly is a “soccer school” among students.
And its latest installment, a 2-2 draw at UC Santa Barbara this past Saturday, saw 14,345 fans pack Harder Stadium — the fifth-largest crowd in NCAA history at an on-campus venue.
“The atmosphere was electric,” interim head coach Phil Ruskin said. “It’s something we look forward to repeating with our home fans this weekend. It’s an event we look forward to every year.”
Even during the Gartner years, Cal Poly and UC Santa Barbara attracted a following with former players recalling thousands of fans would watch the games in those days. Players would give away tickets in the residence halls and around town to promote the matches, creating a blueprint for the massive crowds the Blue-Green matchup draws today.
From its Division II days that helped spur a famous DJ’s stage name to the top rivalry in college soccer, the Cal Poly men’s soccer program has traveled a unique path. One that started with a quirky coach known for his passion and sense of humor.
Case in point: The least DJ Wolfgang Gartner could have done was pay him royalties for his now-famous name, the original Gartner joked.
“He should have at least asked,” he said. “Or sent me a 1 percent residual check for every performance.”
Nick Larson contributed to this article.