Phil Savitz, a coaching legend in SC high school soccer, will retire
The state’s winningest high school boys soccer coach is calling it a career.
River Bluff High School coach Phil Savitz will retire after the upcoming soccer season. This will be his 45th season as a high school coach, the last 12 coming with the Gators.
Savitz told his team of the decision on Wednesday morning, and the school released news shortly after that.
“These kinds of decisions, no matter how old you are and how long you have been doing, it are hard,” Savitz told The State. “My wife and daughter can’t look at me and talk about it without crying. Soccer has been so much a part of our family for all of these years. I don’t even know the real why, but it seems like time. Here we are.”
Savitz has been taking things on a year-to-year basis but started seriously thinking about retirement eight weeks ago, he said. He thought about the positives of retirement such as spending more time with family and two grandchildren.
His family, however, wasn’t on board with the possible move at first.
“They immediately tried to veto it,” Savitz said.
Savitz, though, wasn’t going to be talked out of it and eventually told River Bluff administration and then his coaches on Sunday before telling the players. He was able to make it through telling the players without crying because he told his wife to not come to the announcement.
“That was going to be enough emotion without my wife standing back there,” Savitz said. “She would have started crying and it was going to hit me. But I think I made it through pretty well.”
The 68-year-old Savitz has won 15 state championships and was runner-up nine other times. Savitz won his 800th game last season, becoming just the fifth high school boys soccer coach nationally to accomplish that. He has 806 wins and his teams have won more than 87 percent of their matches.
Before River Bluff, Savitz coached at Irmo where he won 634 games. He left to become River Bluff’s coach when the school opened in 2013. He led River Bluff to a state title in 2016.
“The Irmo and River Bluff soccer community expresses deep gratitude for Coach Savitz’s enduring contributions, and his legacy will undoubtedly continue to inspire future generations,” River Bluff principal Jacob Smith said in a school statement.
Savitz, who didn’t play soccer until his senior year at A.C. Flora, might not have been able to earn any of his accomplishments if he left the state as originally planned. He accepted a graduate assistant job coaching soccer at UMass before Mark Berson convinced him to stay in South Carolina.
Berson was named the first USC men’s soccer coach in school history in 1978 and asked Savitz, who played club soccer for the Gamecocks, to be his graduate assistant.
Savitz was finishing his second season at USC when he and Berson received a phone call in October of 1979 from Nicky Joseph, who was Irmo’s boys soccer coach and won back-to-back state championships in the late 1970s.
Joseph was looking to get out of coaching for a job in business and called to see if they knew anyone who wanted to coach the Yellow Jackets’ program.
“I told him me and Mark would brainstorm. I didn’t even consider it at first,” Savitz said earlier this year. “But then they were running out of time and that is when Mark said, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ I could still do office hours that went toward my graduate assistant. He said, ‘It would be an opportunity to add to your resume.’ “So I thought about it and said I would do it.”
Savitz accepted the job as interim coach. Since he wasn’t a full-time employee at Irmo, the wins and losses that season didn’t go on his record. The Yellow Jackets made it to the Class 4A championship that year before losing to TL Hanna in the state championship.
After the season, Savitz finished off the school year as a substitute at Irmo Middle School while a teacher was on maternity leave. That led to a full-time teaching position — and then Irmo athletic director Joe Turbeville hired Savitz as the full-time head coach.
“That is when all my priorities and my future changed. I was a coach and I loved it. And then the Irmo thing came along and it seemed like it was a thing of destiny,” Savitz said.
Savitz helped build Irmo to a powerhouse. From the 1980-81 to 2004-05 seasons, the Yellow Jackets won 13 state championships and finished runner-up six other times. Irmo won four consecutive championships on two different occasions from 1987 to 1990 and then 1995 to 1998.
The success continued at River Bluff, where he has won multiple region titles and the 2016 state championship.
“I think my legacy will be whatever people want it to be, but I hope I am remembered as someone who put family first,” Savitz said. “That is one of the principles I have built everything on. .... I also hope that me and my coaching staff have been the best people we can be. I had so many players come back to me and say, ‘You taught me a lot about soccer but more about life.’
“And I hope we were able to build positive memories for those that were with Irmo and River Bluff soccer family. I hope they can look back and say, ‘That was a good time. I like to go back there.’ ”
This story was originally published November 29, 2023 at 10:05 AM.
