Maxi Kissel had history at his feet. He was alone with the ball and the opposing goalkeeper just minutes into overtime of the national championship game.
The University of Vermont men’s soccer team had made it to the title game of the NCAA Tournament with a season-long run of late, heart-stopping goals. Now, in the 95th minute of a 1-1 game with Marshall University on a chilly mid-December night in Cary, N.C., Kissel dribbled the ball into the 18-yard box as the goalkeeper charged to confront him. The Vermont forward shuffled his feet, used his right foot to punch the ball to his left as the keeper scrambled to adjust and catch up. He couldn’t.
With Kissel in the clear, what had been unthinkable since UVM’s 1791 founding suddenly had become all but certain: Kissel was going to score, and Vermont was going to win its first ever national crown in any sport other than skiing.
It would be hard to overstate the magnitude of the accomplishment. The university’s soccer program has had its good days over the decades, including the unforgettable 1989 team that made the NCAA quarterfinals. The ski team has six national titles, though none since 2012. And UVM basketball and hockey teams have had the occasional national tournament moment — T.J. Sorrentine’s overtime dagger “from the parking lot” against Syracuse in 2005 is still the stuff of local legend. But Burlington is not South Bend, Ind., or Chapel Hill, N.C., college towns with bank vaults full of championship hardware.
And so maybe fans shouldn’t have been surprised it took six weeks to organize a parade for the triumphant UVM team, given no living Vermonter had ever even contemplated such a thing.
When the celebration was at last held in Burlington on Sunday — thousands lining Church Street in bright winter sunshine, a mix of students, politicians, players and fans — the team’s coach, Rob Dow, once more shouted what had become the team’s informal slogan during its unprecedented run to a title:
“Not underdogs. Just dogs.”
But for those paying closer attention in recent years — folks who might have driven the 800 miles to see a season opener in Kalamazoo, Mich., or stood freezing in the stands at UVM’s Virtue Field in late November — Vermont’s elusive first title actually had felt within reach for a while.
The Catamounts had won the America East championship in two of the past four years. They advanced to the Elite Eight of the NCAA tournament in 2022, recording seven straight shutouts and rising to No. 4 in the nation. When UVM lost in the third round a year later, it felt more like an authentic disappointment than a rare achievement.
Dow, who has now put together eight consecutive winning seasons since being hired in 2017, has done it in part by embracing what so many other programs have as well — recruiting foreign players. The 2024 team had 11 in all, from as nearby as Canada and as far away as Hong Kong. Just two players, Nash Barlow and Karl Daly, both of Burlington, are from Vermont.
And so the Catamounts may have entered the 2024 NCAA tournament unseeded, but they were far from overlooked. None of that makes Kissel’s left-footed finish last month in North Carolina any less remarkable. The Cats’ win made them the first America East team to ever win a national title in any sport. They knocked off four seeded teams, including second-ranked Pittsburgh and No. 3 seed Denver, along the way. UVM was just the third team in the past 40 years to win a title with an overtime goal.
To fully appreciate that moment requires some digging into the stories of the coaches and players who, over long years and in dramatic recent moments, made it happen.
The backstory to Kissel’s goal, for instance, began five years ago with the arrival of the center back who had sent the ball his way, Zach Barrett. The decision to play a novel configuration in the finals — 4-2-2-2, with four players back and two up top — was the brainchild of Dow, of course, but also his associate head coach Brad Cole, who, a decade earlier, had all but given up the game amid mental health struggles.
And at the end, with history made and uniforms being torn off in the hysteria, there was the exquisite midfield embrace between Yaniv Bazini and Max White.
Bazini, the team’s Israeli striker, had played for more than a year with his country caught up in a terrible war, in constant contact with family and friends to make sure they were safe.
White is a 15-year-old boy from Richmond, Vt., whose health issues had forced him to give up the sport he loved but who had spent more than four years embedded with the Vermont team as it clawed its way toward the unimaginable. White’s fortitude and devotion to a team he’d grown up adoring made him the program’s secret beating heart.
