A Q&A with Coach Drago Dumbovic, Croatia Juniors Girls Director and State Champion Coach with the Andrews Osborne Academy Boys

Photo courtesy of Chris Lillstrung - The News-Herald

On November 11, Andrews Osborne Academy captured a Division III state championship in boys soccer after defeating Worthington Christian 2-1 at Historic Crew Stadium in Columbus. Read on for an interview with our very own girls director, Drago Dumbovic, who is the AOA head coach and provided a deep dive into the season.

Tell us about your coaching and playing experience.

I spent my formative playing years in the academy of Dinamo Zagreb in Croatia and spent four years in their first team before moving to the US to play professionally for the next 20 years. After my playing retirement, I coached professionally for two years and collegiately for 11. Since then, I have been a high school and club coach and director.

How did you end up coaching the boys team at AOA?

As you know, we are fortunate to have a great relationship with AOA and share facilities with them. At the time that their previous high school coach retired, I looked into it because I have great respect for the school’s administration after working together for the past few years. So I put my resume in and went through the interview process, and that was it. Scott McNevan and Larry Goodman, who were the Athletic Director and President at the time, trusted me with the development of the program. In the first year, we were extremely successful, winning the district for the first time in the history of AOA, so that was a very big achievement. I am grateful to Head of School Gonzalo Garcia-Pedroso and Athletic Director Rudy Kirbus for their continued support of the program.

How do you prepare for the season considering your team is not fully arrived until Labor Day, a few weeks after most high school programs?

Since most of our players are international and do not arrive to campus until three weeks after most high school programs have begun their preseason, we have much less time to prepare and implement our ideas for how we want to play. Basically, I trust my knowledge, experience and instinct to guide the way we run the program and make sure we are prepared in the short period of time. Sometimes we have to pick and choose what to focus on, and to me, it’s not necessarily always the soccer, but what happens before we play our first game. For instance, my top priority was to create the locker room to be as one. I told the boys on the first day we met, you came here as high school boys, but you will leave as men. We have kids from 12 different countries, which means we bring in 12 different cultures, languages, food, music, and understanding of the world around them. The critical part was how to put all these cultures together to become a brotherhood and look out for each other, respect each other’s cultures, and play for one common goal. In a way, soccer was the easiest part because our players have talent and it was just a matter of finding out what kind of formation and style we were going to play based on what we had. After a couple of weeks, I started understanding that this could be something very special, so I put together a tactical plan that resembled what I did in my professional coaching career, to see if the players could execute it and perform. It was important for us to implement and demand a high standard and not deviate from it. I told them that we will set the bar high, but we are going to do this together and everybody has to be a part of it. That’s how everything started.

What is the locker room like with so many different cultures?

At first, there were definitely challenges with communication. For example, something as simple as telling a joke, which can seem so natural to us, is much different when our players don’t understand each other’s mannerisms or sense of humor. You have to trust the kids to build understanding, and that’s something that people forget - for 15, 16, 17 year old boys to leave their country and comfort zone and come to a different world, they already have some strength in their mind. To prepare for something that is much bigger than what they’re used to in their everyday life. From that standpoint, I knew that they were already strong, I just needed to provide direction and not deviate from that direction. They needed to understand that when they walk into that locker room, we are one. There were challenges, to be sure, but the more and more we were together, they started learning more about each other and suddenly, things weren’t very far apart anymore. The critical part was to open up the world to each other. I told them, “Listen, you will never, ever be part of something like this again in your life. We have 12 cultures in our team, 25 in the school, and we need to embrace it. This is once in a lifetime, and if we embrace it, we can really make this happen.” It was beautiful to watch these kids grow individually, as young men, and also as a group.

Recap your season for us.

We are a very small school and the fear was that our regular season opponents in Division III would not prepare us for the tougher competition in the playoffs, when we would play against other high schools with academy players in their teams. Many schools that we played also had international students, as well, so we were not alone in that. But I wanted to see how we would react in the postseason and if we could be “grown up” enough to face a 1-0 or 1-1 game, or go into overtime and penalties. The toughest game of our regular season was a 1-1 draw against Gilmour Academy, and it kind of opened the eyes of our players that tough games are coming. We played some really good quality teams in the playoffs, but no matter who we were playing, my belief was that we would play our game. We were focused on us - if we played with the intensity and passion that we know, I didn’t think we would find a team who could beat us. That was the idea that we really had to keep with us in order to be mentally tough for the playoffs, otherwise there was no chance. The other team in the state championship, Worthington Christian, looked like college men - big, strong, physical. That’s why I told the boys from the very beginning that only men can win, and if we did not find the mental toughness to battle through those situations, it wouldn’t happen.

