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Princeton University Athletics
Feature Story: The Perfect Teammate
November 11, 2021 | Men's Soccer
The ball was on the wrong side of the field, at least as far as the Princeton men’s soccer team’s Ivy League championship hopes were concerned. This was back on Oct. 30, when the Tigers were playing 20th-ranked Cornell in a game that would be pivotal in determining the league champion.
It was the moment that Kevin O’Toole had wanted so desperately, the moment that made the decision he made a little more than a year ago actually so easy, even if it seemed to be excruciating at the time. Now he was where he wanted to be, where he belonged, surrounded by the Princeton men’s soccer teammates he loves so much, being the perfect teammate for them.
It was early in the second half. The Tigers were already up 1-0 – O’Toole had set up the first goal on a perfectly placed corner kick – but Cornell had no intention of going away quietly, even down a man after a first-half red card.
Cornell was looking for the tying goal when the ball was played out of the back by Alex Charles. O’Toole stood in the middle of the field. There were three red jerseys around him.
Instead of coming back to the ball, O’Toole instead turned to face the Cornell goal. In a blink, in one sudden energetic burst, he directed the ball forward, outraced the three red jerseys and gently placed the ball to his left, right onto the foot of teammate Daniel Diaz-Bonilla, who tucked it into the top corner of the net for what proved to be the winning goal in a 2-1 Princeton win.
O’Toole’s play was extraordinary. Seeing it in real time was incredible enough. Watching the replay, it gets more amazing every time.
Seven days later, this past Saturday, Princeton clinched the Ivy League championship with a 1-0 win over Penn on Walker Gillespie’s goal with five minutes left. At the final horn, O’Toole leapt into Gillespie’s arms. It was only fitting that this time O'Toole was the leaper. Maybe he hasn’t carried Princeton through this magnificent season, but he has done a great deal of the heavy lifting.
Princeton goes for a perfect Ivy League season Saturday at 4 against Yale on Sherrerd Field. Whether the Tigers get it or not, they are still headed to the NCAA tournament as outright Ivy League champion. For O’Toole, it’s the second Ivy title and NCAA trip. With a college career that already includes one Ivy League Offensive Player of the Year award and two first-team All-Ivy League honors before this year’s honors have been announced, winning the league again and heading back to the tournament is obviously the perfect ending to the Kevin O’Toole story.
A better question is where his story starts. The play that O’Toole made against Cornell wasn’t born in Princeton. It wasn’t even born in the United States. And it certainly wasn’t the first time he’d played soccer at Princeton. That actually goes back more than a decade before he ever wore the Orange and Black for the first time.
Where does the O’Toole story begin?
That play against Cornell grew from the playground of the American School in Warsaw, Poland, a school that despite its name had about 20 percent American children and the rest from all over the world. Kevin O’Toole spent first and second grades there, while his father Eric worked in the country for two years. He learned a lot more than just phonics and simple addition in his early elementary school years.
“My best friends at school were Swedish, Danish, Belgian, Turkish, Japanese and Polish,” he says. “That is what I remember most about my experience in Poland. Having international friends during my youth years instilled an appreciation of culture and diversity that I would not have otherwise attained going to school in my hometown. I cherish my friendships with my friends from Poland and still have meaningful relationships with many of them to this day.”
The school required the kids to go outside for exercise no matter how cold it got. In the winters, Kevin would head off to school in snow pants, winter coat and boots, but that didn’t slow him down.
“Every day at recess we played soccer on a small turf field at school, regardless of the weather,” he says. “All the kids at school were required to bring snow pants and jackets so that we could still go outside during the cold, snowy winters for exercise. And our activity of choice – rain, shine, or snow – was always soccer. Exposure to the soccer culture in Europe is when I really fell in love with the game. It was infectious and part of daily life.”
His early soccer memories weren’t just at school.
