Northwestern men’s soccer coach Russell Payne contends that he narrowly advanced past his preliminary Zoom interviews in the spring of 2021.
Before Payne took on a dream job in the Big Ten, the former Army West Point coach met with then-interim athletic director Janna Blais for a virtual sit down. Payne said the former UConn softball star threw him a barrage of hard-hitting inquiries, testing each element of Payne’s program vision.
“(Blais) grilled me,” Payne said. “She asked a lot of great questions, and she challenged me. I just barely qualified for the in-person interview based on getting over the hump with Janna.”
Once he arrived in Evanston for his hiring process’ final stages, Payne said he experienced a “whirlwind 24 hours.” He planned to fly home to West Point, New York, the night of his in-person interview — but Blais and former athletic director Mike Polisky insisted Payne accompany them to dinner at Wildfire Restaurant.
The coach made a quick call to his wife, Vanessa Payne, before holding court in a consequential conversation with the athletic department’s top brass.
“I just shared my vision, shared my experiences and how we were going to build this program,” Russell Payne said. “I could feel things aligning with the way Northwestern did things. The next day, I got offered the job at the end of the morning. I was ecstatic.”
As he beamed with anticipation from an airport lounge, Payne informed his wife they would soon embark on a near-900-mile move to the Midwest. On May 7, 2021, the hire became official, with Payne succeeding former coach Tim Lenahan at his 20-season tenure’s conclusion.
The moment Payne put pen to paper on his new contract, he signed onto a multi-stage rebuild. He first needed to convince his inherited roster to stay in place just weeks before players left campus for summer break. Payne placed one of his first calls to his longtime assistant Krystian Witkowski, who arrived in mid-June as the Wildcats’ associate head coach.
Witkowski and Payne had mere months to put together a recruiting class, but the former professional goalkeeper and son of two principals was no stranger to confronting a daunting test.
“Russell is one of the hardest working coaches in the industry,” said Witkowski, now the Fairfield men’s soccer coach. “We never settled for anything less than going after the best players, the best people, the best teammates.”
Nearly four years since taking the helm, Payne has engineered NU’s first back-to-back winning seasons since 2013-2014. He has turned heads on the recruiting trail, assembling four consecutive top-20 classes, according to TopDrawerSoccer. But as he enters his fifth season at the program’s helm, Payne’s mission remains steadfast: cultivating a championship-caliber culture.
‘Lightning in a bottle’
A Columbia, Maryland, native, Payne grew up in one of the nation’s preeminent soccer hotbeds. He said Howard County high school games drew in remarkable crowds and local youth club clashes mirrored professional derbies. Unlike most corners of the country, Friday night lights centered around the soccer pitch.
“There was such a lightning in a bottle moment in the ’80s and ’90s in Columbia, Maryland, for soccer — and it just hasn’t existed since,” Payne said. “At that moment, we had so many national team players, we had thousands of people going to high school soccer games. It was a really fun time because soccer mattered.”
One of the United States’ first planned communities, Columbia was built on 14,000 acres of undeveloped land by developer James Rouse in the late 1960s. Rouse’s vision for a diverse new city took root between Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
For Payne, the community sparked the perfect storm for his soccer trajectory.
“A lot of my teammates and their families of African American descent all played soccer,” Payne said. “As a Black kid growing up in America, soccer wasn’t the first thing you always looked at. But for me, it was. I had guys that were older than me playing soccer who looked like me.”
Alongside his lifelong friend Renard Brown, Payne began his career as a field player. However, Payne felt his progression in the field had stalled compared to his peers, many of whom were youth national team players. So, Payne picked up a pair of goalie gloves and hopped in the net at age 11.
With little knowledge of the position, Payne attended national champion Howard coach and former Trinidad and Tobago national team goalkeeper Lincoln Phillips’ camps. There, Payne laid the groundwork for a standout career between the sticks.
After Payne found firm footing as a goalkeeper, his parents uprooted their family to Howard County’s western fringe before Payne’s freshman year of high school. He then enrolled at Glenelg High School, where the soccer program had never recorded a winning season.
Payne and Brown cracked the varsity squad as freshmen.
“We were the doormat of the county, for sure,” Brown said. “We certainly took our lumps, but it was a good learning experience playing against the older kids we looked up to in Columbia soccer.”
Payne’s freshman year coincided with coach John Bouman’s first season at Glenelg. Bouman said his peers warned him against taking the Glenelg job because it was a “farmers’ school,” but he jumped at the opportunity to coach at the varsity level.
Bouman, a Netherlands native, imprinted a Dutch philosophy on the program.
“It was like the ‘Austin Powers’ movie,” Payne quipped. “He danced ballet, he did performances and the way he played soccer was very artistic. … We were terrible. We had guys playing in what felt like farming boots, but every year we got a little bit better, a little more competitive.”
Four years after he first suited up for a program that had never won a playoff game, Payne led his high school to Maryland’s grandest stage.
