Ante Jazic has lived a life he didn’t dare dream, hearing the roar of crowds from his place on pitches all over Europe and Canada.
“I never thought I would make a career in soccer,” Jazic says. “I mean, I’m a kid from Halifax, Nova Scotia, which is not known for producing soccer players. That’s a province known for producing NHL hockey players.”
In retirement, Jazic is living another unforeseen dream.
Jazic — co-owner and director of the Little Rock Rangers Youth Academy and technical adviser for the pre-professional team Little Rock Rangers — played for teams in Austria, Russia and Croatia. He was playing for L.A. Galaxy when he met his wife, the former Annemarie Dillard.
“Being a professional athlete and especially a professional coach, it’s a very nomadic lifestyle. As our family has grown I’ve kind of distanced myself from that and I’m just happy with the life we’re living and the way we’re raising our kids, and the fact that we get to grow this soccer club organically from the start,” says Jazic, father of three young children.
Jazic’s position as a midfielder, moving the ball forward to give his teammates opportunities to score, parallels his role with the Rangers.
“Right now, we are sending our best players to [Major League Soccer] academies out of state,” says Jazic, who aims for development of individual players. “My number one goal is to have a complete pathway from the youth game to the professional game and put Arkansas on the soccer map in the U.S.”
Jazic had just retired from Chivas U.S.A. and was head coach of the U15 Canadian Youth National Team and assistant coach of the U20 Canadian Youth National Team and the Canadian Men’s National Team in October 2013 when he and Annemarie moved to Little Rock, her hometown, a few months after they married.
Jazic was traveling extensively, and Annemarie, weary of traffic jams and smog in L.A., suggested they move because he could fly out of anywhere. She gave him two options: Dallas or Little Rock. He chose Little Rock, the more similar of the two to Halifax.
“I think my wife was shocked. She expected me to say Dallas,” Jazic says.
Jonathan Wardlaw had set up the Rangers staff by 2013 and filled a roster with players who had not yet played their first game when he got wind that there was a retired MLS player living in the area.
“I was starstruck. I thought, ‘I can’t just call this guy up because I’m going to fumble the whole conversation,’” Wardlaw says.
He sent Jazic a text, though, and the two met for drinks.
“He started coming to trainings and just kind of sitting in the stands or standing in the tunnel and just kind of watching from a distance,” Wardlaw says.
Jazic gave training advice, and he suggested a summer youth camp, with Rangers players assisting. Offseason training led to parents’ requests for youth teams, and ultimately the birth of the Rangers youth program.
“That’s how we became partners,” Wardlaw says. “Our families are pretty close now. We meet up at the lake and go do stuff together or just go over to their house for pizza and it’s just a good relationship.”
Soccer comes up in conversation during those gatherings, but it does not dominate.
Annemarie was not even a soccer fan when she met Jazic.
“I didn’t know anything about it,” she says.
Jazic had just suffered a potentially career-ending ankle injury during a Galaxy match when they met on a blind date.
“Instead of allowing that to be the end of his career he had surgery and came back from that injury and he played for almost eight more years,” Annemarie says.
That tenacity has carried him through many challenges, she says.
“He is an incredibly determined human being and I think that unwavering determination has led him to the success that he’s had in soccer,” she says. “I am amazed at everything he and his family has had to overcome for him to get to where he is. He didn’t grow up having private lessons — he has worked for everything he has and so did his parents.”
Jazic has held onto the work ethic set by his family.
MOWING LAWNS, PICKING UP ROCKS
Until hiring someone to do the job recently, Wardlaw and Jazic routinely mowed the Rangers field on Vance Street, tossing rocks out of the way as they went. They needed rocks in certain places to facilitate drainage, so they filled those with gravel. They also had to research grass species and roots and soil, an attempt to grow the lushest, most resilient playing field possible.
“Whatever it takes,” Jazic says.
Jazic’s parents, Mario and Sanja, emigrated from Croatia to Canada a few years before he was born.
“Obviously soccer is really popular in Croatia, so when I was about 5 my mom registered me for organized soccer for the first time,” he says.
Canadian winters were not conducive to outdoor sports like soccer, but Jazic excelled at hockey as well as basketball, volleyball and cross-country. He was, also, provincial champion in badminton. But he gravitated toward soccer.
