WHERE ARE THEY NOW?: Gwardys built a foundation for EHS soccer program - The Edwardsville Intelligencer

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LITCHFIELD PARK, Ariz. – In 21 seasons under current coach Mark Heiderscheid, the Edwardsville High School boys soccer team has become a powerhouse, with state championships in 2000 and 2013, plus five other top-four state finishes.

But Bruno Gwardys was the one who started it all.

Gwardys launched the EHS soccer program in 1976 and coached the Tigers for seven seasons through 1982.

While wins were hard to come by in the early days, Gwardys built the foundation for the program and helped to create enthusiasm for soccer throughout District 7.

“I was a young pup when I pulled into Edwardsville with my wife almost 45 years ago and I was almost 25,” said Gwardys, who will turn 70 in October. “Our record wasn’t great during those seven years, but I knew that I would have to devote a lot of time to building the high school program.

“I asked the board of education to put in soccer rebound boards at the elementary schools so the kids could have a soccer ball and shoot at the board. It was anything to get kids engaged in skill development.”

Gwardys, who went on to coach at Hersey High School in Arlington Heights, is retired and lives in Litchfield Park, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix.

He hasn’t been back to Edwardsville since August 2016, when he returned for a 40-year reunion for the soccer program. But his connection to the city remains strong.

“It was so different back when I got there in 1976,” Gwardys said. “Edwardsville had about 9,000 people, but when I came back in 2016 for the 40th reunion, the sign said 26,000. It’s an incredible place to raise your kids and send them to school.”

Gwardys was born in England and moved to the United States in 1966 when he was almost 15.

Soccer was already a big part of his life.

“In my youth, I loved to play soccer in elementary school and for some ethnic club teams,” said Gwardys, whose parents were both from Poland.

“I came here and finished high school, then played soccer at the University of Illinois-Chicago for three years. Then I transferred to Eastern Illinois, which my brother was attending, and I played my last season there in 1972.”

Gwardys, who had a master’s degree in secondary counseling from EIU, found that Edwardsville had a job opening for a counselor and a soccer coach.

He didn’t get the counseling position, but his undergraduate degree in physical education helped him land a position in elementary PE in District 7 while also getting a chance to be the soccer coach.

“I was excited about starting a soccer program in Edwardsville and I had played against SIUE in college,” Gwardys said. “I figured that Edwardsville would have some pretty good soccer players, but there weren’t many. But they worked their tails off and kept the games close and competitive.

“Collinsville, Granite City North and South and the Belleville schools all had established programs and park district leagues with a ton of kids and Edwardsville didn’t have anything like that. But I jumped at the chance to start a program and that’s how it began.”

In their inaugural season in 1976, the Tigers were 1-11-1, with their lone victory coming against East St. Louis.

In those days, EHS played its home games at Hoppe Park.

It was a far cry from Edwardsville’s current turf field at the District 7 Sports Complex.

“It was kind of a swampland. If you talk about mosquito heaven, that was it,” Gwardys said, laughing.

While the losses piled up over the next three years, Gwardys could see signs of progress.

In 1979, EHS had a junior-dominated team that lost two games by a combined score of 17-0 against Granite City South.

In 1980, though, the Tigers turned the corner, posting the program’s first winning record at 9-6-5.

“They were the smartest bunch of kids I ever coached in my life, but they couldn’t get enough soccer,” Gwardys said of the 1980 squad, which lost to O’Fallon on penalty kicks in the first round of the regional.

“We played Granite City South to a complete standstill the first time we faced them, and they had to come from behind with five minutes left to tie the game 1-1. The second time, we lost 1-0 at the Gauntlet. That was when Gene Baker was coaching them, and they went on to win their fifth straight state championship.”

Gwardys recalls Mike Foehrkolb, who was a freshman on the first EHS team in 1976, as being one of the top three or four players in his 30 years of coaching.

“Mike possessed enough talent to be a starter at Granite City South,” Gwardys said. “I had the pleasure of coaching him for three years, but he simply couldn’t take all the losses and chose to sit out his senior year.

“Ironically, that 1979 team had the rumblings of being my best team that Mike would have complemented big-time. I consulted with Mike on his decision and I realized that for him, it was the right decision.”

Gwardys’ assistant coach was the late Fran Dwyer, who took over the program in 1983 after Gwardys left.

“He and I were a great duo and he was so good to me,” Gwardys said. “Fran was my checks and balances and without him, I would have been tossed from quite a few games.”

The 1982 season turned out to be the last for Gwardys at EHS, but that wasn’t his plan.

“It was a real low point of my life because I was excited about what I was trying to develop in Edwardsville,” Gwardys said. “I was told there was a reduction in force, and I was the low man on the totem pole in the PE department and they had to release me.”

Gwardys spent the next two years at Dunbar Elementary School in St. Louis.

It wasn’t the career move he was looking for, but it proved to be a positive step in the long run.

“I took advantage of the St. Louis Public Schools’ offer for full-time teachers that you could take two classes at SIUE every quarter to work toward a degree,” Gwardys said. “I ended up getting a minor in special education.

“There was a guy named Mike Blacharczyk, who was the assistant superintendent for the Madison County special ed coop, and he told me I should go back to school and get a minor in special ed. I followed his advice and to this day, it was the best advice I’ve ever gotten from anybody.”

Gwardys interviewed for several education positions in the Chicago suburbs and eventually got hired in the fall of 1985 at Hersey.

At the time, Gwardys’ wife, Karen, was attending Northwestern University, where she got a degree in physical therapy. He wasn’t ready to commit to another head coaching job with two young children but spent the next two years as the boys freshman soccer coach, then two years as the sophomore coach.

In the fall of 1990, the boys head coaching position opened up at Hersey, and this time, Gwardys was ready to take over the program. He coached the team for the next seven years, including the first sectional appearance in school history during his first season.

When his son, Brandon, was a junior soccer player at Palatine Fremd High School, Gwardys resigned from his head coaching duties so he could watch him play. He continued to coach the boys in the lower ranks at Hersey for the remainder of his 22 years at the school and also spent seven years (1986 to 1992) as the varsity girls coach.

Gwardys retired from Hersey in 2007 but coached soccer for one more year. He then spent a year in the Champaign-Urbana area, where his wife worked as a physical therapist, but that position didn’t work out for her.

“We already had a home in a retirement community in Goodyear, Arizona, which is just west of Phoenix, so my wife said we should just move out there,” said Gwardys, who has one daughter, one son and three grandsons. “We packed up the car and drove to Arizona 11 years ago and we’ve been here ever since. My daughter moved out here a year after we arrived, and our son lives in California.

“My wife and I are always on the run and when we’re not biking, we’re hiking or jogging. We go to the fitness center and we do yoga, so we’re about as active as you can possibly be at this age.”

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WHERE ARE THEY NOW?: Gwardys built a foundation for EHS soccer program - The Edwardsville Intelligencer
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