Zac MacMath’s first stint as a Major League Soccer goalkeeper came late in the 2011 season after the regular starter came down with an injury.
The Philadelphia Union had snagged MacMath, a highly touted three-year starter and national champion at the University of Maryland, with the fifth overall pick that January. When the Union’s Faryd Mondragón got hurt in the first half of an early September game against Real Salt Lake, MacMath heard his number called at halftime. The lanky 6-foot-2, 176-pound MacMath held his own, notching his first three career saves at the age of 20.
MacMath would start the next seven games, and the following season Mondragón moved on. That left MacMath as the top shot-stopper in Philly, a job he would keep for three seasons (2012-2014), making 109 starts in all competitions.
“Every year I was the starter and keepers were coming in to replace me. I learned early on that you have to compete for that position,” MacMath recalled in June.
And, as MacMath would soon learn, starting jobs don’t always last.
At the end of the 2015 season, Philadelphia traded MacMath to the Colorado Rapids, with whom he spent the season on loan. During the next six seasons, MacMath became a journeyman backup playing for the Rapids, Vancouver Whitecaps and Real Salt Lake.
Now in his 12th season, MacMath is finally getting another chance to be a No. 1 keeper once again. The 30-year-old, now in his third season with Real Salt Lake, has started all 19 games after last season’s starter, David Ochoa, suffered a quad injury during the preseason.
Entering play July 13, MacMath has notched a career-best save percentage (73.3). His 19 starts and seven clean sheets are the most he’s had since he was with the Union.
MacMath’s confidence has only grown as the season has progressed, he said. At first, he was playing each game thinking he would eventually give the job back to Ochoa when he returned to full health. But soon that No. 1 keeper mentality began to return and with it his level of play.
“That not only changes my confidence but it also changes my preparation week to week and also changes my leadership role,” he said. “As a backup, you have to be more careful speaking to certain people because you’re not playing, you’re not on the field experiencing those things, but if you’re on the field you can lead a certain way through your actions and through your words, where people take it a bit more serious.”
Those habits were learned early in his college career at Maryland, when as a freshman MacMath led a Terps team stacked with future MLS pros to the 2008 national championship. After two more seasons of eye-popping stats, MacMath decided to forgo his senior year and enter the MLS SuperDraft. His final college stat line — 34 shutouts in 64 starts, 43 total goals allowed for a 0.65 goals-against average.
“Playing at Maryland where being the No. 1 team in the country was kind of expected and being surrounded by a bunch of guys that just gone pro the last two years, I was kind of waiting for it. It was just a matter of time,” MacMath said. “I didn’t have a huge eye on the league, I’d say, while playing in college, but at that point, I just wanted to go somewhere where a team wanted me.”
With the top job in hand in Philadelphia after his successful run of games as a rookie, MacMath believed he belonged not just in the professional ranks but as an entrenched starter. But the team’s overall performance was mediocre, failing to reach the playoffs in any of MacMath’s three years as a starter. The team pulled the plug despite MacMath still being in his early 20s.
After the loan and trade to Colorado, starts were hard to come by. In four seasons with the Rapids, MacMath started 30 times, 17 of which came in 2016, when he also notched the first postseason appearances of his career.
His lone season with Vancouver in 2019 and his first two seasons with Salt Lake produced similar results. While he was grateful to have a job, the prospect of ever becoming a regular starter slowly dimmed.
“I learned the pro game can be cruel,” MacMath said. “It was a tough couple of years trying to navigate. There was a point where I had accepted being a career backup and I want to be the best career backup that I can be not only to continue playing, but to provide for a new family that I was starting and, really just try to be that be a good role player for the younger guys on the team.”
“There was definitely a shift at some point where I was like, ‘OK, I can be a really good No. 2, but I also always had to have that edge to prove myself as a No. 1.”
Now past the halfway point in the 2022 season, MacMath isn’t worried about anything beyond the next game as Real Salt Lake (8-6-5) makes a push for a playoff spot with 15 games to go.
“We’re going through the dog days of summer, where it’s gonna be very tough to go certain places and press or have the ball for 90 minutes,” he said. “We just have that ability to stay calm and have confidence that we’re in any game that we play.”
As an MLS veteran, MacMath knows how unpredictable the league can be. On any given night, weekend to weekend, any team, home or away can win a game. But a team’s chances increase dramatically when a confident keeper is starting in goal.
Photo Credit: Laura Dearden/RSL Photographer