What follows are some of the tales of hardship and triumph, of doubt and faith, of recovery and tenderness. They explain a lot about the culture of the Vermont team and the characters who created it. And they give context and meaning to what happened 10 days before Christmas, with history at Maxi Kissel’s feet.
A Different Kind of Brotherhood
Rob Dow was in a familiar crisis on the sideline in Cary. Marshall had broken through in a scoreless game with a goal midway through the second half. Vermont goalkeeper Niklas Herceg — playing with a broken finger, as he had all season — had been unable to corral and collect a Marshall cross, the rebound falling to Tarik Pannholzer, who punched it cleanly into the top of the net.
There were barely 20 minutes left to rescue Vermont’s chances.
But rescues were the team’s specialty. Two weeks earlier, an overtime goal by Bazini had given UVM a 1-0 third-round win against San Diego. A freakish goal against Pittsburgh in the Elite Eight, again by Bazini, sealed a 2-0 victory in the game’s final minute, sending Vermont to the tournament’s Final Four for the first time ever. And then, in the national semifinal, Bazini scored once more, a twisting half-volley in the 84th minute to level the game against the University of Denver at 1-1. Kissel went top corner with a rocket to score the decisive goal in penalty kicks and send UVM to the title game. That season, UVM had scored a total of 16 goals in the 83rd minute or later.
At the heart of all the heroics was Vermont’s strategy of adding late subs with fresh legs and moving the six-foot-five Max Murray, a center back stalwart all season, up top with the forwards to create chances with his height and reach.
Amid the clamor of screaming fans in Cary, Dow, 43, listened to his gut. He sent in Marcell Papp, a first-year forward from Budapest, Hungary, and moved Murray from the back line to the front.
Dow is a compact, sturdy ex-hockey winger, with bright blue eyes and a broad, easy smile. Along with some of the players, he grew a mustache during the tournament run. People told him he looked like the TV character Ted Lasso. The comparison went beyond the bad facial hair.
Like the compassionate Lasso, listening had been key to Dow’s long search for what he calls his “coach’s voice.” As a kid, he had a fear of public speaking, mixed up words and sentences when he tried, and worked through embarrassment to conquer a speech impediment. The issue persisted to adulthood: One of his teams gave him an ovation when he at last made his way through a pregame pep talk without stumbling.
But the voice Dow sought to cultivate was about more than fiery rallying cries. It needed to be a voice of authority, of an expert and a father. Sometimes all at once.
In time, he’d come to realize his own father had given him a clue about how to master that voice.
Dow grew up in Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia, a suburb of Halifax. The town’s spiritual center was an ice rink and recreation facility. Dow spent most of his boyhood there, playing hockey, playing bingo with his grandmother on Tuesday nights, doing his homework in the library.
The National Hockey League was the dream for many kids — and their parents — in Cole Harbour. That NHL superstar Sidney Crosby had grown up in town made the dream more tangible — and suffocating. Youth hockey in Canada is an intense scene, marked by pressure, politics, hazing, insularity. It was not that way in Dow’s family.
Dow was good enough to make the junior national team. But his father made clear that he just wanted his son to do the things he loved. On rides home from practice through the Nova Scotia nights, a time when most parents pushed their sons to succeed, his father did more listening than talking.
And so Dow, who had played and excelled at soccer, in part as an escape from the town’s hockey mania, listened when a player from Iceland, struggling with language and homesickness, said he wanted to quit and go back to his family’s farm. Dow, then an assistant coach, watched as his boss got the player access to UVM’s farm, where he baled hay and shoveled manure — and found a girlfriend. It was a lesson not in soccer instruction but in creatively answering a basic human need.
Dow listened during the long crucible of the pandemic, through countless Zoom calls and virtual workouts as players battled isolation, anger and despair at their upended careers. When one frustrated player tried to organize a shutdown of the entire program, Dow thought it was a terrible idea. But he nonetheless encouraged players to write directly to top school officials.
He listened to the team’s doubts when half a dozen starters were injured to begin the 2024 season and the first four games produced just a single win.
