A decade after the late Bill Russell led San Francisco to consecutive NCAA basketball national championships, Luis “Lou” Sagastume helped put the school’s soccer program on the national map.
A native of Guatemala, Sagastume was a midfielder, team captain and second-team All-American as a senior on the first of coach Steve Negoesco’s five NCAA championship squads in the fall of 1966. Playing on a muddy field at California’s Memorial Stadium, the Dons beat Long Island University, 5-2, to claim their first national crown in any sport since the basketball team won in 1955 and ’56.
“When I mention that I went to USF, people always say, `Did you know Bill Russell?’ He was 10 years older than me,” Sagastume said. “They were the influencers in our careers. It was such an honor” to win the first soccer title.
Now 79 years old and living in Colorado Springs, Colo., following a 28-year run as head coach at the Air Force Academy, Sagastume is USF’s 2024 entry into the West Coast Conference Hall of Honor.
“I was so pleasantly surprised,” he said of his reaction when he got the news. “I was jumping up and down, it’s just so awesome. I’m very grateful.”
And entirely deserving, according to Henry Contreras, a native of Venezuela and Sagastume’s fellow midfielder on the team. “He was very talented but he was a team worker. Coach Negeosco named him captain because he had people skills,” Contreras, 80, said in a phone interview from his home in Miami. “He was a great player and a great human being. We respected him. He helped keep the cohesiveness and the spirit of the team.”
Sagastume and honorees from the eight other conference schools will be celebrated on Saturday, March 9, at the Credit Union 1 WCC Basketball Championship in Las Vegas. Linda, his wife of 35 years, and several of his five children and their spouses will join him for the event.
While Russell came to USF from across the Bay in Oakland, Sagastume arrived in the city as a wide-eyed eighth-grader from Guatemala City who spoke no English.
A year or so earlier, he had come with his grandparents and one of his sisters to visit San Francisco when he was 12 years old on what was more a business trip than a vacation. His grandmother was shopping for a fishing boat to be used back home in a venture she was starting with a business partner.
His grandmother, Clara, was key to the arrangement because she knew the country’s president, Carlos Castillo Armas, who would be able to provide them the license they needed to operate in Guatemalan waters. Armas was a military man who had been chased out of the country by the new leftist government. He regrouped in Nicaragua, building an army before returning to seize power in 1954 through a coup d’état that had support from the U.S.
But the family’s dream of a fishing business collapsed when they got word in San Francisco that Armas had been assassinated. Clara’s political connections were gone.
Even so, the trip turned out to be life-changing for Sagastume. Long-time friends of his grandmother, the Wagner family, asked Lou if he’d be interested in moving to San Francisco to attend school. His parents had recently divorced and he was ready for a change. In 1958, after the Wagners arranged for resident papers, Sagastume arrived in his new country.
“It was so exciting. When you saw pictures of America and you saw the neighborhoods and all the beautiful things about America . . . we got all that from the movies,” he recalled. "There was an attraction for me that I couldn’t comprehend. But I know I was truly happy to come to America.”
At Herbert Hoover Junior High School, the principal paired Lou with the school’s only other Spanish-speaking boy, who helped show him around and served as a translator. Within six months, Sagastume had picked up English.
What helped him even more to fit in and make friends was his ability as an athlete. He had played high-level youth soccer in Guatemala and immediately became one of San Francisco’s top young players.
“When I was ready to come to America, the first thing I packed was my soccer shoes,” he said. “When I started school, I convinced my friends to join the team and sort of started teaching them how to play. Soccer wasn’t too advanced here and I could almost do anything i wanted to.”
But playing soccer caused him back pain when he was young, and Lou preferred basketball and swimming. That remained the case even when Negoesco began recruiting to join the youth team he coached. Sagastume repeatedly declined.
“I had no idea who he was at the time. I didn’t know many people in San Francisco. I was a young kid living life,” he said.
Negoesco made one more push to get Sagastume to join his team, explaining that several of his players had been suspended before a state championship game and he needed a couple of replacements. Just one game, he promised.
“I thought maybe I can get this man off my back if I just played,” said Sagastume, who agreed to play and recalls scoring the winning goal in the match at Balboa Park. He was hooked. “I had the feeling of victory again in my heart,” he said.
After playing for Lincoln High School, Sagastume accepted a partial scholarship from Negoesco to play at USF. Because he didn’t meet academic standards to attend school during day sessions, he was required to take night classes. To make ends meet, he sold newspapers on the corner down the street from his house for a time, worked as a busboy then got a job stocking shelves at a Sears department store.
His daily routine was dizzying: He worked from 8 a.m. to noon, studied at the library until 3 p.m., practiced from 3 to 5 p.m., then took classes from 6 to 10 p.m. “A rigorous schedule,” he acknowledged.
On the field, things went more smoothly. Sagastume and the Dons were 32-3-2 in his three varsity seasons, losing, 5-2, to St. Louis in the quarterfinals of the NCAA Tournament his junior season of 1965 after building a 2-0 halftime lead.
Negoesco worked his players hard. To achieve elite fitness, he had them do weekly seven-mile runs in the sand on the beach near the famed Cliff House overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
USF made it back to the NCAAs in ’66, thanks to an unbeaten record blemished only by a tie against Cal. Negoesco assembled a team with remarkable international flavor, bringing together players with roots in 10 countries: China, Poland, Israel, Venezuela, Hungary, Peru, Germany, Nicaragua, Indonesia and, of course, Guatemala.
“Sports Illustrated called us a United Nations team,” Sagastume recalled. “We got there in our younger years and developed in San Francisco.”
The NCAA quarterfinals brought the Dons a rematch on the road vs. St. Louis, a collegiate soccer powerhouse. “It was a revenge game,” Sagastume said.
While practicing the day before, the Dons were greeted by hecklers from a nearby dorm. “These guys started yelling at us how they were going to beat us and kick our (butts) and break our legs,” Sagastume recalled. “I was captain of the team and I gathered everyone and said there is no way these guys are going to beat us. We were angry.”
Playing on a soggy field in the rain, the teams battled in a 1-1 game into a fourth overtime before Peruvian Eduardo Rangel for the winning goal for the Dons. “We went crazy, started diving in the mud,” Sagastume said.
Back in the Bay Area for the national semifinals in Berkeley, the Dons got a pair of second-half goals, including one from Sagastume, to beat Army, 2-0, on Cal’s rain-ravaged football field. The weather was cool and dry for the championship game, when Sagastume contributed a pair of assists to USF’s win over Long Island.
The Dons won four more titles under Negoesco — all of them between 1975 and ’80. No team in 57 years since ’66 has equaled the five goals scored by USF in the NCAA championship match.
Sagastume’s playing days were mostly over by then but he had coached the St. Ignatius Prep junior varsity team and taught Spanish at the school while still attending USF. He credits Negoesco as the inspiration for his career path. “I owe everything to him, practically,” he said. “The way he pursued me, the way he got me to USF, the way he helped me. He was a big mentor.”
Sagastume served as the JV coach at USF in 1967 before gaining more experience at Chico State and San Francisco State. In 1979, he was hired to run the program at Air Force, where sons Ryan and Marcus both played for him and he became the program’s winningest coach before retiring in 2007.
He received the United Soccer Coaches Latino Award of Excellence in 2020 and has been inducted into the athletic halls of fame at both USF and San Francisco State.
In what has sometimes been a dramatic journey, soccer is a near-constant thread for Sagastume. His years at USF remain a vivid chapter. “It was such a fun time in my life.”