By Jonathan Raymond, News Staff

Ed Matz deserved better than this.
The former women’s soccer head coach gave Northeastern its most successful program over the past couple seasons. He brought the school just its second-ever Colonial Athletic Association (CAA) championship in 2008, a year in which his team also advanced to the second round of the NCAA tournament. This year, the Huskies won the regular season championship and advanced to the CAA title game again. Matz was also named CAA Coach of the Year for his efforts.
Matz was exactly the kind of coach Northeastern should strive to keep; to reward.
And now he’s gone, after resigning Jan. 7. Gone not only because his program wasn’t given scholarships in the wake of the cutting of the football program, but also because his program, easily the most successful at Northeastern over the past two seasons, wasn’t given any assistance and he simply was not told why.
‘I felt very uninformed that this wasn’t even brought to my attention, that this was going to happen,’ Matz said of the allocation plan which did not include his team. ‘Nothing was explained to me, just that they had a plan and women’s soccer would be included in the future, but that right now we would get no immediate bump.’
According to Matz, at least, he was never informed of the thought process during the decision making, and even after a sit-down meeting with Athletics Director Peter Roby, was never given an explanation why his program wasn’t receiving immediate funding while several others were. He was merely told women’s soccer was vaguely ‘in the plan.’
There’s no reason to think Matz isn’t telling the truth here, because Roby knows his sentiments, knows he’s angry, knows he’s made public comments, and still declined to be interviewed or refute anything Matz has said.
And presuming it’s true, then all it would have taken to keep Matz at Northeastern would have been a sufficient explanation, or, really, an explanation at all, as to what kind of plan Roby and the rest of the administration had for women’s soccer in the near future, and why it was temporarily put on the back burner.
But that never happened, and now a man who turned Northeastern’s women’s soccer program into one of the nation’s fastest-rising soccer programs, with legitimate All-American contenders in players like Veronica Napoli and Devin Petta; a man who gave NU its only real CAA powerhouse, is leaving to coach UMass.
Again, not just because he wasn’t given funding he rightly felt the success of his program had earned, but more-so because he wasn’t told why.
On top of that, the school then sent out a release announcing his move before he was given a chance to have a meeting with his team to tell them about his decision in person. Instead, he was told he would have to call them one by one, and deliver the news over the phone.
‘I was angry, I was hurt,’ Matz said. ‘I’m disappointed, I’m sad, because I didn’t foresee this happening. It was very unplanned and unsolicited, and I’m still getting used to it.’
In the only statement Roby has made concerning Matz’s departure, he said in the release announcing the resignation, ‘I am grateful to Ed for his service to the university.’
But actions, in this case, have spoken louder than words. Matz’s version of events indicate his service was disrespected and his accomplishments disregarded during the process that led to his resignation. And in lieu of Roby offering up an alternative account of events, we can only take Matz for his word.
This is not about the women’s soccer program deserving more money, which they did, but is beside the point. This is about Northeastern losing one of its best coaches when it did not have to. A man who was always open and friendly and represented the university as well as anyone in the athletics department.
This is about a process ‘- the allocation of funds saved from cutting football ‘- that was done without transparency even for the coaches it was directly affecting. It is about a process that led to the loss of Ed Matz, a man who, since he began at NU in 1994 and took over as men’s coach in 1996, more or less single-handedly built the Northeastern soccer program.
Perhaps most importantly, this is about the fact that now Northeastern has no women’s soccer coach, while UMass has itself a damn good one.

‘- Jonathan Raymond can be reached
at [email protected].