Amid all that listening, a special, durable connection between coach and players took hold. And a team culture was born, one Dow thinks is distinctive for a men’s program, in soccer or any other sport.
No one would outwork or outhustle Vermont; no player would be spared accountability; fierce defending would be its hallmark, and maybe the goals would come.
But there would also be a sense of brotherhood. Not in the familiar, macho way, with late-night carousing and talk of courage. His players would be honest with each other about who they were and what they thought; once, a Black player challenged a white teammate who said he didn’t see the race of his teammates. The Black player stood, pointed at his own skin, and said: “Look, that’s Black. Let me be clear about who I am.”
Dow’s players wouldn’t feel ashamed to want help and ask for it; he started a mentoring program for older players to help younger ones with the mental health challenges that come with finding confidence and one’s place.
While Dow said they might cringe at the word, his players allowed themselves to be vulnerable in front of each other. The 2019 women’s national team that won the World Cup had done that, and Dow thinks it’s what imbued that team with a sense of higher purpose.
In preseason training, the team recorded its highest-ever collective fitness score. Max Murray shifted positions without complaint from forward to center back. Andrew Millar played five different positions to fill in for the injured. Zach Barrett, the fifth-year captain, and three other senior players paid for campus meal plans out of their own pocket so they could eat every day with the team’s underclassmen. Players gathered every Sunday morning to watch English football on TV. There were poker and pizza nights. Dow arranged for the team to meet the famous Vermont team of 1989, to take a measure of what lasting bonds looked and felt like.
In the 81st minute against Marshall, Dow’s decision to listen to his gut paid off. Murray intercepted the Marshall goalkeeper’s clearing attempt in the attacking end, settled the ball and found Papp to his right. Papp executed a glorious bit of one-two passing with David Ismail and, with the ball returned to him, rifled a right-footed shot across the goal box and inside the far left post.
1-1. Vermont had new life.
The Nicest Striker
The near misses were piling up and tearing at Yaniv Bazini as the clock ticked away in Cary. The team’s striker had scored in every game of the tournament — 14 total on the season to lead the team. Now, in the biggest game of his life and of his school’s history, the magic seemed to have run out.
In the 23rd minute, forward Ryan Zellefrow sent the ball to Bazini and Ismail on a two-on-one break. Bazini played the ball off to Ismail, who was then alone against Marshall’s Aleksa Janjic. Nothing. The Marshall keeper deftly parried Ismail’s shot.
Six minutes later, Bazini got a chance off a corner kick, needing only to head the ball in, a striker’s bread and butter. His attempt wound up just wide.
“Honestly, I didn’t know much about Vermont — whether it was a state or a country.” Yaniv Bazini
The teams went to the half scoreless. But Bazini, 25, was not the type to give up. Compared to October 7, 2023, a frustrating half of soccer was a conquerable thing.
That October morning, Bazini awoke in a New Jersey hotel room to hundreds of messages on his phone. Then he got a call from Dow.
“Are you OK?” the coach asked.
Israel, where Bazini had grown up, learned to kick a ball and done his compulsory military service, was under assault. More than 1,000 were dead, the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Bazini hung up with Dow and reached his family. They were alive, but rockets were landing in their friends’ yards. He knew people who had been at the music festival where more than 350 were slain.
Bazini had decisions to make. Should he play later that day against New Jersey Institute of Technology? Should he return to Israel?
Bazini had come a long way from his boyhood in and around Beit Hanan, a village of some 500 in central Israel. Beit Hanan is known as a moshav, a communal settlement slightly larger than a typical kibbutz. Such communities have a different calculus for the sharing of income and other assets but, like the kibbutz, are built on the principle of “everybody together.”
He’d begun playing soccer in kindergarten and thrived at his local high school. At one of Israel’s soccer academies, he made the switch to striker after being found not fit enough to play on the wing. He’d started his college career at North Carolina State, got injured, had a falling out with the coaching staff and received a happier call from Dow.
Come to Vermont, Dow told him.
“Honestly, I didn’t know much about Vermont — whether it was a state or a country,” Bazini said, laughing. “I mean, I think I knew it wasn’t a country.”