How did you prepare for the state championship game?

My personal philosophy is that I really believed in us - my focus is us. In the few days between the semis and finals, I tried to help individual players visualize and focus and concentrate, understanding how to mentally approach the game. One thing that can happen at this level is you get very tense. The outside pressures and distractions become bigger and bigger and we had to learn how to eliminate them. Our team is very creative and plays with a lot of imagination, so I told them repeatedly that we had to have fun and not put restrictions on that creativity. I believe that throughout our playoff run, our players enjoyed the process and expressed their talent in a good way. 

And then you get to that stadium for the championship, and it’s absolutely beautiful. But we had prepared everything pre-game down to the minute: the preparation, the speech, the warm-up, and so on. But suddenly we found out that the game before us went into overtime and our whole preparation went down the drain and we had extra time we didn’t account for. The clock just kept going and our game was delayed by an hour, and the boys were getting anxious and strung out. So we tried to get the kids up, get the boombox in and get them up and moving. One of the things I reminded them in my speech before the game was that we were writing the book of our season, and nobody could write it but us. When we went into the playoffs, I told them there were five pages left in the book, and every page would be us writing that story, nobody else. As we got closer and closer, the kids would come into the locker room after each win yelling, “One more page! One more page!” I told them before the championship that we were going to write the end of the book with their names engraved on the walls of Andrews Osborne Academy forever. One day, they could bring their children and point to their name and say they were a part of that greatness. 

After that, it was like thunder and lightning in the locker room, but the game actually didn’t start very well. We were a little tense, and the other team was all over us in the first few minutes. The other team was excellent, and it caused us to wake up. We started playing better and changed formation around halftime. We eventually went up 2-0, but like I said, the other team was excellent, and we made a mistake to go to 2-1. From there, the pressure started coming down on us. Oh boy, the last 10 minutes were pure survival. Even with 10 seconds until the end, the ball was still coming in our box and bouncing. It was the longest 10 seconds I can ever remember. The clock was just about frozen, and I said, “Come on! Move!” It was a true championship game, the way it should be played. Both teams had unbelievable chances, and luckily, we were the ones who put them away. After the game, our fans erupted - it was a celebration like nothing else. When you talk about making history, it’s incredible when it happens and you get to experience it. My coaching staff and Gonzalo and Rudy, along with the faculty and students who came down on buses to cheer us on, it was incredible. What a journey.

Your team has been invited to participate in the Mondays with Malta radio show and be represented at the Willoughby City Council meeting. What does it mean to you and your players to represent the local community?

After the game, I sad in an interview that the world is not in a very good place. There are so many things happening, and for us to have the “world” of these kids come in and become a brotherhood, is just so incredible. All these young men that learn about America and other cultures and become friends for life. When these kids leave, they’re going to respect everybody more, and for the time being, our season will hopefully make the world just a little bit better when the boys go home and see the world a little bit differently. When you grow up in the same communities and with the same people, you don’t necessarily have the opportunity to destroy barriers of culture and politics like we did.

It was extraordinary, and we’re so grateful to our community for believing in us. Our police and fire department escorted us from our team lunch at Sol in Downtown Willoughby, and suddenly there’s sirens everywhere. So our kids didn’t know what the hell was going on - suddenly the whole city just stood still. So Willoughby stood by us as well, and we can’t thank our Mayor Fiala and our police and fire departments enough. It’s really special when our international students come to our small school and feel that appreciation from their community. We showed the very best of our country to those 12 nations in our locker room, how beautiful this country is, what it can offer, how kind it is. Just look at what Ish said after the game.* Hopefully they can learn from it all and take it home, reflect on it through the years, and be grateful for an experience like no other.

Ishmael Mensah, a senior midfielder and native of Ghana, said of the experience, “It’s wonderful. It’s a very, very big privilege to be in the United States, especially at this school, Andrews Osborne. It’s a very good school. There’s very good people in this school. What I would tell my kids one day is take care of your opportunities. Quitters are losers. But winners never quit.”