University of South Carolina (Upstate)
NCAA DI • NULL
Date: August 26, 2026
Would Recommend
Tags
I’ve had enough coaches at this point to know that “good coach” can mean a lot of different things. Some are good at tactics. Some are good at motivation. Some are good at recruiting. Some are good at making everyone terrified of them lol. Sharif was different because he somehow paid attention to all the stuff that most coaches don’t notice. He could spend an entire film session talking about one run that nobody else even remembered happening. Then after practice he’d ask you about an exam you had the next morning or whether your family was okay. It wasn’t this fake “I care about you as a person” thing either. You could tell pretty quickly whether a coach actually knows his players or just knows their GPS numbers and stats. He was demanding. Like, really demanding. There were definitely days when I thought he was insane and wondered why I was paying tuition to told to make a run over and over again. But the older I get, the more I understand what he was doing. He didn’t lower the standard because you were having a bad day. He just helped you figure out how to manage and thrive. The thing I remember most isn't a win or a speech. It's that he noticed people. If someone was struggling, he usually knew before they said anything. If someone was doing something well, he noticed that too. He also wasn't above admitting when he got something wrong, which sounds small until you've played for enough coaches to realize how rare that actually is. And he didn't seem particularly interested in being the most important person in the room. He wanted the players to be. That's probably the best way I can explain why playing for him mattered to me. I don't think I left his program just being a better soccer player. I left being much more aware of the kind of teammate, student, and person I wanted to be. Would absolutely play for him again. Even on the days I would've preferred to throw my cleats into traffic.