Bazini is a lithe six-two, with a classic striker’s mix of length, flexibility and clever feet. He sports a manicured goatee and speaks softly, his English considered but clear.
In Vermont, he acclimated almost immediately. He played in all 22 games of the 2022 season, scoring game winners against Harvard University, University of Massachussetts and, in the third round of the NCAA tournament, against University of California, Los Angeles.
In 2023, he made winning goals against Western Michigan University, Bryant University and, on October 3, just days before the attacks, against University of Connecticut.
Months, maybe years of war stretched in front of his people back in Israel. Soccer games suddenly could not feel less significant.
Bazini recognized that returning to Israel would not decide his country’s future. And so he chose to embrace what his coach and teammates always regarded as his essential goodness.
As a team’s designated top goal scoring threat, strikers tend to have a certain on-field persona: greedy, ornery, sharp-elbowed.
“He’s the nicest striker I’ve ever encountered,” Dow said with a chuckle.
Bazini would stay. He pledged to be the best ambassador for Israel he could. Acts of kindness and humility do not end wars. But they do not hurt.
Bazini played, if distractedly, that day in New Jersey and in the games that followed. He accepted the support of his team, and his form improved.
In 2024, Bazini put together one of the meanest seasons for a striker in UVM history: starts in all 24 games, 30 points, 14 goals, months of productivity that made him the third-greatest career goal scorer in school history.
If Bazini was frustrated in the finals against Marshall — he’d eventually record a game-high four shot attempts — Vermont would never have reached that game if Bazini hadn’t scored on an overtime penalty kick against San Diego in the tournament’s third round.
Bazini is the team’s designated penalty shot taker. He doesn’t have a favorite spot to aim. Penalty shots are a guessing game between kicker and keeper. Conventional wisdom is to shoot for one side of the goal or the other, forcing the keeper to commit to a direction and block the shot.
Or you can play ball down the middle. But that takes guts. If the keeper stays put, you will be second-guessed mercilessly for the rest of time.
“Of course I was nervous,” Bazini said of his third-round kick. “It’s good to be nervous. The question is whether you will control the nervousness or it will control you.”
He went down the middle, and UVM advanced.
Bazini says for him, it is still October 7, 2023. A hard day to accept and impossible to shake. But there is also December 16, 2024. Bazini wouldn’t have gotten there without the teammates who recognized his hurt, fear and split loyalties and supported him.
And so with their striker misfiring in the championship 90 minutes, his teammates delivered for him when it mattered most — coaches sending on late reinforcements, sumptuous goals from Papp and Kissel, critical late-game saves from Herceg, the keeper.
Call it a soccer moshav. “Everyone together.”
Second-Chance Goals
Few people in Vermont watch more soccer tape than Brad Cole. With 48 hours to prepare for the game against 13-seeded Marshall in the finals, Vermont’s associate head coach watched every second of that team’s season. He was confident in his assessment of what he had seen: Marshall’s center backs were simply not as athletic as Vermont’s forwards. If the Catamounts could create one-on-one moments in the attacking end, their players were fast and strong enough to win those battles.
Cole was part of the pregame decision to change the team’s tactical strategy. They would abandon the shape they had played leading up to the finals — three defenders, six midfielders and one forward — and play with two men up top instead of the single striker.
It felt risky but right. Cole, 32, saw the opportunity clearly — no small thing for a young man who, a decade earlier, couldn’t see clear to the next day.
“I try to see the good in the players. Even though I made mistakes, people saw good in me.” Brad Cole
In 2012, Cole was living in a closet in Burlington, a desperate sublet for a desperate young man struggling with depression and the partying he did to ease it. What little money he had came from making deliveries for a nearby Chinese restaurant.
Sleep till 2 p.m., party till 5 a.m.
The routine took a toll on Cole’s body. It didn’t spare his sense of pride, either. Cole had been a hometown success story — a South Hero boy, a captain on every youth soccer club he’d ever played on, a ball boy at UVM men’s games. As a junior in high school, he’d walked into the Vermont soccer office and signed on the spot. He’d toured schools across the country, but he’d decided: I’ll play for Vermont, or I won’t play college soccer at all.
