Philadelphia Atoms alumni celebrate the 50th anniversary of their 1973 NASL championship

Al Miller has never forgotten the August day in 1973 when over 18,000 fans flocked to Veterans Stadium for the Philadelphia Atoms’ last home game of the year.

The team he coached was one win away from going to the North American Soccer League’s title game in its first season of existence. And in a league built mainly on imports from abroad, a squad full of American players had a historic chance to prove itself in the world’s game.

Ninety minutes later, they walked off the field 3-0 winners over Toronto Metros-Croatia.

“We go in the dressing room aftereverything is over, and Bob Ehlinger, our GM, comes running in,” Miller said. “He goes, ‘Al, you’ve got to bring your team back out; the people are demanding it.’ I brought the team back out and they sang ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ I still get choked up thinking about it.”

The memories came rushing back Saturday, when Miller and a group of his old players reunited to celebrate what happened next: a 2-0 win over the Dallas Tornado in the title game at Texas Stadium.

Fifty years later, it remains the last championship won by a Philadelphia professional outdoor soccer team.

A group of Atoms alumni has gathered every five years since then to celebrate and reminisce. This year’s gathering, held Saturday at the United Soccer Coaches Convention, was extra special. Not only was it the golden anniversary, but the convention was in Philadelphia.

» READ MORE: Al Miller, coach of 1973 Philadelphia Atoms team that won city’s last major pro soccer title, gets lifetime achievement award

The team was given this year’s edition of the Walt Chyzowych Distinguished Playing Career Award at a Saturday evening ceremony that drew a crowd of luminaries, including U.S. Soccer Federation president Cindy Parlow Cone.

“How cool is this, to keep the history of soccer in the U.S. and U.S. Soccer alive?” said Cone, who knew Chyzowych worked for decades as a coach and administrator with the governing body. Two years after his death in 1994, she debuted with the women’s national team — which Chyzowych long championed — and went on to win two Olympic gold medals and a World Cup.

“For many of you in this room, I’m in the position that I am because you have laid the groundwork,” Cone said. “I’m proud to be able to stand on your shoulders.”

It was the second time the Walt Chyzowych Fund — named for another Philadelphia soccer legend — honored Miller at a convention. In 2019, he was given the individual lifetime achievement award.

“It means an enormous amount, because to see these young guys that I had 50 years ago get this recognition after 50 years, which they fully deserve — they made history back in ‘73,” Miller said. “And so it warms my heart that the Chyzowych Foundation decided to do this for them. I’m very happy with it.”

Stan Startzell, a three-time All-American at Penn who also was an all-Ivy League football placekicker, joined the Atoms in 1973 after starting his pro soccer career with the New York Cosmos in 1972.

“At the time, we called it The Atoms Family, and we were all so close,” he said “Those were pioneering days. Barry Barto and I would do a clinic any time we could get eight kids together, all over the city.”

Barto is one of many players from that team who went on to become coaches. He took the former Philadelphia Textile (now Jefferson University) to the Final Four in 1987 and ‘81, before spending 23 years at UNLV. Lew Meehl succeed Barto at Textile, then moved across town to Drexel.

Manny Schellscheidt has earned decades of acclaim with the U.S. national team program, Seton Hall, and the New York Red Bulls’ youth academy. He was inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame in 1990.

Count Roy Evans, too, an Englishman who decades later managed Premier League giant Liverpool. The defender spent the summer of 1973 on these shores, playing 19 games for the Atoms and scoring two goals.

Norm Wingert grew his legacy through his son, Chris, who played for 15 years in Major League Soccer — a stability on the field the Atoms could only have dreamed of in their four-season existence.

The most famous Atoms alumnus is goalkeeper Bob Rigby, who after the title game became the first American soccer player featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

“We played [the title game] at Texas Stadium, and there were 4,000 people at the airport when we came back,” Rigby recalled. “And that’s 7,000 years ago.”

The Ridley Park native, now 71, knows better than most that it feels like that long ago sometimes. In the years since then, he has become a connective tissue across eras of Philadelphia soccer.

After being a Union season ticket-holder in 2010, the team’s first year, he worked as the analyst on local TV broadcasts in 2011. It wasn’t always the right fit, and Rigby left the booth after a year. But there was never a doubt about why he was there.

“I grew up knowing all the reverence for the Lighthouse teams,” Rigby said, referring to the famed Lighthouse Boys Club in Kensington that produced Walter Bahr and generations of players afterward.

He didn’t start playing soccer until he was a senior at Ridley High School, having grown up in a football family. But the world’s football got him to East Stroudsburg University, and he was so good that the Atoms made him the No. 1 pick in the 1973 NASL draft.

Now there’s the Union, about to start its 14th season, with hard-won respect on the local sports landscape.

“They’ve had a sense of trying to have people that are going to really appreciate the area and kind of play in a manner that you know Philadelphia teams can relate to, and that’s no different” Rigby said. “It’s a neat thing to be able to see where it’s at, but have a perspective that a lot [of people] don’t have, because it’s a different world.”

And if a floppy-haired teenager from Medford had shown up at Veterans Stadium or Franklin Field back then, been given a chance, and taken over the ball in central midfield?

“Brenden Aaronson, he’d walk on water at any time,” Rigby said.

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