Bob Barry (1940-2026): ‘The Cat’ who built Hawaii soccer’s bridge to the mainland

I knew at the time that we were lucky to have Bob Barry as a high school soccer coach. Just how incredibly fortunate we actually were — that appreciation grew over years and decades since we played for Iolani in Honolulu in 1979-1982.

Barry was also the French teacher at Iolani. At lunchtime, we’d hang out in his classroom and read the latest issue of Soccer America magazine, a print weekly at the time, and flip through his old France Footballs. How rare it must have been in the 1970s for young American soccer players to hang out with a teacher who had soccer posters on the wall.

Coach Barry spent his summers working soccer camps on the mainland with the likes of future National Soccer Hall of Famers Walt Chyzowych and Joe Machnik. Each January, Barry attended the NSCAA (now United Soccer Coaches) convention. He’d come back with anecdotes, fresh training methods, and modern gear for our goalkeepers, who dressed like the pros while our opponents’ keepers were repurposing American sportswear to soccer.

We may not have comprehended it at the time, but Coach Barry’s mainland trips, which also included working his way up to the USSF A license, created connections that would lead us, and many more Hawaii kids, to college soccer. 

Machnik, while on the verge of becoming the USA’s most renowned goalkeeper coach, met Barry in 1970 at an All-American Camp in Upstate New York. Barry had arrived a day earlier and his goalkeeping impressed so much that Machnik’s colleagues joked they wouldn’t need his services anymore, because they’d acquired “The Cat” from Hawaii.

Machnik and Barry became lifelong friends and Barry became a regular coach and director at Machnik’s No.1 Soccer Camps.

“Bob was a perfect coach,” Machnik said. He could wow campers with his demonstrations, “and he had hundreds of stories, and a million jokes.”

Getting smiles out of players is an invaluable coaching attribute. And Coach Barry had a sense of humor that complemented his rigorous fitness drills befitting a former United States Marine Corps sergeant major who, I later learned, “genuinely loved” his time in boot camp.

Barry used his athletic agility for slapstick. His discussions of world soccer could morph into dad jokes, “The best goalscorers? The Finnish.” One time we were discussing the greatest goalkeepers, the likes of Lev Yashin, Gordon Banks, Sepp Maier … Coach Barry, with a serious tone, told us that the Italian great Dino Zoff had an equally talented brother named Jack who for some reason never made it.

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My family moved from Dallas to Hawaii when I was 10. Within a year, I joined my AYSO teammate, John Richardson, to watch his older brother Mark Richardson play for Iolani at Kapiolani Park. It was also at that park where, after one of our youth games, we hung around and watched an adult game that fascinated us because of the acrobatic goalkeeper at one end — the same man who coached Iolani.

I had my parents sign me up for the Iolani Soccer Camp — at which I would later work — and the Iolani entrance exams. After fifth grade, I left my Hawaii Kai elementary school for Iolani, where John was already in its lower school. We started playing varsity our freshman year, him in goal and me in attacking midfield.

Our predecessors at Iolani included Angus McKibben, a 1978 All-Ivy League goalkeeper with Cornell, and Ric Miller, the defensive MVP of the 1978 NCAA Division II championship game that Cliff McCrath’s Seattle Pacific team won. Others had gone on to play at St. Mary’s (Calif.), Santa Clara, Lewis & Clark and Navy. During our senior year, McCrath, by now a close friend of Barry’s, flew to Iolani where we staged a scrimmage so he could scout John. Thanks to Barry, I’d gotten a recruiting call from then Santa Clara University coach Ralph Perez. I ended up at my father’s alma mater, UC Berkeley, whose former head coach and then assistant AD, Bob DiGrazia, knew Barry well. 

“He measured his success not by wins and losses, but by how many of his former players went on to college,” said his son, John Barry, an Iolani alum who played goalkeeper at Lafayette in 1994-97 for coaches Jeff Gettler and Nelson Rodriguez, currently an MLS executive VP.

“It’s different now, but it was unusual for Hawaii players to get noticed by college programs in the 1980s and 1990s,” says John Barry, who also coached high school and college soccer and is now the Sports Communications Director at Whitman College. “My dad used his contacts to get players noticed and to help guide them toward programs that they’d be interested in.”

At Seattle Pacific, John Richardson won two NCAA D2 titles as a player and two as an assistant coach at Seattle Pacific. My time on the field at Cal was far less illustrious, but it led me to Soccer America, whose offices in Berkeley were then less than two miles west of campus. Early on when I was looking through the B section of our photo files, I found shots of Bob Barry at Kapiolani Park, which led me to the archived issues that included Barry from before I knew him. Those were years in which Barry helped connect the established adult soccer community and its experienced players and coaches to a youth and high school game that was only beginning to take root. That incuded Bob Clague, an Englishman who coached Punahou for 34 years through 2007.

Barry’s 25 years at Iolani through 1996 included a one-year sabbatical in 1984 spent earning a Master’s Degree in Sports Management at UMass-Amherst while serving as an assistant coach to Gettler. He later assisted Gettler for a season at the University of Richmond, and coached BYU-Hawaii, Willamette University, the University of Hawaii and Chaminade University. He also served as a director of coaching at Oahu youth clubs. Barry spent a year as goalkeeper coach at the Shattuck-St. Mary’s program directed by Tim Carter.

Soon after I started at Soccer America in the early 1980s, I began attending the Coaches Convention annually. I was amazed at how many people were impressed when they learned I played for Bob Barry. The conventions also became my annual reunion with Bob, and our circle of mutual friends in the soccer community grew.
 
We’ve shared memories of Coach Barry since he died at age 86 on Sept. 12. What has really sunk in is how fortunate my teammates and I were to have such an accomplished coach with a global understanding of the game at a time when that was rare in the United States, let alone in Hawaii.

At the time, when we were teenagers, it never occurred to us that an American high school coach with that depth of soccer expertise in the 1970s must have taken a unique path.

He was born January 31, 1940, in Springfield, Missouri. When his father, a civil engineer specializing in dam construction, went to work in Iran, a 14-year-old Barry went to the École Nouvelle de la Suisse Romande in Lausanne, where he mastered French and saw soccer being played. A multi-sport athlete, he was immediately drawn to the sport and the goalkeeper position. 

After serving in the Marines, Barry attended Everett Junior College in Washington and the University of Hawaii. When his son, John, was 2, they traveled to Paris where Barry attended the Sorbonne as part of earning his Master’s Degree in French from Middlebury College in Vermont. 

And, thank goodness, for me and countless others, he returned to Hawaii. 

However elated I was as a 10-year-old that we would be moving from Dallas to Hawaii in 1974, I seriously worried whether soccer even existed in the islands.

Now I know I arrived at the perfect time. Thanks to you, Coach Barry.