The following year, UVM won exactly one game. Scared but undeterred, Cole joined the team as a freshman. That season, UVM produced a stunning win against Stanford, then ranked 13th in the country. Over Cole’s first two seasons, the team became a credible force.
“We weren’t terrible,” he said. “We could compete.”
Cole described himself as a “smart player. Never the high-talent guy. Locker room guy. Competitor. Glue guy.” Some predicted he’d be named a captain as a junior.
He never made it to his third year. In fact, he hadn’t been to a single class at school the fall semester of his sophomore year.
Cole had a poisonous relationship with his roommate. There were some personal dramas eating at him, as well. He was angry, frustrated, not sure how to cope. He went to practice, returned to his dorm, sunk into isolation. He was in a crisis he could not name or conquer on his own.
He met with the coaches, told them he was quitting both the team and school. He said nothing of his struggles. Blindsided, his coaches asked him to take a breath, give it thought and come back in a week.
He said he would. He never did.
Cole’s parents were concerned but gave him his space. He would be on his own financially. “Fair enough,” Cole said. He delivered food, worked a restaurant gig and slept in a closet.
It was the restaurant owner who sized him up one day and said, “You need to see a therapist.”
Today, Cole can’t say how that therapist was paid for. He might have been covered under his mother’s health insurance. She might have paid out of her pocket.
But it turned him around. He and his therapist talked about the game he loved, about repairing burned bridges. The therapist encouraged him to reengage with soccer in a simple, comfortable way. Cole returned to coaching young kids.
And then, in 2014, he sucked it up, swallowed his pride and went to meet with the UVM coaching staff. He told them aspects of his struggles he’d shared with few, if any, others.
What they said shocked him.
“Welcome back.”
Cole was named a captain the following season and later won the university’s Russell O. Sunderland Memorial Trophy, given to a student-athlete who “overcomes obstacles and maintains a high quality of play and academic prowess,” according to the school’s website.
Cole didn’t have another season in him. The two years away had taxed his body too much. So he joined the coaching staff as an undergrad assistant, working the lowest rung on the ladder.
The restart worked. Cole’s second chance would be a life of coaching. He coached in England, at Cornell, at the University of Portland. He’d become known as an accomplished recruiter and returned to UVM as Dow’s associate head coach in 2023.
Cole oversees recruiting and training, and he has valuable input into the team’s lineups and strategy.
“I try to have empathy for what people are going through and understand that they’ll make mistakes,” he said. “I try to see the good in the players. Even though I made mistakes, people saw good in me. I want to pass that on.”
Cole never stops moving, a kinetic bundle of both nervous and directed energy. At six foot one and 175 pounds, he’s as fit now as he was as a player on Far Post youth teams 15 years ago. He has piercing blue eyes with a wise-guy twinkle.
Asked what he regarded as his greatest contributions to the tactics and achievements of the 2024 team, Cole listed two.
First, he said he was delighted by what he called the “siege” mentality the team adopted on defense.
“We’re going to stand in our box and dare you to even try and score,” he said. “Teams think they are in control, and yet they don’t create chances against this.”
The second achievement was less tactical but far more important: the energy and optimism and fun that marked the team’s approach to every aspect of preparation and play.
“I think that goes further than anything,” he said.
Sleeping in a closet for months, out of school and out of money and seemingly out of answers, Cole once thought he’d lost that joy and purpose for himself.
It was certainly something like joy that started to bubble up early in the first overtime period. Maxi Kissel was on a collision course with the only center back left to defend his end. Based on Cole’s research, he liked Kissel’s chances.
‘We Need You to Run’
Overtime against Marshall had barely begun, and Bazini had just missed yet one more chance at ending the game. Now Zach Barrett was back at the top of the box in Vermont’s end, defending his ass off.
He’d just outdueled a Marshall attacker in a pitched one-on-one struggle and played the ball to safety. But back Marshall came, mounting another incursion into the attacking third.
