Macias completes soccer coaching staff

Every Luke Skywalker needs his Yoda.

It's a lesson Montana soccer coach Chris Citowicki learned years ago, when a mentor, Augsburg men's soccer coach Greg Holker, told him of his plan to bring in an experienced coach as an assistant, someone who had seen more, done more, accomplished more than Holker had.

Citowicki had to question that decision. "As a young coach, you view that as a threat, right?"

Holker opened Citowicki's eyes to the benefits. Imagine everything he's going to bring to the table, Holker told him, things I haven't seen as a coach that he's already gone through, that he can help me navigate.

"Since that point, for about a decade-plus, I've been thinking, when is the opportunity going to come for me to do something like that, where I can bring in someone who's seen it all, done it all, gets it and can help guide me through things that I don't even know are coming?" Citowicki says.

"That's the kind of presence you get with someone like Damian."

Damian Macias, who has coached at the Division I, II and III levels in the U.S. and for nearly a decade in Okinawa, Germany and mainland Japan, was hired as Citowicki's associate head coach recently.

Macias comes from Division II Missouri Western, where he was the head coach for two seasons. Prior to that he was on Chris Logan's staff at North Dakota, where he first crossed paths with Citowicki, who spent the 2017 season at UND before being hired at Montana.

Macias replaces J. Landham, who spent three seasons with the Grizzlies before getting hired by Villanova earlier this summer. Landham coached Claire Howard and Camellia Xu to Goalkeeper of the Year honors the last two seasons.

"J. did his role to perfection," says Citowicki. "I've just evolved this role now into something very different. Damian has a greater knowledge and breadth of understanding than I do. Why not bring in somebody like that, someone you can look to, someone who can whisper into your ear, how about this?

"It has to be someone who is comfortable stepping aside from being a head coach to being associate head coach again and helping as opposed to leading. And he is. There is no ego involved with Damian. It's just service of the people he works with, and he does a very good job of it."

Macias had no intention of leaving Missouri Western, which he turned into a program on the rise in the Division II ranks in his two years at the school.

He inherited a program that had won four matches in the fall of 2019, just one of 11 matches in the Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletics Association, one of the strongest Division II women's soccer leagues in the nation.

In the spring of 2021, the program's first season under Macias, the Griffons went 8-3-2 and advanced to the title match of the MIAA tournament. The reward: a No. 23 national ranking.

Last fall, Missouri Western won nine matches and reached as high as No. 13 in the United Soccer Coaches national poll.

"We did well," Macias said. "We closed some gaps. I felt like the soccer was getting really good, really quickly. We were in everything and really starting to climb the ladder. We moved the soccer program forward."

Then Citowicki reached out.

The two had remained in touch over the years, sharing an ongoing group chat with Logan at North Dakota. I've got an opening, Citowicki told him. What do you think? They talked on the phone. Then again. And again. Finally a job offer was made.

"I talked to (assistant coach Ashley Herndon), I talked to J. It was a really good vibe beyond the X's and O's, beyond the win-loss record, beyond the success," Macias said. "I was super excited about saying yes. I didn't have to wrestle with it.

"Chris came to Montana and did his thing, and it's magic. This is the place to be. He's a great person, and his energy adds to all of that and amplifies those pieces. What he's done here makes this a great, great opportunity."

Even for somebody who is giving up a title.

"You go from driving your vision to driving someone else's vision as an assistant and finding middle ground in that," he says. ""Having been in the game for a bit, in different roles and positions, I just hope to add to what Chris is doing and bring something."

If it's a somewhat nontraditional hire, it has nothing on the nontraditional path that Macias took to get to Montana from his birthplace of Florida.

That's the life of an Air Force kid and later an Air Force spouse. Ask him where he's been and hold on.

"Florida, New Mexico, California, New Mexico, Nebraska, England, Texas," he says. Then he remembers he forgot about Germany, the first of two times he's lived there. "Did I say Germany? I missed Germany.

"College, get married, start a family. From there, Okinawa, Germany, mainland Japan, Illinois, North Dakota, Missouri, Montana." Whew.

The California stop, in Monterey, was where he first fell for the sport. "Youth soccer, not too big to be dangerous but big enough to think I was dangerous," he says.

No matter where the family moved, soccer was the common denominator between strangers, something that could bridge and overcome unfamiliarity, language barriers, make the next base feel a little more like home.

"If you move a lot, military kids always have something they hang their hat on," he said. "Soccer has its own little vibe and language and ability to find connections with folks from everywhere. That's the brilliant part of growing up and being all over."

He graduated from a high school in England, right as his dad was retiring from the Air Force and moving the family back to Texas for good, San Antonio specifically.

Macias earned his degree in criminal justice from Texas-San Antonio, met and married Amy, a nurse, and got busy living. Or as much as a person can while working in human resources. "I spent two years there. I thought, I don't know if I can do this," he says. "This thing is killing me. I need my outside."

He was coaching club and learned of an open high school position. But in Texas, a coach can only be hired if they are employed in the school district, so he went through a certification program and started working as a special education teacher.

He paid for college by working at psychiatric hospitals, youth treatment centers and youth detention facilities, "so the nontraditional special-ed kid was kind of in my wheelhouse," he says.

