MARIETTA, Ohio — Our All-Decade Teams were assembled from interviews with former players, coaches and review of team records including All-Conference, All-Ohio and All-Region winners. We put players in the decade where they played the majority of their career or in cases where they played equal amount of seasons in each, where they had the most success in. Grad years on players that didn't complete their time at MC were what the expected grad year was meant to be. We tried to remain true to the positions played, but some may have been moved from one side to the other. Please understand that records are spotty, particularly in the early days and your memory may very well be correct.
The decade of the 1980s began with change at the top as former coach Phil Roach had moved into the Athletic Director's position and hired his former player and a member of the 1967-79 All-Decade Team, John Blair, as his replacement. With recruiting becoming increasingly important Blair tapped into his New Jersey roots and increased the pipeline from the Garden State to Marietta. Blair stayed for three seasons before getting hired by Division I Citadel. His work, on and off the field, helped propel the program thru the middle part of the decade.
The highest level of success the program had ever seen was orchestrated by the Coach of the Decade, Lee DeFreitas, as he was hired away from Sewickley Academy (Pa.) to run the program in the summer of 1983. His 1983 team set the school record for wins with 9, finished third in the Southern Division of the Ohio Athletic Conference (OAC) and laid the groundwork for the 1984 Championship winning side.
The 1984 side won the first OAC championship in program history by going 12-3-1 overall and 6-2 in conference. The 12 win season set the record for most wins and that season's winning percentage of .781 still stands today as the top mark in the program's history. The six-win OAC schedule is tied with the 2002 team as the best in school history. DeFreitas left Marietta after the 1985 season finishing with the highest winning percentage in school history at .622 in his three seasons. This record still stands today, 35 years later.
The back half of the decade was marked with mixed results as two coaches, Harvey Lipman, who was also a math professor at the college, took over for DeFreitas for the 1986 season and Grant Fuller came in 1987 and stabilized the program over his three seasons and helped set the team up for the next decade.
The decade of the 1980's holds the honor for having the highest winning percentage of the five-decade history of the program. Its 1984 team still is the only team to win an OAC Championship in the 52 years of Men's Soccer. Three players from the 1980's decade have been inducted into the Marietta College Athletic Hall of Fame, Jamie Malone ('86) in 2003, Doug Lessing ('84) in 2009 and Ken Rickvalsky ('84) in 2014. The 1980's also saw the first Marietta College player to move on to the professional ranks in
Joe Bergin ('86).