Barrett wasn’t having it. He stepped in front of a Marshall attacker, blocked the ball meant for that forward and raced to retrieve it before it got to the sideline.
Barrett, a 23-year-old fifth-year senior from Pennsylvania, was the team’s captain and conscience. A bruising six-one, he was also the club’s enforcer, but not because of a mean streak. He’d been through it all, the exciting breakthroughs and the most miserable setbacks. Upon arriving in Vermont, the COVID-19 pandemic scrapped his freshman season. The subsequent spring campaign amounted to a mere handful of games. They made it to the NCAA tournament the next couple seasons without reaching the final four teams.
What sustained Barrett throughout the dislocation and disappointment was the dream Dow had talked about when recruiting him to come to Burlington: We aim to win a national championship.
It was half-charming and half-lunatic. But it brought Barrett back for his fifth fall in Burlington. As he raced the ball to the sideline in the championship game, he was playing in his 2,058th minute of an exciting and exhausting season.
Barrett got to the ball and, worried about being tackled from behind, quickly picked his head up. He caught a glimpse of Kissel beginning a run far up the right flank. With his right foot, Barrett played a long, high-arcing ball and said to himself: Run, Maxi. Please, run.
Barrett had made the plea before, and not politely.
Late in the first half of the November 1 game against UMass Lowell, Vermont had been defending in its end for close to five unbroken minutes. Tension and fatigue were exacting a cost and imperiling a 1-0 lead.
At last, the ball went out-of-bounds. Barrett wasted no time confronting Kissel, the team’s fastest player and one of its most talented goal scorers. Barrett didn’t think Kissel was working hard enough. He was furious.
“Maxi!” Barrett screamed. “Come here.”
He shoved him in the chest.
“Wake up!” he hollered. “We need you to run.”
In the locker room at halftime, the 1-0 lead intact, Kissel was downcast. While other players tried to comfort him, Barrett gave no quarter.
Go ahead, be sad, he thought to himself. We need you to run more.
Barrett was the model for a classic, old-school Vermont player: modest talent, big heart; play direct, be direct — with teammates as well as opponents. No drama. No headlines. A center back’s quiet glory.
“I have a good day,” Barrett said, “when no one is talking about me.”
Barrett can recite his good days and bad days over half a decade in Burlington by heart:
His first game in spring 2021 against New Hampshire, Barrett, just 19, playing 90 minutes against men of 23 and 24, getting run over but hanging in there. He belonged.
A win against New Hampshire the following fall to take Vermont’s first America East crown in six years.
The 2022 NCAA second-round game against Southern Methodist University, when UVM went to the locker room at the half down 2-0. Dow used a whiteboard to diagram plays and positioning and accidentally used 12 or 13 magnets for Vermont’s players instead of 11. Afraid to note the mistake, his players went out and played as if they had two extra men, winning 3-2 on a flying scissor kick by Garrett Lillie with four minutes left.
And finally, at home against UMass Amherst on October 1, 2024. Vermont played a brilliant second half to earn a 2-2 draw and make up for an equally miserable first half. The team stayed on Virtue Field for half an hour afterward, leaving their parents waiting with dinner. It was a moment of truth. The season just hadn’t been good enough. Something had to change. The next day, in a players-only meeting, Barrett gave a talk.
He told the team to shrink its focus to nothing more than the next game, the next half, the next ball played forward.
“How do you eat an elephant?” he asked his befuddled teammates. “One bite at a time.”
UVM went 12-1-1 over the next 14 games, including the College Cup.
If Barrett was the embodiment of a traditional Vermont player, more gutsy infantryman than skillful superstar, Kissel represented the school’s embrace of foreign players, with their often more developed technical skills. Kissel, 22, is a wispy 150 pounds, with a broccoli sprout of curly black hair and a silky-smooth face of smiling mischief. The son of a German father and Haitian mother, he was born in New York City but played virtually all of his formative soccer in Germany.
Kissel’s first stop in America was the University of Bridgeport, where, over two seasons, he scored 36 goals. In fall 2024, he transferred to Vermont.