“I remember always having a ball at my feet,” Kevin says. “We were fortunate to take many trips throughout Europe in my short time there, and I would always dribble my soccer ball through the cities we visited. I think that was foundational for me in developing my footwork. Exposure to the soccer culture in Europe is how I really fell in love with the game. It was infectious and part of daily life.”
His first actual soccer team was in Poland, after some of school friends talked him into trying out.
“Many of my classmates were bigger, stronger and faster than I was,” he says. “They were just better. That made me resent the sport at times because I couldn’t compete with some of the players. Though I was close, I didn’t give up and I was much better for it. Playing with more talented players made me a better player, and when I came back to the United States, I remember feeling like the game came to me much easier.”
That’s quite a story. There aren’t too many other American kids who had that sort of formative experience. Still, while that might be where the soccer piece of the Kevin O’Toole story begins, it’s not where the Princeton soccer piece of his story does. That actually goes back way further, more than a decade before he was even born.
O’Toole’s mother Nancy O’Toole was Nancy Reinisch when she was a soccer star herself at Manalapan High School, near the Jersey Shore. She committed to play at William & Mary, and a few weeks before she was to head to college, her Manalapan Soccer Club team faced off against the Braddock Road Blue Belles in a girls’ club regional final, with a trip to nationals on the line. Manalapan led 3-0 at the half. Braddock Road won 4-3.
There were three players on that Braddock Road team who would be her teammates at William & Mary. One of them was Jill Ellis, who would go on to be a hugely successful college coach and then lead the United States women’s national team to championships at the World Cup and the Olympics. Another would be Julie Cunningham, who is better known as Julie Shackford in Princeton soccer circles.
Shackford coached the Princeton women for 20 years, including to the 2004 NCAA Final Four. She is currently the head coach back at her alma mater. In the meantime, Shackford and Nancy O’Toole remained great friends through the years. Between them they have six children who are separated by five years total, and those six kids spent a great deal of time together as they were growing up.
“Nancy and I were teammates and roommates on road trips,” Shackford says. “The kids all grew up together. We’d play soccer, take them to Great Adventure. We spent a lot of time in each other’s houses. The connection was pretty special. I think I got them interested in Princeton as little kids. They’d come to games, basketball games, soccer games. The environment was really appealing for that.”
Today, Shackford coaches two of those six kids, her daughter Kayleigh and O’Toole’s sister Jillian, at William & Mary.
“We spent a lot of time with Julie and her kids,” Kevin O’Toole says. “We were all really good friends. We all still keep in touch. There’s three of them and three of us. We all got along really well. We always were playing pickup soccer games. They’re a chaotic bunch, and we were chaotic as well. I remember running around Robert Stadium when I was a kid with them. I loved it.”
O’Toole would go to Shackford’s Princeton camp in the summers when the family was home from Poland, not as an official camper but mostly just to run around and jump into some drills.
“We’d always go see Julie when we could,” Nancy says. “There was a time when Jill was still an assistant with the national team that they trained at Princeton and we came down and Julie introduced all the kids to the players. That was a lot of fun.”
It was Shackford who would put Kevin on the radar of the men’s coaching staff, first in a joking way and then later on in a way that had a dramatic impact on his development.
“Kevin was maybe 10 tops when Julie and I were having lunch one day,” Nancy says. “Totts [Steve Totten, the men’s associate head coach under Jim Barlow] happened to walk in, and Julie introduced us. She said “her son is a great soccer player. You’re going to want to keep an eye on him.”
By the time he was a teenager, O’Toole had played for a strong club team in Montclair and also had made the Red Bulls academy team, which is a stepping stone to the pro ranks. O’Toole was playing in the back for the Red Bulls, which meant he had not yet been able to show off the offensive game that is his strength. When it came time to think about colleges, he “cast a wide net,” his mother says. “He thought about Princeton, but he hadn’t yet put it at the top of his list. I suggested that he go to a camp at Princeton when he was a sophomore. I said he should see how it goes, see how he thinks he stacks up.”