As a senior, Payne captained Glenelg to its first-ever state championship in 1992.
“(Payne’s) talent was off the charts,” said Scott Cline, one of Payne’s former teammates at Glenelg. “We played at a rural school outside the city limits that had no soccer history, and Russell was a major part of our success. … We got to kind of be (the) pioneers there.”
Staying close to home, soaring an ocean away
When Maryland men’s soccer coach Sasho Cirovski took over the Terrapins in February 1993, he told The Baltimore Sun he sought to return a then-dormant program to a national championship standard. Upon reading the print story, Payne’s mother, Marion Payne, told her son it was worth hearing the new coach out.
Soon, Cirovski and his staff contacted the young goalkeeper. Meanwhile, more established East Coast powers Rutgers and UConn also pursued Payne.
“My first goal was to get the best Maryland players to stay in the state,” Cirovski said. “I focused on Russell Payne and Shane Dougherty. … Once you meet Russell, you realize there’s a lot of substance to this young man besides his raw athletic ability and goalkeeping talent. I was immediately drawn to him.”
Although Payne was averse to attending college so close to home, he said Cirovski sold him and his mother on the combination of athletic and academic potential. As Marion Payne left her son on campus for his overnight stay, her parting words pulled no punches: she said she first needed to talk to her husband but, “you’re going here,” Russell Payne recalled.
Payne heeded his mother’s advice, committing to Maryland within two months of his initial conversations with Cirovski. He earned a full-ride academic scholarship and set out to major in biology. As Marion Payne put it, her son’s proximity concerns proved overblown.
“He focused on being on that team and being there,” she said. “He was 45 minutes down the road, but he didn’t come home a lot. We only saw him when we would go down to games.”
The Terrapins struggled during Cirovski’s first season, accumulating a 3-14-1 record, but the coach saw glimpses of promise in his then-freshman goalkeeper.
During spring practices, Cirovski made Payne catch 10 consecutive hard shots after every session. Every day, Payne couldn’t leave the training ground until he accomplished the feat.
“Sash was a maniac — I didn’t understand why he was all over us so much,” Payne said. “I didn’t think he liked me. Turns out he loved me and was pushing me to be something better than I was. Some guys couldn’t handle it, and they quit. Other guys stayed with it, and the very next year, we had the biggest turnaround in college soccer.”
Maryland made the NCAA tournament during Payne’s final three seasons with the program. As a senior, he posted a conference-best 0.88 goals against average for an ACC tournament championship squad.
Meanwhile, Payne juggled a rigorous scientific course load as he maintained his academic scholarship standing.
“They used to call him ‘The Professor’ when they when they were traveling because Russell told the guys, ‘While you guys are having a good time on the bus or the plane, I’ve got to study because when I get back, I have a chemistry exam,’” said Bill Payne, Russell Payne’s father.
After graduation, Payne sidelined previous plans of attending medical or dental school and pursued a professional soccer career. He signed a contract with the USISL A-League’s New Orleans Riverboat Gamblers and played for various domestic clubs from 1997 to 2000.
Payne spent his professional career’s final stages overseas, playing 47 games for Irish top-tier club Derry City, starting 35 matches for Germany’s SV Elversberg 07 and culminating his playing career in 2005 with Shamrock Rovers — the winningest club in League of Ireland history.
“You go over to Europe … the language is different, the culture is different and you literally have to kill or be killed,” Payne said. “I just kept learning in all those environments, but I just loved it. It was an adventure.”
Learning the championship standard
After his final season in Ireland, Payne returned home to Maryland. Payne previously pondered flying out to California for a Division II coaching interview, but his old coach called him back to College Park. With former men’s assistant Brian Pensky shifting over to the Maryland women’s head coaching role, Payne joined Cirovski’s staff as an assistant coach.
On the eve of the Terrapins’ 2005 season opener in California, Payne sauntered into his hotel gym for a pre-match workout. To Payne’s bewilderment, Maryland seniors Chris Lancos and Michael Dellorusso had the same idea.
“A couple of the seniors are on the treadmill, just hitting a mile, getting primed, sprinting it out,” Payne said. “I’m like, ‘What the hell?’ They’re like, ‘We’re going into this season to kill.’ They owned it, and that’s so rare. It’s like when you’re around a national championship program, the players are taking it over. That’s where you want to be as a coach.”
That season, Maryland broke a 37-year national title drought, defeating New Mexico 1-0 in the NCAA Championship.
With Payne serving under Cirovski, the Terrapins won another national championship in 2008. Payne said at this point, he learned winning titles requires a combination of crucial factors: a driven culture, player buy-in and, most importantly, a bit of luck on the team’s side.
As Maryland rose to perennial powerhouse status, Payne’s name became prominent in national coaching searches. In late 2009, Payne and Cirovski were sitting in the latter’s office when Cirovski’s phone rang.
