Max Tassano was one of those athletic kids who seemed to excel at any sport he tried. At the age of 13, he was the starting pitcher on his league’s all-star team. During the game, with fans and parents cheering from the stands, he set up to throw a fastball. Staring down the batter, he went into his windup. The second he released the ball, he heard—and felt—the bone break in his arm.
“Well,” he thought as the pain shot through his arm, “I’m never doing that again.” Flanked by coaches and emergency medical technicians, he managed to walk off the field. The next day he decided to turn his attention to soccer.
He quickly found success, becoming part of an Olympic Development Program as a middle-schooler and entertaining visions of a professional career. But in high school, he went through a growth spurt that left him with a body he wasn’t quite used to—from a lithe 5 foot 10 inches to an awkward 6 foot 3 inches. “Even now, I’m not, like, a prime athletic specimen for the game,” he notes. “I’m basically a slow gangly giant.” By his senior year of high school in suburban Philadelphia, when his teammates were looking at NCAA Division I soccer programs, Tassano paid more attention to what college was the best academic fit—and if it had a good soccer program, so much the better.
He entered Carnegie Mellon as an International Relations major in the same year the university had just graduated nearly its entire soccer team. “It was basically a bunch of us freshmen showing up for the first tryout, looking around at nobody but coaches and realizing, ‘Oh, I guess we’re the soccer team.’” By the end of the year, five of the 11 starters were freshmen. At the start of sophomore year, they all moved into a house together about a mile from campus.
During the 2012 season, those same five players, now juniors, continued to start, and their friendship and experience together could be seen in game after game as the team finished the season with a 13-4-1 record and a final NCAA Division III ranking of 18. Tassano led the team in scoring with 11 goals and five assists and was named by the National Soccer Coaches Association of America to the 2012 NCAA Division III Men All-Great Lakes Region Team first team.
After the regular season, the team advanced to the second round of the NCAA Division III Championship tournament. During the second half of that game, against Northern Ohio, Tassano and the opposing goalkeeper both went for a ball with the score tied 1-1. The keeper slid into Tassano’s ankle, spraining it. But unlike his baseball injury, Tassano didn’t walk off, never to return to that game. He stayed on the sidelines, cheering on his teammates, who lost 3-1.
Fully recovered, he’ll return to the soccer pitch this fall, as a senior, when he and his buddies will have an eye on a national championship.