“I fell in love with the game and just kind of moved up the ranks recreationally,” he says. “I got bumped up pretty quickly and that was very eye opening. I was playing against adults who were physically far superior than I was, obviously. But through that I met some great people and a lot of those same players mentored me throughout my career.”
He played for the provincial teams, the equivalent of state teams in the United States, and his coaches recognized his talent and fast-tracked him to adult competitions.
At 17, he was invited to try out for the Canadian Youth National Team.
“That was the first time I faced adversity in my soccer career, the first time I was cut from a team,” he says. “I was the only kid from Atlantic Canada invited to the camp and there were all these kids from Ontario, British Columbia — soccer hotbeds. I was invited because back then they would call the token kid from Atlantic Canada, bring them up and then just send them back on their way.”
Jazic had just finished his freshman year at Dalhousie University in Halifax in 1995. The Dalhousie Tigers had gone undefeated and won a national championship, and Jazic was named conference Rookie of the Year.
When his mother asked him to join the family on a trip to Croatia, he thought, “Why not?”
GOING TO CROATIA
“My uncle had a flat and beneath his flat, lived the daughter of a professional soccer coach,” he says. “My uncle knew that I played soccer, and that I was pretty good at soccer. So before I even arrived he begged the lady to organize a tryout with her father, a tryout with a local professional team. I wasn’t aware this was transpiring.”
That was an opportunity Jazic couldn’t turn down. He opted to stay behind for the tryout instead of flying back for his second year at Dalhousie.
“My dad didn’t speak to me for six months,” he says.
Jazic’s father worked in construction and desperately wanted his son to get a college degree.
Signing with Hrvatski Dragovoljac meant dropping out of Dalhousie, and his father didn’t yet see soccer as a way forward for him.
Croatian soccer was cutthroat, and while Jazic had talent and drive he lacked the benefit of the same daily play or coaching in Canada that his new teammates had gotten since childhood, so he had to put in extra time and effort.
“If I just take a step back and reflect about if I was Croatian, looking at a guy from Canada coming to take one of their spots …” he says, who was not fluent in Croatian. “It took a long time for me to earn their respect and the only way I did that was through hard work and dedication every day, and the coaches were extremely tough on me.”
He had not gotten much playing time during the first six months, before his visit home that Christmas.
“I’ll never forget it. My flight was returning and I didn’t want to go back,” he says. “I was crying at home because I was homesick, I missed my friends and it was a very difficult time in my life. And it was my father who said, ‘You signed a two-year deal. You need to honor that commitment.’ He made me get back on that plane.”
That set his trajectory.
“If he would have said, ‘It’s OK. Don’t go back,’ there’s a 99.9% chance I would have stayed and gone back to school, but thankfully he gave me that push to go back and from there things started getting better for me,” he says.
Since childhood, Jazic’s parents had expected him to set his own alarm, gather his gear and ask them for a ride in time for practice.
“My parents and what they instilled in me: commitment, work ethic, determination, overcoming adversity. They came to Canada with nothing and worked for every dime,” he says. “They invested all their resources in their children. I had to work then, too.”
At 14, he ran a local paper route with his brother.
“We would wake up at 5:30 a.m. before school and then deliver the afternoon paper again at 3:30 p.m. after school,” he says. “When I was 16, I worked the back shift at a gas station from midnight to 6 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays for two years. I’d sleep for a couple of hours then go to soccer games or practices.”
That tenacity stayed with him as an adult, and in 1999, it began to pay off.
“There are two big clubs in Croatia — Dinamo Zagreb and Hadjuk Split. Those are factories or stepping stones to other teams in Europe,” Jazic says.
His father grew up playing soccer — still played recreationally as an adult in Canada — and had been a supporter of Hadjuk Split since childhood.
“From that small club in Zagreb I got transferred to Hajduk Split. So once I made it there my dad knew I was on a good path,” Jazic says.
Three years later he was transferred to Rapid Vienna, an Austrian team, and its central location afforded him the opportunity to see much more of Europe.
“It was just a melting pot of Europeans and culture in their downtown in Vienna,” he says. “I was in my early 20s and I wish I appreciated it all and enjoyed it all more. I was more focused on my career at that time so I didn’t appreciate that opportunity, that lifestyle that I had, but looking back on it that was a great time.”