“He takes the call, hangs up and he’s like, ‘Hey, that was the associate AD at West Point,’” Payne said. “He’s like, ‘Let me give you some advice. When somebody calls for you in the business you’re in, you take the call because it’s not often you’re actually wanted.’ … So, I called them back and went for a visit.”
After the Army Athletic Department presented Payne with a blank canvas to construct a program, he became the Black Knights’ coach in December 2009. With their first child — the couple’s daughter, Harper — on the way, Payne and his wife set down roots in West Point.
While Payne didn’t come from a military background, he took strides to assimilate to West Point’s unique culture. He soon realized that while he had one boss on paper, the athletic director, he had many superiors in the high-level military officials “highly invested in the young men” he coached.
During Payne’s tenure in the Patriot League, the Army men’s soccer locker room displayed a sign that read, “A West Point soccer player will be at the right place at the right time and do the right thing.” The Black Knights touched the sign before and after every training session and home game.
“The expectation was to be premier, not just on the field, but everywhere you go,” said Marcos Arroyo, an Army midfielder from 2014-2017. “Excellence was a mindset. … Russ just fed into that, and he used that to breed a culture that other people could see as an example.”
George Mason men’s soccer coach Rich Costanzo, who served on Payne’s Army staff from 2014 to 2017, said Payne didn’t just seek players interested in West Point. Payne instead identified and recruited the nation’s top talents.
Just as Payne secured Arroyo’s commitment from the Orlando City Academy over juggernauts like Stanford, he and his staff landed a high-profile signing from Torrance, California, ahead of the 2016 season.
That player was none other than current Portland Timbers center back Zac McGraw, the first-ever MLS SuperDraft selection from West Point.
“I don’t think if there was any other individual as the head coach there I would even be given the opportunity to be drafted,” McGraw said. “With the amount of phone calls I’m sure he had to make to make sure a service academy player wasn’t being overlooked, I don’t know how many other coaches would have stuck (their) neck out for me.”
Laying the foundation at NU
Following an 11-season stint at Army — and several roles within the U.S. Men’s National Team System — Payne’s path led him to Martin Stadium. Payne stepped into a program Lenahan had forged from the ground up in previous years.
“Tim did an amazing job,” Payne said. “The way this program historically is resourced, we’ve always been below the national scholarship limit. He built it up consistently while he was here.”
In 2004, the ’Cats made their first-ever NCAA tournament. Seven years later, they won their first-ever Big Ten tournament title. But the postseason well dried up in 2014, and NU hasn’t made a return trip to the NCAA tournament in more than a decade.
The ’Cats have shown flashes of brilliance during Payne’s first four seasons in Evanston, launching a bid for the regular season conference title that lasted until 2023’s final matchday and securing their first-ever 4-0 start the following year. For Payne, the building blocks for consistent success stem from work on the recruiting trail.
Payne said he and his staff target the non-negotiables of athleticism, agility, strength and soccer IQ — but they must see an innate work ethic to offer a recruit.
“You have to be able to put it all together and have it exist inside this exterior, that is ‘I’m a dawg. I’m a Wildcat, but I’m a dawg. I’m going to work, I’m going to fight, I’m going to compete at every corner,’” Payne said. “When you see it, you know you’ve got it.”
TopDrawerSoccer ranked NU’s 2025 class as the nation’s No. 13 recruiting class. The talent influx includes MLS Next and ECNL academy products and three transfer commitments — former Purdue Fort Wayne forward Seth Mahlmeister, former Drexel forward Omar Jallow and former La Salle midfielder Yuval Nimrodi.
In evaluating transfers, Payne said he values players with a “backstory” connecting to the program or the area and those who feel as if they “have something to prove.” To both high school and transfer recruits, Payne pitches his squad as a program on the rise.
“I feel like I’m coming in at the perfect time,” said Andrew Johnson, a Sporting Kansas City Academy graduate and incoming freshman. “This program has so much potential, with the coaching staff, the players, the upperclassmen and the incoming class. I’m very excited for what the future holds.”
In about five months, Payne’s 2022 recruiting class will wrap up their final preseason as seniors and kick off the 2025 campaign. Payne pointed to center back Nigel Prince and midfielders Jason Gajadhar and Jayvin Van Deventer as three players he expects to take significant strides during their senior campaigns.
While Payne said the ’Cats are “nowhere near” their full potential, he simultaneously feels the loftiest of peaks are within reach.
“We’re so close. I don’t feel like the NCAA tournament is a benchmark,” Payne said. “The NCAA tournament is just when the floodgates will open, but we have to get there. This is a national-championship-level program we have — and getting these guys to believe and understand that and train that way every day is the fun part of this challenge.”
Email: [email protected]
X: @jakeepste1n
Related Stories:
— Men’s Soccer: Northwestern trounces Penn State 4-1 in regular season finale
—Men’s Soccer: Northwestern’s 2004 squad reflects on 20-year anniversary of Indiana upset