Barrett loved a lot about Kissel. He had been the first new guy to show up at captain’s practice before the season started, working with his teammates before formal training began. No one, in fact, made Barrett laugh more than Kissel. He was a great locker room presence.
And he could play.
Often a late sub off the bench, Kissel had scored 10 goals coming into the title game against Marshall, five of them game winners. No one in the country had more.
Still, Barrett could be hard on him. Kissel’s body language, in practice and in games, could seem suspect. He didn’t exhibit the perfect attitude about starting only four games. Kissel thought some of Barrett’s ire was unfair, and at least one coach thought the speedy forward’s body language could be deceptive. Kissel really did care.
Barrett came to regret the way he handled Kissel’s lack of hustle in the game against UMass Lowell.
“Not my proudest moment,” he said. “But I did get what was best for the team out of him.”
In overtime of the title game, with a shot at the dream Dow had sold him on five years earlier, Barrett again needed the best out of Kissel, for him to get to the ball he’d played for him before the Marshall center back. Kissel’s best runs during the year had been clocked at 22 miles per hour. If he hit that speed once more, Vermont might actually catch up to a title.
“I wasn’t really hopeful,” Kissel admitted, fearing Marshall backliner Alex Bamford would get there first. “But then I just said, You know what, give it my all. So I started sprinting 100 percent, and I realized, Oh, wait. I’m actually a lot faster than him.”
Kissel got to the ball first and survived Bamford’s effort to run through him. Dow believes the Marshall defender was willing to get a red card to prevent a breakaway, but nothing Bamford tried worked.
Kissel was in.
Perhaps for the first time in his Vermont career, Barrett quit playing during a game. He and a handful of others just stopped in their tracks to stare as Kissel streaked toward the goal.
“We were watching like little kids,” Barrett said.
As soon as Kissel played the ball wide to his left around the approaching keeper, Barrett knew.
Holy shit, he said to himself.
‘Our Deepest Connection’
Max White wanted a hug. Maybe with Maxi Kissel, if he could get to him under the pile of players and coaches at the corner flag. Maybe with his mom, who had spent the championship game with the legion of Vermonters, boosters and boozers both, who had made the trip to Cary.
The 15-year-old wound up in the arms of Yaniv Bazini, and there’s a picture of it.
It is a gorgeous image, the two of them set against the dark night sky. Bazini’s hair is drenched from 95 minutes of thrilling soccer, and it looks like it might be starting to freeze. His face is a mask of raw emotion, his mouth wrenched in a way that suggests he might cry any second.
White’s head is buried in Bazini’s chest, the player’s large, angular hands cradling the boy more than grabbing him. White’s expression is visible in the embrace, and there is no doubt about the look in his eyes: wonder.
White first joined the Vermont men’s soccer team in spring 2020. In an announcement streamed online, Dow introduced the program’s latest key signing with a big smile.
“During the recruiting process,” Dow said, “the coaching staff became 100 percent confident that this player would make an immediate impact on our team.”
At the table in his family’s home in Richmond, seated between his parents, the midfielder smiled shyly. He wore a pink wool cap over his shoulder-length hair. With care, and maybe a tiny tremble, he scratched out his signature: Max White.
Dow wasn’t done.
“He holds the strongest values of our program,” he said of White, “tough, resilient, hardworking, disciplined and a family-first teammate.”
White would go on to score no goals or even play in a single game. Yet after his more than four years with the program, it’s possible Dow and his players, for all their expectations and hopes for White’s contributions, might have underestimated his potential.
A shrewd student of the game, Max White held several gigabytes’ worth of UVM soccer data in his head.
White was 10 years old when he signed. He joined UVM as part of a national program called Team IMPACT that, according to its mission statement, “connects children facing serious or chronic illnesses with college athletic teams.”
White, a guileless teenager with an athlete’s build and warm, welcoming eyes, lives with a rare variation of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects connective tissue throughout the body. It can cause a range of debilitating conditions and is especially hard on joints, often leading to mobility issues.
White had undergone surgeries prior to signing but had been able to keep playing soccer and basketball. Still, he would need additional surgeries to fortify his ankles and knees. There would be considerable travel for his specialized medical care. Chronic pain could be an issue.