And so he did. And, in the beginning at least, he wasn’t stacking up as well as he might have wanted.
“Julie came to watch the final game, and she and I were sitting together,” Nancy says. “Kevin was doing fine, but he wasn’t standing out. Julie decided she needed to get involved, so she just went over and yelled ‘Let’s go O’Toole’ and the top of her lungs. That lit a fire under him. It was like he was just there, and then he came alive. He finished strong.”
“I knew he had potential for sure,” Shackford says. “I had already talked to Jimmy about him early on. Then he wasn’t doing well at the camp, and I couldn’t put up with that, so I started screaming at him. He was the best one there.”
It was a year later that O’Toole attended the overnight camp at Princeton.
“It just happened to fall at a time when the Red Bulls didn’t have an event,” Nancy says. “I said ‘Kev, go check out Princeton again.’ When I went to pick him up, I wasn’t expecting much, but he just said ‘I love it here. This is where I want to go.’ From that point forward, he never wavered on Princeton.”
“He was on the radar pretty early for us,” Barlow says. “He was always a guy we had in the mix. We knew right away he had a soccer brain and could make plays. I don’t think we had an idea how good he could be offensively after playing in the back with Red Bulls. It wasn’t clear where he would help us when he got here, but he’s been such a huge part of our attack and offense. I wouldn’t have predicted that.”
He’d start 12 games as a freshman, finishing with a goal and two assists on a team that finished a distant third in the Ivy League, 11 points back of Dartmouth and eight back of Columbia. The following year, 2018, he exploded offensively, winning league Player of the Year honors as the Tigers won the league title by one point over Columbia.
His first NCAA tournament game saw Princeton and Michigan play through an epic exchange of penalty kicks before the Wolverines won in the 14th round. The game was played in a driving snowstorm in Ann Arbor.
“I was hoping to make an impact as a freshman,” he says. “Everything is so up in the air in college, and I didn’t even know positionally where I was going to get thrown into. I wanted to make some meaningful contribution to the team. That was my only goal. I was happy to get playing time early on. That’s hard to come by. I didn’t expect the personal recognition that I got sophomore year. I was just pumped to win the league and to play in the tournament at least once in my career. That was my dream.”
Princeton went 10-4-3 in 2019, his junior year, but some tough league moments left the Tigers tied for fifth place. Despite a second first-team All-Ivy League selection, it was an empty feeling for O’Toole, the consummate team player.
And then? He never would have imagined what would happen next. The global pandemic shut down all of college athletics in the spring of 2020, and there was no certainty of what would happen the coming fall. O’Toole, and all Princeton athletes, had two options – take a gap year and come back in 2021 or stay enrolled and lose the year of eligibility at Princeton. If he chose the latter, he would have graduated and then been able to play someplace else for a year as a grad student. If he chose the former, he would have to find something to do for a year.
“It was a really difficult decision,” O’Toole says. “I actually waited until the last day. There were just so many unknowns. Originally, they weren’t guaranteeing that you could come back in a year if you took a gap year. I was thinking about my future potentially in soccer. Hopefully I have many years ahead of me to play professionally. But what it came down to was that I didn’t want to miss out on my senior season. That wasn’t something I was ever going to get back. You only get one senior season. And I didn’t want to use it anywhere else. That’s what it came down to.”
“It was a struggle at the time,” Nancy says. “Do I gap? Do I continue? What were the implications going to be for playing professionally? In the end, he made the right decision for himself. He had an amazing experience last year.”
In the fall, he and several of his teammates traveled across the country to live in Mission Viejo, Calif., stopping off at a few national parks along the way. They were split somewhat evenly between those who were enrolled and those who had taken the year off.
“It was a great bonding experience,” he says. “It was great to be best friends with a lot of the guys there. We also played a lot of pickup soccer. We were working on our chemistry on the field and off the field.”
He came home for the spring semester doing data analysis work, and he played with the Red Bulls again. When it came time for his final season, he was ready, even if nobody had any idea what to expect after that much time away.
