IAC boys soccer has been home to a multitude of long-time head coaches. There’s Adam Heck, who coached Lansing for 20 years. Trumansburg has had two mainstays: Chris Bond (29 years) and current head coach Jason Hodge (18 years). Over in Dryden, Laszlo Engel has led his program for 27 years. A tenure filled with many victories, championships, and unforgettable memories has come to a close.
Engel will retire in December after 34 total years coaching soccer at Dryden. Along with his time as boys soccer varsity head coach, he was also the JV coach for five seasons and the modified girls soccer coach for two seasons.
Engel was originally planning on retiring in June but decided to stay on board for one more season. He has zero regrets about completing his illustrious career with such a dedicated team.
“It was a great year to complete my career with,” Engel said. “It’s a hard-working group of young men. They just never stopped. Any game, no matter what the score was, they just came out and played as hard as they could until the final whistle. As a result, I think we started to win some games because their work rate was very high. I think that certainly is what made this year successful.”
The Lions finished with an 8-8-1 record and once again qualified for sectionals, ultimately falling to Chenango Forks in the Class B tournament. What stands out about the squad was its sheer experience with 11 seniors. For the majority of the roster, they shared their own ‘last dance’ with their coach and made sure to make his swan song a fruitful one.
“I do think that also helped motivate them,” Engel said. “They had a cause, so to speak. They wanted to make sure that I left on a good note.”
Since Engel began coaching at Dryden in 1993, he has been a staple of the strong sports community. A big part of that is helping build the next generation of soccer players in town, which Engels believes has been paramount to the team’s success during his tenure.
“We teach our kids to give back,” Engel said. “We run a camp for the youth of our town. We referee their games and all the sports do something like that as well. I think that makes a difference because when the kids are young, they want to grow up and be like them. It keeps it going. It’s been a really, really nice experience to have gone through that for so many years.”
Another key person in developing soccer in Dryden was Janine Bennett. She led the girls soccer team during the majority of Engel’s career, and the symbiotic relationship between both coaches and programs was mutually beneficial.
“We work extremely well together,” Engel said. “We would help each other out at practices and talk about things we needed to work on. There were days we would switch and we coach each other’s team. We could say the same thing to all our players verbatim and they would hear differently depending who says it. So when we saw that that worked, we just kept doing that.”
Under Engel, the Lions were consistently among the elite teams in the IAC. He won seven division titles and five league titles while leading the Lions to two Section IV championship games and winning the 2004 Class B crown. A lot has changed with IAC soccer over nearly three decades, and Engel has seen firsthand how much the league has grown in both size and ability.
“It’s evolved a lot over the years,” Engel said. “But I also think soccer has improved dramatically in all the schools. Everybody goes through their peaks and valleys. We went through a little bit of a low there ourselves the last few years, and now we got it right back. I’ve seen that from most of the programs
After retirement, Engel will move down to Raleigh, North Carolina alongside his wife Sue to be closer to their daughter Samantha, who was a star player at Dryden and is a member of the Daemen University Athletics Hall of Fame. As he gets set to leave a town he has called home for decades, Engel reflects on making an indelible impact on countless people.
“You get to know them in different ways, much deeper than as a student, and you get to see them grow up and become men and women,” Engel said. “You get to meet their families. You get invited to weddings. It’s really quite remarkable. I think that’s the best part is the camaraderie that continues and the teams that come back and they chat with you and all the stories that they remember, because it’s fun to hear it from their perspective. There’s a lot of them out there. It’s really so nice to see where they’ve gone and what they’ve done and where they are in life, and those relationships started right here. It’s been great.”
