Lehrer’s desire to be the best can be traced back to his playing days. In 1984, his first year with the UCLA soccer team, Lehrer was named Bruin Rookie of the Year. One year later, he helped lead his team to an NCAA championship.
After graduation, Lehrer spent six years playing internationally. He played for teams from Italy, Austria, and Scotland, among others.
Nevertheless, despite all of his accomplishments on the pitch, the star’s greatest athletic feat has nothing to do with soccer. After being cut by the U.S. national soccer team in 1988, Lehrer set his heart on one thing—making it to the Olympics.
Initially, Lehrer figured that his best bet to become an Olympian would be through white water canoeing or kayaking. However, he struggled to find a good coach. That is, until he came across Andy Toro.
Andy Toro was a four-time Olympian who had represented both Hungary and the United States. At the time, he was a coach for sprint canoeing, which Lehrer admittedly knew very little about. Nonetheless, he decided to give it a shot with brother Jacob and sister Heidi.
“I said, ‘Andy we’d like to train with you,’ and he said, ‘I don’t train amateurs,’” Lehrer recalled. “So we said, ‘Okay, no problem,’ and we kept showing up every day. He eventually took us on, and we just would progress and progress and progress.”
Lehrer quickly propelled himself into national contention. After a few years of training, the three siblings were confident in 1995 that they could qualify for the Olympics at the Pan-American Games.
But confidence swiftly turned to despair. In the middle of the race, the boat sank, leaving the Lehrers with only one remaining chance to qualify—the World Championships.
“[Andy] pulls us aside after the thing and we’re all crushed and he says, ‘You’ve got a one in five million chance of getting to the Olympic Games,’” Lehrer said. “I said to Andy, ‘You know, honestly, I like my chances.’”
However, Lehrer overcame the odds, and the team posted a personal best at the Championships. The performance was enough to send the Lehrers to the Olympics, the culmination of his taxing journey. Although the squad did not medal, Lehrer said the experience was a positive one.
“My most valuable skill set in my life [is] how I talk to myself when [things get] stressful,” Lehrer said. “I have a good internal dialogue to take me where I want to go when my mind is saying, ‘I don’t know if I can do this. It hurts too much.’”
Going beyond his job as a coach, Lehrer has utilized his own experiences to also serve as a mentor to his players. Immediately upon arriving in Cambridge, he installed an open-door policy, encouraging all his players to come talk to him about anything.
“A lot of my best memories with [Coach Lehrer] consist of my sessions in his office maybe not even going over soccer, but even more importantly my life goals and about what I want to do with my life,” Harrington said.
It is one thing to turn around a soccer team, but it is another thing to leave an impact on a group of players beyond the pitch. The transformation of the Harvard men’s soccer team under Coach Lehrer has officially begun.