Our Team

It started with two goalkeepers at a college reunion.

I was working on a documentary about childhood friends making it to the 1990 and 1994 World Cups, but as a historian I wasn’t sure how to best bring the compelling story to the big screen. I mentioned the project to Kirk Rudell, a classmate and writer-producer in Los Angeles. He’d worked on shows like Spin City, Will & Grace, and American Dad!, so he wasn’t a “doc guy” either, but he was the only Hollywood insider I knew, and—as he said—a story is a story, so we teamed up.

A master storyteller and soccer savant, Kirk has always been receptive to my ramblings about how the United States has as long a soccer history as most other countries around the world. And he quickly shared my need to tell those stories — which so often revolve around risk-taking, work opportunities, and immigration — to an American soccer community that all too often apologizes for its lack of history. The result of that partnership was SOCCERTOWN USA, the award-winning documentary that we wrote and produced in 2019.

That work led to a second film, VOICE OF THE GAME — our pandemic project when we were all in lockdown — about one of the most important, but least known, coaches in American soccer history, Manfred “Manny” Schellscheidt.

Kirk and I were joined by another classmate and teammate, the polymath Patrick White. A lawyer by training and a banker by trade, Patrick played classical piano growing up (and late night blues in college) and never lost his love for music. He composed the soundtrack to VOICE OF THE GAME, which captures the essence of a philosopher-coach.

I met Larry Geraghty when he was in high school; I taught him history and coached him on our national championship teams at St. Benedict’s Prep. But we really bonded years later as fellow teachers and storytellers. Larry not only teaches media studies, he produces and edits all sorts of projects as a freelancer. He meticulously edited the award-winning VOICE OF THE GAME.

So SOCCERTOWN MEDIA is home to some friends, teammates, and storytellers. We’re proud of the projects we’ve worked on so far and look forward to producing more American soccer stories in the future.

-Tom McCabe