New book chronicles final season of UNM men's soccer program

Seven years ago was a dark time for soccer fans in New Mexico.

Sure, something called New Mexico United was announced and was on the horizon as a player in the USL Championship, a professional league.

But the University of New Mexico men’s soccer team — beloved and revered across the state and perhaps the crown jewel in the Lobos athletic program — was on the chopping block.

At the time, it seemed like somebody’s cruel idea of a joke. A scandal-free program that not only regularly graduated its players with honors but competed at the highest national level, faced elimination.

Elimination indeed.

Despite much hue and cry from the community, legislators, players and former players, men’s soccer was outcast. It was no more, except for one more lonely season for players and coaches who saw it through to the end.

UNM professor Ryan Swanson was a witness to that final season in 2018, embedded within the program for team meetings, practices, locker room speeches, postgame breakdowns and even legislative sessions.

It was the ultimate lame-duck season for a program that many said deserved better. And Swanson was on hand to chronicle it with his recently released book, “A Beautiful Shame: One Team’s Fight for Survival in a New Era of College Sports.”

The book is available on Amazon and from other vendors.

Swanson, associate professor and chair in the Honors College at UNM, also serves as the director of the Lobo Scholars Program. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Georgetown and has written extensively about sports.

The Lobos saga as it unfolded, coach Jeremy Fishbein’s fight to save the program and the muddled mess of its inception to implementation was a natural story in the making, Swanson said.

“He (Fishbein) allowed me to have complete access through this terminal season, if I wanted,” Swanson said. “That was something I was interested in doing. The way I saw it, he had a team that had been really successful. We knew they meant a lot to the community. He had thousands of kids in soccer camps. Then they got a termination letter with a one year pass. I simply couldn’t pass it up.”

The book wades through the difficult season, which ended with a 4-12-1 record, the worst of Fishbein’s career and the fewest wins of any Lobos men’s soccer team in its 36 years.

“There was a lot of tension around UNM athletics the whole time,” Swanson said. “People’s emotions were running really high. There was a lot of press coverage for these cuts. Everybody involved were fighting for their angle. For somebody working for UNM, getting involved was awkward at times. I found it difficult to navigate sometimes.”

The demise of the soccer program, however, given the time lapse to look back in retrospect, has become microcosm of collegiate sports today as it embarks into the eras of name, image, likeness and the transfer portal, he said.

“What it’s got going for it is people are searching for insight for what college sports is supposed to be,” Swanson said. “Conference realignment, NIL, the transfer portal. We’re at a reckoning point. Football and basketball are going to exist, but what about everything else? On college athletics and the whole debate of how it’s going to work and how it should work, when I think about the UNM Lobos soccer team, they were a public good. They were there for the good of the state as an entity and was an example of how I think college athletics should work.”

In the end, he said, the goal was give the Lobos’ swan song an appropriate send-off while injecting some greater context.

“Given the interlude of time, my goal was to tell the story as truthfully and as vibrantly as possible, but it had to be truthful,” Swanson said. “When I look back at the season, it was a real privilege to be along for the ride as it played out.”

There was a surreal factor to the season, as well.

“When I was part of the season, that last Lobos soccer season, it was like it was in slow motion. Like it was a Shakespearean tragedy in the athletic sense,” he said. “The players were 18-22, the kinds of things they did, they had moments of brilliance and maturity and periods that were normal for people 18-22. I wanted to tell a story that showed what this season was like. It had poignant, joyful moments and the heartbreak, as well.”