“We didn’t want to pressure anyone on the team,” Barlow says. “We wanted them all to do what was best for them and make their decisions with their families. Everything was so up in the air anyway that we wouldn’t have known what to tell them in the first place. When we came back, we had no idea what to expect. We had two classes we didn’t know much about. We knew it was going to be an important year to have good leaders in the upper classes. Kevin’s calming presence during times when things have gotten crazy has helped a ton. He commands so much respect by how he carries himself and engages in the moment.”
Princeton started out slowly, losing its first two and then struggling to get over the .500 mark. After a 1-0 loss to St. John’s on Sept. 28, the team sat at 3-4. Up next was a make-or-break game, so it seemed, in the Ivy League opener at Dartmouth.
Princeton went up 2-0. Dartmouth tied it at 2-2, getting its second goal with nine minutes to go, forcing overtime. It stayed that way through the first 10-minute extra period. Then, a little more than a minute into the second, O’Toole did something else amazing.
First, standing right at midfield, he trapped the ball, which squirted away from him to Diaz-Bonilla when O’Toole was knocked to the ground. Instead of staying down, he hopped up and immediately got the ball back. He was about five yards across the midfield line. From there, he put together a run of five touches, outrunning a Dartmouth defender without losing control of the ball. Then he threaded a pass through four Big Green players, right to Malik Pinto, who had the finish for the win. To keep possession of the ball from where he started and then to make the pass to Pinto that he made is not easy to do with no defense on the field in a practice drill. To do it in the 102nd minute in a pressure situation? Again, it was amazing.
“He’s so easy going and calm,” Barlow says of O’Toole. “He’s so calm under pressure. He doesn’t get rattled. He embraces the moment, and he never forces anything. It’s clear how much fun he’s having when he plays. He just makes really big plays in really huge moments.”
Princeton lost its next game to Temple, falling to 4-5. They enter the Yale game at 11-5, including a 6-0 run through the league that has already salted away the outright title. O’Toole, already a big-time offensive player, has exploded this season, with seven goals (one short of his previous career total) and nine assists (equal to his previous career total).
“This is all a collective effort,” he says. “I’ve gotten some great passes from teammates. If anything, I don’t try to focus on scoring or assisting. I just try to focus on attacking with pace, on being dynamic, on playing forward as much as I can. As long as I’m doing those things, I’m helping my team.”
His goal is to play professionally after graduation. A student in the School of Public and International Affairs, he’s writing his senior thesis on humanitarian intervention in Afghanistan.
“It’s amazing to be back on campus,” he says. “It’s been a more engaging learning environment. Maybe classes are a bit more challenging, but it’s great to be back here. Being a gap year senior, I’ve gotten to meet any extra year of teammates. From the team my freshman year to the team now, I’ve gotten to have so many incredible teammates. That’s been the best part.”
He’s come a long way from his early days with the sport in Poland. And, for that matter, from his days of running around Roberts Stadium as a kid.
“He’s had a tremendous experience,” Nancy O’Toole says. “Jimmy and Totts do a great job of selecting top guys. They’re a great group of guys to be there with, and he’s loved every moment of it.”
“He’s such a humble kid,” Shackford says. “He never takes himself too seriously. He’s just a wonderful kid. And he’s really talented and really humble. He was always a good player as a young kid. He’s really blossomed into an amazing impact player.”
And a nearly perfect teammate. When the all-league teams are announced next week, he has a chance to become the sixth player in league history and first from Princeton to win two Player of the Year Awards. He’s a lock to be a first-team selection for the third time.
And yet none of that is what he’s about. Ask him what he’s proudest of, and he quickly talks about his teammates and what it means to him to be part of the program. He talks about winning, and how they have done it together. He took the year off to be part of something special again, and that’s how it’s worked out for him. Now, no matter what else, he goes out as a champion.
It’s the perfect ending for the perfect teammate.
– by Jerry Price