MAKING A MISTAKE
In 2004, when he was offered a spot with Russia’s Kuban Krasnodar he took it, purely for financial reasons. He signed a contract while training in Germany, without even seeing the Russian city that would be his home.
“I really didn’t take a look at the broader picture and the lifestyle and environment I would be in,” he says. “When I landed in Russia, I knew I made a mistake.”
Journeys to games across that massive country could take 14 hours and cross seven time zones, and Russians did not readily welcome foreigners to their land.
“Going from Vienna to Russia was very eye opening. It was a very different mentality — the Russian mentality is very cold — and that was probably the most difficult time in my life in terms of my professional career,” he says.
He played out his two-year commitment.
“You only have one life to live. If you’re not happy every morning waking up and doing the things you’re supposed to love to do, and you’re not enjoying it at all and regretting every decision you make and just being miserable and not embracing the opportunity. It was time for a change, and I kind of re-evaluated how I was going to live my life,” he says.
Opportunity presented itself and Jazic leapt.
“Luckily enough that my Canadian national team coach — I was playing with a team camp at the time, while I was in Europe — he got a job with L.A. Galaxy and MLS, and he asked me if I was interested in joining, and I was. I couldn’t wait to get on that plane. I was out of Russia as quick as I could and I started in Los Angeles.”
Former professional soccer player Paul Stalteri — who played for Tottenham Hotspur and Fulham, among others — played on the Canadian National team, with Jazic as captain. They later coached together as well.
“He was left-footed, I was right-footed,” Stalteri says. “He played as a left back and was a good skillful player, smart, a good defender, could get forward, could play passes.”
Stalteri has visited Jazic in Little Rock a few times, taking in a Rangers game and golfing.
“I have a really good relationship with him. He kind of flies under the radar. That just speaks to the kind of personality he has,” Stalteri says. “He doesn’t want to be the focal point or the talking point, but to have a guy with that much knowledge and experience in the game … it’s a huge advantage to the young kids there to have that opportunity in front of them.”
Uche Onyeyiri of Conway agrees.
“He has been an inspiration to my son, the fact that he has played soccer at the level of some of the European clubs that we follow and the fact that he has trained and scouted some people who are top soccer players in the world,” Onyeyiri says.
DRIVING TWO HOURS TO TRAIN WITH JAZIC
Ana Marquez drives her son Julian from El Dorado to Little Rock multiple times each week to practice with the Rangers.
“We drive two hours because Ante was very straightforward with their vision as far as development for the individual player and not just, ‘Let’s rack up trophy after trophy,’” Marquez says. “I really like that about him because I wanted my son to grow and improve his skills.”
The Rangers youth program is expanding from Little Rock into Searcy.
“We’ll probably expand to more cities. It’s kind of grown into this thriving business, and it’s kind of unique to be a part of it from the ground up and grow any which way we want,” Jazic says. “We’ve been really cerebral about it and that gives me a lot of joy, seeing the growth and seeing the development of kids and developing those relationships.”
When he was playing, Jazic supposed he would eventually be traded to a team that would take him home to Canada. He is happier, though, with the way things turned out.
“Meeting my wife and having this beautiful family was the best thing that has happened to me,” he says. “I never thought I would be living in Arkansas, but it’s been one of the biggest blessings.”
SELF PORTRAIT
Ante Jazic
BEST MOMENT ON THE PITCH: First time captaining my country.
FAVORITE TIME OF DAY: Morning carpool with my two boys.
MY IDEAL VACATION: Summertime in the mountains.
SOMETHING I WATCHED RECENTLY AND ENJOYED: "Formula 1: Drive to Survive."
FAVORITE SOCCER TEAM: Real Madrid.
SOMEDAY I WANT TO: Own a professional soccer team.
MY GUILTY PLEASURE: Dairy Queen blizzard.
BIGGEST PET PEEVE: Tardiness.
ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP: Stubborn
“Meeting my wife and having this beautiful family was the best thing that has happened to me. I never thought I would be living in Arkansas, but it’s been one of the biggest blessings.” -Ante Jazic (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Cary Jenkins)