Success follows Michael Marchiano.
The Bel Air native was a do-everything midfielder for McDonogh School in the early 2000s. He helped the perennial prep powerhouse collect the 2004 MIAA A Conference championship during his senior year.
For his efforts on the field, the Maryland commit was named Gatorade Maryland Boys Soccer Player of the Year. When he arrived in College Park, Marchiano became a two-time team captain and helped head coach Sasho Cirovski win two national championships in four years.
Marchiano’s coaching career has been more of the same. His stints at Division I men’s soccer programs like Army, Loyola and Drexel have all coincided with newfound success for those teams. Even a one-year stop at Loyola Blakefield boys’ soccer in 2023, when he helped the Dons to an undefeated season and MIAA A championship, was a resounding triumph.
“He’s a rock star,” said Steve Nichols, who coached Marchiano at McDonogh and later tapped him to be his assistant coach for six seasons at Loyola. “Everywhere he’s been, he’s won.”
Marchiano was appointed Maryland women’s soccer head coach in December. He previously served as an assistant since 2023 and interim head coach for the last five 2024 regular-season games.
His first foray into women’s soccer is perhaps the most difficult and unique challenge of his coaching career. Maryland’s women’s team has had only one winning season since the university joined the Big Ten in 2014 and has just four conference wins out of the last 52 matchups dating back to the spring of 2021. Still, the 37-year-old remains clear-eyed about the job he is undertaking.
“All of us who have spent our lives in soccer or any sport, I think we all love competing for and winning championships, right? But there’s something to be said for a project where you’re just trying to improve things, and you’re trying to — I don’t know, people use the word building a program or rebuilding a program,” Marchiano said. “It’s just a different kind of project that I relish, that it’s a specific challenge.”
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In 2009, on the heels of winning his second national title with the Terps the preceding fall, Marchiano graduated and played briefly for Real Maryland in the United Soccer League. Then a job as a junior agent with the Wasserman Group, a Los Angeles-based sports agency, helped him realize he might be more attuned to coaching than talent acquisition. Driving up and down the East Coast, Marchiano loved seeking out hidden talent but was put off by the ruthlessness of the business.
When a friend of his father’s passed away, Marchiano attended the funeral service of the late former coach and athletic director. The anecdotes from former players and colleagues about the impact this man had on other people struck a chord with Marchiano.
“It gave me the inspiration and clarity to know that this agent role wasn’t what I was,” he said.
Two days later, he quit his job and turned his full attention to coaching. His first stop was with Cirovski and his alma mater.
Marchiano spent two seasons as a volunteer assistant for Cirovski at Maryland and another year at Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He then took a job as an assistant at Army, helping turn the four-win Black Knights into a 12-win juggernaut a season later.
But it was almost inevitable that Marchiano would find his way back into Nichols’ orbit. In 2014, after 17 seasons of building McDonogh into an MIAA powerhouse, Nichols was named head coach at Loyola. One of Nichols’ first calls was to Marchiano.
“Are you in?” Nichols asked the then-26-year-old. “I said, ‘You’ve been in college for three or four years, I haven’t.’ He was like a son [or] brother to me. I want to do this together.”
During his six seasons, Marchiano helped Nichols transform Loyola from a middling Patriot League program to a consistent winner. But the experience wasn’t without struggles. The 2014 and 2015 teams went a combined 8-20-6 with a 3-12-3 mark in Patriot League play.
“That first year was tough on both of us,” Nichols said. “I think we both aged 10 years.”
Then the tide turned. After a last-place finish in 2015 (0-8-1), the Greyhounds finished second in 2016 (6-1-2), the biggest season-to-season turnaround in conference history. In Marchiano’s final three seasons (2017-2019), the Greyhounds won or shared three straight regular-season titles, a historic stretch that saw them lose just five league games.
Marchiano saw similarities in that rebuilding process to the one he is undertaking at Maryland, which might be even more difficult.
“With all due respect for Loyola soccer … the gap that we are trying to bridge here at Maryland to the UCLAs and the Penn States, that gap, I would venture to say, is larger, so the challenge is greater in that regard,” he said. “But I think we feel prepared. We know what’s ahead of us, and we’re going to have some really enduring times here in the next year or two, but I think we’ll be all right in the end.”
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For Maryland women’s soccer, anything would be better than the recent past. Since 2014, the Terps’ first season in the Big Ten, they have finished in last place in 6 of 11 seasons. Following the lone winning season during that period, a sixth-place finish (9-8-3 overall, 5-5-1, Big Ten) in 2019 under Ray Leone, the team has won just 4 of 52 Big Ten games.
Leone was fired following the 2021 season and replaced by Meghan Ryan Nemzer, but the losing continued. The team went 4-8-5 (3-7-0, Big Ten) in 2022, and finished 2023, Marchiano’s first season with the team, at 3-10-5 (0-9-1, Big Ten).
Nemzer was relieved of her duties in October 2024, and Marchiano was named interim head coach. In five games, Marchiano showed a glimpse of what he could bring to the program, helping the Terps win their first Big Ten game since 2022.
Two months later, Marchiano was given the full-time job. At the time, some current players rejoiced, including Kelsey Smith, a rising redshirt junior striker. Smith, who will be a key piece in this first year of the rebuild, scored two goals and notched two assists in 2024.
“Definitely my first reaction, I was super, super excited,” said Smith, an Elkridge native and McDonogh alum. “From the start, he had a positive impact on me and a lot of the other girls. I know a lot of us vouched for him and put in a good word, because we knew that he could bring the good parts of what we had from the fall and continue to grow our team.”
While some players left through the transfer portal or graduation, Smith stayed to finish her career with Marchiano at Maryland. Marchiano and assistant coach Morgan Ruhl are McDonogh graduates as well.
“McDonogh is very culture-driven. And the fact that it was like that for me, and for Morgan and for Mike, just shows how many generations can be impacted,” Smith said. “I think Mike is trying to build that here, where there’s generations of great players and compete for championships and just overall, a positive experience for college athletes.”
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Since his appointment, Marchiano has been building relationships with current players and recruiting future stars to College Park.
In late May, Marchiano was in North Carolina for a recruiting showcase. The players he was scouting that weekend weren’t for the 2025 season but for next year and beyond.
“He’s not only such a good coach soccer-wise and on the field, but he builds relationships with us off the field, and I think that’s really important,” Smith said. “And something that’s kind of lost in Division I sports is having that coach and player relationship where you feel comfortable going to them for anything on and off the field.”
Marchiano’s career up to this point has been marked by an ability to recruit top talent. At Loyola, he convinced players like Barry Sharifi and Brian Saramago, two Red Bull Academy players, to spurn bigger programs to come to Baltimore.
“Since Mike left, I haven’t had a guy like him who can go into a living room and convince kids to come to Loyola instead of going to UCLA, Maryland, Duke, Virginia, Indiana,” Nichols said. “And it just tells you No. 1, how good of a coach he is, but No. 2, what a personality he is.”
For Marchiano, the job isn’t just about the winning and the accolades and the titles. It’s about the process, the hard work, the act of “trying to improve things,” as he puts it. It’s also about connecting with players and forging relationships that will last a lifetime or longer. It’s about building something that lasts. It’s another challenge he’s ready to take on.
Photo Credit: Allie Mize/Maryland Athletics
Originally published June 18, 2025