The new men’s soccer head coach walks into the first team meeting of the year and writes 198 on the board. The coach, fresh off a Big East coaching gig with West Virginia, the school from which he graduated, was taking over the 198th worst team in Division I soccer. That’s out of 200 teams.

“You know, I’m not 198th, you guys are,” the coach told his new team. “I wasn’t here and everybody contributed to [the ranking], and I can tell you that we’re not going to be 198th next year.”

It was the first year the Binghamton men’s soccer team had joined Division I, but that didn’t stop the coach from having high hopes and high standards for his team. Just two years later in 2003, after being picked to finish eighth in the conference, his team won the America East tournament, earned an NCAA tournament berth and was then ranked nationally for seven weeks of the following season.

But Paul Marco didn’t always want to be head coach at Binghamton University. As a child, he wanted to work alongside his grandfather at his family-owned crane company. That idea quickly dissipated.

“My family only knew hard work, and I didn’t really understand what hard work was until I went to work with my grandfather,” Marco said. “And I quickly figured out that during the Christmas holiday, when I was working on a crane truck and it’s pouring snow and freezing, that this is not for me,” he said.

So Marco became a soccer player, a standout one at that, and decided it would be good to come home after spending over a decade at WVU as a player and coach. Growing up outside of Albany, coming to Binghamton made sense for him and his family — he and his wife have been married over 11 years with two children, Stephanie, 4, and Emily, 18 months. Binghamton was the logical choice; or so he initially told himself.

“If I had to say that it was personal, I’d be kidding you,” he admits. “Because I probably don’t see my mom or my mother-in-law any more than I did.”

The selling point for Marco to join the Bearcats, as it turned out, was pitched by Jim Norris, the BU Athletic Department’s associate director of athletics, who told Marco, “We have no football, we want men’s soccer to be our football.”

“Coming from a football school, I knew exactly what that meant,” Marco said.

And while Binghamton men’s soccer may not sufficiently substitute college football in the hearts of all, the Bearcats are certainly not 198th in the nation anymore, thanks to Marco. In fact, in 2006, they are regular season conference champions after being picked to finish fourth.

Entering the year, Binghamton knew it would have to deal with the departure of its star class of 2005, which featured Graham Munro, Darius Ravangard and Danilo, to name a few. But the team had no way to prepare for the injuries that have left the bench lined with wounded stars, and early on, Binghamton’s record suffered along with its players.

But after Sept. 10’s 1-0 overtime loss to Florida Atlantic University, Marco spoke to his team and turned the season around.

“I basically told the team, ‘losing’s over, we’re not losing anymore and I don’t care what we have to do,’” Marco said. “If that’s all we’re going to get with the group that’s playing, I’ll play a new group, because I’m not going to lose with them.”

Since that fateful talk, the team has gone 7-2-2 with a freshman goalie, players who were intended to be redshirted this season starting and team captain Kyle Antos, among several other starters, sitting on the bench the entire season, unable to help. Everyone has stepped up, and winning starts at the top.

“The values that he instills in our team are the values that every world class team needs,” Antos says. “He makes sure every player accounts for himself; everything you do you do for the team.”

Marco did everything he could for his team this year. And despite the fact that the America East Coaching Staff of the Year award went to the University of New Hampshire’s Rob Thompson and his staff for finishing second after being voted to finish eighth, the conference does not have to recognize Marco for his accomplishments, especially since his players and those around him already do.

“I think that you just get so passionate and obsessed with what’s going on, that sometimes there isn’t a lot of time for family and for you,” Marco says. “People ask me, they see that I’m in the office late or early in the morning, and I jokingly tell ’em, ‘I’ll sleep in December.’”