Macias wanted more, more soccer, more involvement. He started helping out with the men's and women's programs at Division III Schreiner University in nearby Kerrville, his first taste of coaching at the collegiate level.

When Dennis Currier was hired by Incarnate Word in 2001, Macias asked about helping out, anything for a new experience.

Currier, with an assist from Macias, would coach the Cardinals to a record of 62-15-7 in his four seasons at the school, success he turned into the head job at Dayton, where he still is.

His final season, in 2004, was highlighted by a regional championship and a trip to the NCAA Division II quarterfinals, where Incarnate Word fell 1-0 to eventual national champion Seattle.

"It felt like I had cut out my corner of the world," says Macias. Then that world started changing, as Noah, then Mason, then Mia arrived and started growing.

A guy, whose wife is also working fulltime and despite his own soccer skills, can only juggle so many balls before they start crashing to the ground. There are only so many hours in the day and so many hours of daylight.

"Unfortunately, as a coach, you're constantly going after hours," he says. "That's when kids can practice. On the weekends they have games, tournaments happen on holidays. What is traditionally family time is coaching time.

"We had started a family, and we were dropping them off in the dark and picking them up in the dark. Something had to give. We had to find some ownership in this."

After earning her nursing degree and working in San Antonio, Amy joined the Air Force. Her first two assignments kept her at bases in the area. After a time, she was ready to get out and return to working in a civilian role.

The Air Force asked her to reconsider. It was going to be one of those Life Moments.

"I loved everything I was doing, but for the family it didn't make any sense," Macias says. "We talked about it, chewed on it, wore our hearts out over it.

"She had a very well-defined pathway in the military, in terms of advancement and benefits, and this soccer ball can travel, so I kind of took one on the chin and said, I'll take care of the kids. Let's go do what we're going to do."

That meant a decade overseas. Okinawa, Germany, mainland Japan. With each new stop, Macias had two priorities: No. 1, the kids. No. 2, soccer, however, wherever he could find it. "We kind of met in the middle," he says.

He played with the guys on the base to get his competitive fix, and he coached where he could, younger kids, on base and off, in Japan, older players in Germany.

The family, after a decade abroad, returned to the States, to Illinois, where Macias got on with the high-level St. Louis Scott Gallagher Soccer Club. Illinois was supposed to be Amy's final stop before she could retire.

Then the Air Force told her they needed her in Grand Forks, N.D. It was 2017. Logan, at North Dakota, had recently hired Citowicki away from St. Kate's, the Division III program he had led the previous six seasons.

Macias reached out to Logan before the family had even hit the road from Illinois. "He said, Hey, when do you get here? What's going on? Tell me your story," Macias says. "We met up and from then on, I was as involved as I could be."

What he found wasn't so much a staff, with strict roles and a head coach who wanted things done his way and his way only. It was a collective of soccer minds that just wanted what was best for the program.

"There are only a few coaches at that level who are as open, so the UND experience was the best one ever," says Macias. "Whatever it takes, let's just make this team better. If someone has an idea and it's going to work, why wouldn't we do it?

"Everyone checked their ego at the door. You don't have to be the smartest one in the room. The smartest one in the room is the one who knows where to find the answers."

That fall, North Dakota had its most successful season as an NCAA Division I program, a four-win improvement from the previous year.

After one season with the Fighting Hawks, Citowicki was hired at Montana. After two seasons at North Dakota as a volunteer assistant coach, Macias was elevated to associate head coach. In each of the three seasons he spent on Logan's staff, North Dakota's wins total increased.

Midway through that experience, the Air Force had one last assignment. So Amy and Mia were off to Ohio, leaving Dad behind. He was hired by Missouri Western in August 2020.

"I had kind of given up a piece of my path to follow her and help the family," he says. "She knew she was on the back end of her career and I was rejuvenating mine, getting my feet back underneath me. So the opportunity at UND was immense in terms of rebuilding my resume."

The family left Texas when the oldest, Noah, was in second grade. He's now a Texas A&M grad and going to law school at Texas Southern. Mason is studying international business at A&M. Mia is at Blinn College, 20 minutes south of her dream school: Texas A&M.

"As soon as we moved away, they missed their cowboy boots and missed their cousins, their aunts and uncles, their grandparents. In our family, everybody is in Texas," says Macias. "It's probably not the recommended pathway for a family, but we've got some resilient kids.

"Even with all our moving, they considered themselves Texans. We didn't realize how much until it came to applying to college. They wanted to go back home and be around family they know but feel they don't know. They missed something. They want to rebuild that."

Once her time in the Air Force was complete, Amy joined Damian in Missouri and is working as a travel nurse. Later this fall she'll rejoin him in Montana. Just another hurdle on life's path.

"We'll figure this out. I painted on the locker room wall at Missouri Western, Figure It Out. There might be some grit and grind in there, but I knew I'd have her support. We'll figure it out," he says.

Citowicki was hoping for someone with some life experiences, not just soccer experiences, because it's all part of the package as a coach, of what they have to offer the players and the perspective and value that life lessons can bring. He found one. And then some.

"Look at the top programs in the country. They all have assistants who have been around the block many, many times and have a lot of experiences they can draw on and know what they are doing," said Citowicki.

"I was surprised he took the job, to be honest. But I'm very happy to have him here. I think I've reached everything I could possibly want to reach. I have the ultimate support staff."

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