After coaching 34 years of coaching at the Wheatley School, Bernie Hintz figured it was time to hang up his spikes six years ago.
The long-time New Hyde Park resident outlasted some lean years after leading his first Wheatley squad to a 5-5 record in his first year there in 1972, then enduring a decade of losing seasons before succeeding in turning that program around in the early 1980s.
The creation of the Albertson Soccer Academy drew top players to the area, and the Wheatley School, and Hintz’s teams consistently battled for top conference honors and took the state title twice – once during a season when it went undefeated and he was named coach of the year.
Hintz had coached top talents such as All-Americans Carlos Mendes, now with the New York Red Bulls after playing for Old Dominion, and Adam Bruh, Wheatley’s all-time leading scorer, who had a career in Europe after playing at the University of Michigan.
But after having soccer as a primary focus of his life for the previous 40 years, his wife Betty told him he was walking away too soon.
Known to players on some of his teams as “Mrs. Coach,” Betty Hintz gave him the same candid analysis about himself that he had come to value from her about his teams.
“You’re not ready to stop coaching. You’ve got too much to give kids. There are kids out there waiting to learn,” she said she told him. “You’ve got a profound knowledge of the game. You’re not done.”
So Hintz, 60, looked into an opening at North Shore High School in Glen Head. And that’s where he’s been coaching for the past five years, reviving what had been a strong soccer program. North Shore isn’t likely to be a threat to win the state title in the foreseeable future. But North Shore’s final win in what was a losing season gave Hintz his 321st win as a coach, the record as the winningest coach.
Hintz said all six losses in his squad’s 4-6-4 record could have gone the other way.
There’s irony of Hintz surpassing former Cold Spring Harbor coaching legend Ralph Witney, a coach Hintz said he was in “total awe” of in younger years, is not lost on him. Witney’s teams regularly walloped Wheatley; one-fifth of his coaching losses came against Cold Spring Harbor. The coach whose record he eclipsed this season counted Hintz’s club as a stepping stone to another conference titles in their early encounters.
Hintz has come full cycle in his coaching career, back to a point of focusing on bringing his players along while they try to win games. He aims to give them valuable experience – rather than thinking about state bragging rights.
“I try to teach them enough soccer so they improve,” Hintz said, adding that he tries to give his players a good time while they play.
He recalls when he hit the 200-victory milestone and breaking the 300-game win barrier is a big deal on a personal level.
“It’s almost unbelievable to me. When I hit 300, I thought ‘that’s phenomenal,” Hintz said.
It’s a different sport these days, with athletes who more frequently letter in more than one varsity sport these days, and who have a dizzying selection of distractions in the digital media era that makes it tougher to keep players focused, Hintz said.
“I don’t know how many more years I have at this. I remember what it was like at Wheatley. I go out there with a different set of goals than I had at Wheatley,” he said.
He’s still been coaching at Wheatley – as the varsity golf coach – for the past 16 years.
Wheatley won its first state soccer title under Hintz in 1983 and the second title – the perfect result in a perfect season – came 21 years later. In between, Wheatley won more conference titles than Hintz could recall, and fielded more than one Long Island title team that didn’t go all the way.
Mendes made All-American 12 years ago, with Bruh’s early success in a star-crossed career that included a serious injury at Michigan.
He can still remember when his goal was to have a winning season at Wheatley, and the realization that doing less is sometimes just what the job requires.
“When you’ve coached as long as I have, and you have a player like Mendes or Bruh, you just want to make sure that they don’t get in their way,” Hintz said.
Even good teams have to catch a break in making the unbroken string that Wheatley recorded in its storied ’04 season. That was a bittersweet year for Wheatley, starting with the sudden death of Craig Grumet, a star defenseman who would have been the team’s captain in his senior year. The team dedicated its season to Grumet and took home the state title.
“When you make a run for a state title, there is one game where you have to be lucky,” Hintz said.
For Wheatley in 2004, it was the game the team topped arch-rival Cold Spring Harbor in the Long Island Championship match 1-0 on a header by Paul de Barros off a corner kick.
That’s the kind of game he said Wheatley played this season against Mattituck in a losing result that could have gone either way, according to Hintz, who added that in the end, Wheatley just didn’t get the breaks in that 3-2 game.
Hintz takes the long view of these things, as he always did while coaching at Wheatley. That was natural then, when he taught the same five- and six-year-old kids as physical education teacher at the North Side School who he’d be coaching in high school a decade later.
He’s thinking about de Barros scoring that header to beat Cold Spring Harbor, and remembers that the memories aren’t just about the guys who scored the big goals or went on to have big careers, and then starts musing about a kid who lost direction and recently died from a drug overdose.
“You do end up losing some kids along the way,” Hintz said.
Hintz counters that thought with a more personal one, describing the moment at Wheatley when his son David, then a junior at Great Neck South, came in at the end of a scoreless match to take a free kick – and struck it for the game’s lone goal.
“It was the greatest moment of my coaching career,” he said, recalling his son bringing it up for months afterwards.
Hintz isn’t planning to alter anything in his routine next season, including the post-game notes he hears from his wife during some memorable dinner hours.
“I’m a source of feedback for Bernie. I hear things from parents that he doesn’t hear. He takes that information and uses it as a coach,” Betty Hintz said
“Dinners are always interesting the day after a game,” said Hintz, who calls his wife “an expert on the school district after 39 years of doing this.”
Hintz has been playing soccer since he was nine years old, playing for a team in the old German-American League before he played in school. He recalls his father first taking him to games at the Metropolitan Oval on Metropolitan Avenue in Queens
“I couldn’t believe the size of their thighs,” he said, recalling his first game there. “And when they kicked the ball, it sounded like thunder. And I was sold on soccer.”
He played two years at Queensborough Community College, then finished his college playing career at Adelphi University with a trio of Israeli national team stars, Robey Young, Admad Aruskins and Shuka Palji coached by Mel Less.
An injury prevented Hintz from playing on the U.S. Team Handball team in the 1972 Summer Olympics. That’s why he was available to interview for the North Side teaching job, which led to his long run at Wheatley.
Achieving that victory record while at North Shore has prompted thoughts about that next plateau – and Hintz admits that he’s been projecting how many more seasons he’d have to hang in to coach that 400th win.
