STARKVILLE — “Our winning football coach”

Starkville Rotary Club Vice President Susan Seal introduced Mississippi State soccer head coach Nick Zimmerman with a zinger at the club’s weekly meeting on Monday. 

Football – the most common name for the sport – isn’t so foreign in Starkville anymore after a remarkable campaign spurred by the team’s growing crop of international recruits helped establish the Bulldogs as a power in the Southeastern Conference. 

While he is in his first year as head coach, Zimmerman had a big hand in building and developing the winningest team in program history, culminating in an undefeated SEC championship in 2024 and a No. 1 seeding in the NCAA Tournament. 

Zimmerman’s visit with Rotary was to promote the program through a summary of its recent success on the field and in recruiting, but he also shared his enthusiasm for the community and desire to maintain the level of support that the team received in 2024.

“It’s the people that when we talk to recruits, that’s what makes Starkville special,” he said. “It’s all of you. It’s looking at a game in the Sweet Sixteen and seeing 4,000 people at a soccer game. When I got here six years ago, there were about 20 people in the stands, and it was all players’ parents.” 

Zimmerman also talked up his coaching staff of Jonathan Garbar, Henry Zapata, Kat Stratton and Director of Operations Alyssa D’Aloise. At the time of Zimmerman’s Rotary appearance, Garbar was in Spain scouting potential recruits. The head coach plans to hit the road himself next week, heading to California to try and sustain the momentum the program has picked up as an emerging power in the college game. 

“We’re going to have a lot of flags,” he said, pointing to a picture of the flags in the stands at the MSU Soccer Field.

The flags represent the nations of players who have played for the Bulldogs and Zimmerman aims to expand the list. 

Another list he hopes to expand is the list of Bulldogs who go professional. Six players from the 2024 team signed professional contracts, and it was almost seven with Ally Perry offered a chance to play at one of the biggest clubs in Europe. 

“(Perry) had an opportunity to leave and sign with Juventus, a pro team in Italy, and she came to me and said, ‘I trust you, am I ready?’ I said as a soccer player, you’re ready, but from a mentality standpoint, you’re not.”

Zimmerman cited his own experience playing abroad as an American and trying to find a place in a team abroad, and noted her need to develop more as a leader. In the time since then, Perry worked on adding that to her game, stepping into the shoes left by the nine graduating starters from a year ago. 

That sort of development and attention is the kind of experience Zimmerman sells recruits on, and the level of focus that they can get in Starkville is rare in the European experience. 

“Our sell is, if you want to go pro, then you’re not going to find a better environment,” he said. “We’re going to develop you, we’re gonna grow you, everything we do is about football. And it’s going to be one in a spot where the proof is in the pudding.”

MSU has done well recruiting internationally in recent years. Colombia national team player Ilana Izquierdo was the metronome of the Bulldog midfield, Spaniard Aitana Martinez-Montoya brought a high technical level to the forward line, and Haiti national team defender Ruthny Mathurin brought strength and composure to the defense. 

It has been a fruitful avenue for recruiting, and Zimmerman sees it as a way to continue competing with the best in the game, even if they lose out on recruiting battles domestically.

The NCAA Tournament has been a humbling experience for the Bulldogs recently, losing to established powers Notre Dame last year and Stanford in 2023. Recruiting against those schools is hard, but Zimmerman believes that as the Bulldogs continue to make a name for themselves and show the developmental path that is possible in Starkville, the right players will follow.  

“We’re going to lose some kids who want to go to South Bend,” he said. “They don’t want to come here, that’s fine, but we have to navigate now and hit on our recruiting. We can’t just do the definition of insanity over and over, and have a kid go, it’s between us in Notre Dame. They’re probably going to go to Notre Dame, that’s OK, but we need the right fit, the right people here. Internationally, we feel we can stay to do what Florida State did years ago and have the top, top players from all over the world.”