Many sports fans will say that March Madness is the best month of the year. But for one sports family, Marsch Madness can take up half-a-year.
And no, that isn’t a typo.
New York Red Bulls head coach Jesse Marsch chuckles a bit when asked about Marsch Madness — the highly successful MLS head coach pausing then looking to ask “How did you find that?” A clever turn of the phrase on the NCAA Tournament and March Madness, the “Marsch Madness” here is a reference to his trip around the world with his family. In particular, the blog that his family created so as to share their experiences. Following being fired from his first head coaching job with the Montreal Impact in 2012, Marsch and his wife and children took a trip around the world. Their journeys and experiences, summed up in the blog, are something else: “went skydiving, swam in the Ganges, came face to face with mummies and King Tut’s tomb, floated in the Dead Sea, touched the Wailing Wall, the Berlin Wall, saw the leaning tower of Pisa, saw where Jesus was crucified, where Buddha’s eyebrow hair is housed and walked where Ghandi walked right before he was killed.” are chronicled in a blog his wife kept called Marsch Madness. That is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to their journey. Although truthfully, they make no mentions of Antarctica or icebergs as a place they visited.
The origins for the name of the blog date back to Marsch’s days as an All-American at Princeton. It was a nickname devised in the head of Grant Wahl, then a fellow student at Princeton. Wahl is now a soccer reporter for Sports Illustrated and one of the most respected journalists in the business. Always known to turn a phrase, he came up with Marsch Madness to describe the Princeton midfielder’s hot scoring streak. “It dates back to Princeton — I scored a lot of goals at Princeton and they started calling it ‘Marsch Madness.’ And you know who coined it? Grant Wahl,” Marsch told Metro.
“He was the one who came up with it, he was the editor of The Princetonian. It never became anything, then when we went on this trip around the world, my wife used it.”
The blog still exists on that thing Al Gore created, the internet. But while the website remains up and functioning, the New York head coach doesn’t see it getting updated anytime soon.
“That’s kind of it. I had maybe three entries, my wife did the whole thing, really. We had some time when we came back for a month and acclimated and she put some details in it,” Marsch said. “She did an amazing job on it. It chronicled our trip really well. Definitely a happy memory.”
Adventures of Red Bulls manager abroad preserved with ‘Marsch Madness’