Max’s mother, Brooke, told Dow that there would come a time when her boy would have to give up soccer. The physical demands and risks of a contact sport played on uneven surfaces would pose too great a threat.
White joined the team in the earliest months of the pandemic. The coaches and players met only virtually. Brooke wanted her son to be able to join the online team meetings.
Dow told her the meetings could be dark, the sidelined players beset by loneliness and confusion and anger.
“We want Max to see that,” she told Dow.
White himself was marooned at home, unable to go out for fear of his health. He watched the players work out via Zoom from the couch at home.
His situation was unfortunate. But his company was wonderful.
“I wanted our players to know there was someone else struggling worse than them,” Dow said.
“That’s how the marriage came together,” Dow said of the partnership with White. “That’s where we found our deepest connection.”
As pandemic restrictions lifted over the next four years, in sideline snippets and locker room laughs, the relationship only blossomed further. White attended team meetings and practices, traveled on the road for away games, chipped in at summer camps run by the staff and players. At home games, the announcers at Virtue Field introduced him as part of the starting lineup.
A shrewd student of the game, White holds the equivalent of several gigabytes’ worth of UVM soccer data in his head — records and rosters going back years; comebacks and goals, both famous and not; coaches; substitution rotations.
But he is also a shy, deeply observant boy, capable of arresting insights into the stuff of life.
“You meet him, and you are going to underestimate him,” Dow said. “And then he is just going to say something so profound.”
The surgeries did not stop. White was away from the team during recoveries. Players would text him, and he’d unfailingly write them back with thanks. If he ever complained, no one can remember it.
And then, a couple years ago, White’s youth soccer career ended. Dow said he often would see White on the bench with the injured players, looking out at the game they loved, stolen from them for a week, a season, forever. Dow’s heart would crack.
By design or accident, White became closest with those injured players. Maybe it’s because they just had more opportunities to talk and kill time together. Or maybe because they understood each other’s hurt and lasting hope.
Connor Thompson was one of those injured players. Thompson, 21, arrived from Kennebunk, Maine, in fall 2021. In the weeks leading up to the season, he’d begun to suffer pain and fatigue in his calves. He’d run during warm-ups and suddenly feel as if he were doing a marathon.
“I was practically crying during practice,” he said.
Thompson toughed out eight games and eventually had surgery for something called compartment syndrome, a tightening of the muscles in his legs that restricts blood flow. Then he dislocated both knees.
That was year one.
Of course, Thompson knew who White was. He’d always been impressed how a kid his age could hang so comfortably in a locker room with 21- and 22-year-olds. But White’s emotional maturity was remarkable.
White was not a mascot, nor a community service box to be checked by players looking to feel better about themselves. He held wisdom, and tactical insights to boot. He was a teammate in every sense.
“Good substitution,” he’d sometimes say to Dow after a game.
When Thompson dislocated his knee again in his junior season, he had a surgery not unlike some procedures White had undergone. They compared notes, talked endlessly about their second love, basketball. White was still able to play — the even surface and, in theory, less contact made it a tolerable risk.
Thompson went to see a couple of White’s games — he played both point and shooting guard positions.
“He reminds me a lot of my two younger brothers,” Thompson said. “His vision, his passing, it’s very good. And he just works so hard.”
Thompson said he has never looked up the specifics of White’s condition. He knows it’s serious. To probe further might feel like a violation of White’s privacy.
“I would just probably cry,” he said.
Everyone was crying with laughter and delight in the locker room in Cary after the team secured the title. The team had created a giant bracket for the NCAA tournament and slapped the UVM insignia on the winner’s slot of each round they advanced. Now, it was time to put it on the champion’s slot.
Max Murray, the fifth-year senior, started the chant.
“Max White! Max White! Max White!”
Out of the corner of the room, White emerged. He slapped it on. The place went berserk.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Year of the Dogs | Stories of grit and grace from UVM men’s soccer’s championship run”
This article appears in Jan 29 – Feb 4, 2025.
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