He grew up in Eden Park in Cranston, a neighborhood of modest houses and small businesses sandwiched between busy Reservoir Avenue to the west and Pontiac Avenue to the east. He wrestled and played baseball on championship teams at Cranston High School East, the red brick landmark on Park Avenue. At the urging of a pair of Sunday school teachers, he went to Colby College in Waterville, Maine, in 1969.
And he never left.
During his 40-year career as a coach and administrator at Colby, Mark Serdjenian made such an impact that former players, parents, friends, and admirers raised $1 million so the school could name a field after him, a soccer field.
Remarkable because he never played soccer until he arrived on Colby’s Mayflower Hill campus; Cranston East did not field a soccer team in those days. But appropriate, certainly, because Serdjenian became a soccer icon at Colby and in Maine.
The two-year-old grass field is a beauty with enclosed shelters for players and a 16-foot wireless LED scoreboard at one end. It is part of a re-designed athletics and recreation complex at the small liberal arts college that includes artificial turf baseball and softball fields, an athletics green, tailgating space and the new $200-million, 350,000-square foot Harold Alfond Athletics and Recreation Center that is the home of Colby ice hockey, basketball, swimming, track and squash plus a fitness center, climbing wall and office space for coaches and administrators.
“I can’t imagine any better capstone for a career. It’s really wonderful,” Serdjenian told me recently from his home less than a mile from campus. “The setting is beautiful, and the field is fantastic.’
Serdjenian knew almost nothing about soccer when friends encouraged him to try out for the freshman team. “I found soccer intriguing, even though I had not seen a game,” he said. The closest he came to playing was kicking a basketball at the Aqueduct Pool in Cranston one summer. He broke his toe.
At Colby, he decided the only position he could play was goalkeeper. “I knew how to catch a ball,” he said with a laugh. He made the team and spent the season learning about the game, the rules, how to direct his defense.
He and a classmate were the keepers on the 1970 varsity. “He started the first game and had a tough half,” Serdjenian said. “Coach Jack Schultz put me in for the second half, and I started every game the rest of my Colby career.”
Serdjenian graduated in 1973 and took a job teaching third grade in Waterville. He also assisted the Waterville High School soccer coach Jeff Lovitz, who had played at Colby. In 1976 Colby hired Serdjenian as head soccer coach.
“I was a head coach for the rest of my life. I don’t think at the time I had mapped that out,” he said.
For the next eight years Serdjenian taught third grade boys and girls and coached college men. He left teaching in 1984 to become Assistant Dean of Students at Colby while retaining his coaching job. Dual roles were common in Division III at the time.
“Having an office on campus made it easier for the players to meet with me,” he said. Skills he learned on the soccer field transferred to the Dean’s office. He remained in that office for 23 years, rising to Associate Dean of Students for Academics. Among his responsibilities was supervising the student judicial board. Earl Smith, Dean of the College Emeritus, worked closely with him.
“His role in the office was what we privately called the “bad cop” because he dealt with the inevitable number of good kids who did bad things. He was on one hand the prosecutor and on the other the advocate and probation officer,” Smith wrote in an email.
“One might think he would have been the dean that students didn’t like, but au contraire. They knew he truly cared and they loved him,” Smith said. “So too for those students who got themselves in academic trouble. Many of them became Mark’s ‘projects,’ whether they were suspended for a time or not. There are legions out there who owe their eventual success at Colby and in the world to Mark, who never gave up on them.”
Smith added that Serdjenian “will no doubt best be remembered for soccer and coaching, but it is important to understand that as associate dean of students he came into contact with many more students than he did as coach.”
Serdjenian founded the Colby summer co-ed soccer camp in 1979, which attracted an estimated 14,000 kids during his tenure. He also founded the Colby Noontime Basketball Association and until 2010 played with other staff, faculty and locals three times a week.
He joined the athletics department full-time in 2007, continued to coach men’s soccer, was interim women’s soccer coach and assisted the women’s lacrosse team for nine years. He laughed about his lax qualifications: “I had seen a game.”
Serdjenian, the longest-serving head coach in the New England Small College Athletic Conference with 40 years, retired in June, 2016. His legacy includes a 261-230-46 record; two New England ECAC Division III titles; New England Division III coach of the year and Maine coach of the year twice.
He and his wife Tina, a 1972 Colby graduate, raised three children in Waterville. All were soccer stars. Kerry, 44, went to Arizona State and played on the national club championship team his senior year. Tracy, 40, and Christine, 37, were high-school All-Americas and Maine players of the year. Tracy was captain at Vassar and Christine captain at Brown.
Kerry has coached the Waterville High School boys team for 11 years. His daughter Danica, a junior, plays for the Waterville girls team. Her coach? Her grandfather Mark.
“I couldn’t help myself,” he said, laughing again. “It was a beautiful coincidence that the job opened up when I retired. I knew the coach, and it’s a great program.” His five-year record is a sparkling 60-16-2.
Mark Serdjenian, 69 now, marvels at how his life has played out.
“The way it fell into place was pretty remarkable. The jobs that fell into place were pretty remarkable as well. Having a wife who supported the journey was critical. Without that it doesn’t happen,” he said.
He reflected on how he ended up at Colby and Waterville in the first place. Norma and Norval Garnett were Colby alums. She taught high-school Spanish in Warwick. He was a trust officer at Industrial National Bank in Providence. They also taught Sunday school and told Mark’s parents that it was worth a drive to Maine to look at Colby.
“We did, and I loved it,” he said. “If they had not gone to Woodridge Congregational, I would have never heard of Colby.”
