A Beautiful Shame

Friday Night Lights collides with the high desert of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where a university required to balance its budget ends up cutting the hopes and dreams of a generation that is too often told it is not good enough. This isn’t about soccer; it’s about a community and a coach that had to fight for every inch only to have it all taken away with a single stroke of a pen. The final season of UNM Soccer is about perseverance in the face of adversity and controlling the controllable. A story that needs to be told and remembered. – Peter Trevisani, co-founder, owner, CEO, New Mexico UnitedA Beautiful Shame is a gripping inside look into one of the darkest moments of men’s college soccer this century. A program that stood for excellence and achieved incredible success should have been heralded and rewarded and not dropped. This book reveals the current sad state of a college sports landscape that needs real reform so this never happens again to the players, coaches, and the community that serve a university so well. – Sasho Cirovksi, head men’s soccer coach, University of Maryland, three-time NCAA championPeople often talk lovingly about grass roots soccer—Ryan Swanson skillfully recounts the struggles involved in nourishing those roots, and how they were torn up at UNM. – Stefan Szymanski, PhD, professor of sport management, University of Michigan, author of SoccernomicsWhat is the value of the University of New Mexico men’s soccer team? Ryan Swanson, in this rich and textured chronicle of the announced final season of Lobos men’s soccer, shows that—contrary to university accounting—it is priceless. A Beautiful Shame places the Lobos’ story in the complicated contexts of Land-of-Enchantment state politics as well as the heightened scrutiny and sweeping business changes transforming American college sports in the twenty-first century. At its heart are the young athletes and their coaches who come together to fight to win—on and off the pitch. – Victoria L. Jackson, PhD, sports historian and associate clinical professor, Arizona State UniversityNeither overly sympathetic nor overly critical, Swanson delivers a deft mix of detailed accounting of the agonizing final run of one of New Mexico’s most successful sports programs ever with very human, relatable anecdotes that could only be known by the players, coaches, and the embedded author, who lived out that impossible season. There were political promises never fulfilled, numbers that never added up, school administrators digging in on decisions meant to solve problems that cutting soccer didn’t really fix, a college sports landscape moving at warp speed into an uncontrollable billion dollar behemoth, and a sport itself that didn’t always view college soccer as something worth saving, anyway. All that taking place in the complex setting of New Mexico—a proud state always ready for a fight, but rarely prepared to deliver solutions—and there’s no more fitting description of the painful last days of UNM Lobo men’s soccer than as ‘A Beautiful Shame.’ – Geoff Grammer, journalist, Albuquerque Journal

Ryan Swanson is professor of history in honors at the University of New Mexico. He also directs the Lobo Scholars Program, an initiative that serves high achieving student athletes. Swanson is the author of The Strenuous Life: Theodore Roosevelt and the Making of the American Athlete (2019) and When Baseball Went White: Reconstruction, Reconciliation, and Dreams of a National Pastime (2014), which won the 2015 Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) research award.