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 Decades of the 2010s began with a familiar refrain, a new coach leading the Pioneers. Athletic Director
Larry Hiser hired from within when he hired Steve Rose to be the program's head coach. Rose had spent the previous five seasons as an assistant to head coach Patrick Holguin. This was the first time since the 2000 season that the Men's and Women's programs had separate head coaches. Rose stabilized the program and began to see improvement when he chose to leave the coaching business after the 2012 season and enter corporate life.
Hiser reached back into the history of the program when he hired former player
Joe Bergin ('86) as the next head coach. Rose's path from coaching into the corporate life was the exact opposite of Bergin's. Bergin left the corporate life to become a full-time head coach. A part time head coach at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga. certainly made for an interesting choice as the selection to lead the program back to some winning ways.
For his efforts over the next seven seasons Bergin is named the Coach of the Decade, but his era started slowly as the 2013 team picked up just four wins and finished out of the Ohio Athletic Conference (OAC) playoffs again. This was the last time, however, in the decade that a Pioneer team would not appear in the conference playoffs.
Momentum began in earnest the following season when the Pioneers won six games and qualified for the OAC playoffs for the first time in five seasons. The season ended in the quarterfinals, but it gave the team a taste of the post season. 2015 saw further improvement as the team won nine games but lost again in the quarterfinals, this time in double OT.
The 2016 season marked a breakthrough with the team winning 11 games, the most since 2002, and advancing to the semifinals of the OAC tournament with a thrilling overtime win in the quarterfinals. 2017 started with a record breaking five shutouts in a row on the way to an 11-6-3 record. The team qualified for the playoffs for a record breaking fourth time in a row and once again the season ended in the semifinals with an overtime loss.
In 2018 the team again qualified for the playoffs bowing out in the quarterfinals and finishing with a 10-9 record. The decade wrapped up with a sixth straight playoff appearance and its third semifinal appearance of the decade as the team finished with another season of double digit wins at 10-9-1.
The team entered in a new era in facilities in the spring of 2018 with the construction of new locker rooms in the newly converted McCoy Athletic Building. Marietta Field saw a major transformation in the summer of 2018 as well when it was converted to a navy blue FieldTurf product, widening the field to 72 yards and adding Musco LED lights for night games and trainings. The new era was christened with a record 1200-plus fans in attendance at the 2018 home opener.
The Pioneers, under the direction of Bergin, finished the decade with four straight winning seasons, for the first time in history; four straight double digit win seasons, another first in the history of the program; and six straight OAC playoff appearances, the longest streak in the program's history.
Stay tuned for Wednesday's Defensive Player of the Decade and Friday's Offensive player of the Decade announcements.
