By JOE MURCHISON
Courtesy of Sampson Geeplah.
Sampson Geeplah, of Laurel, knows what it is like to chase the dream of playing professional soccer.
In 2006, after failing to get hired after a tryout with Major League Soccer’s (MLS) Colorado Rapids, Geeplah went to Uruguay to play on a pro team for a year. In 2008, he moved to Norway and trained for six months with a team there. An ankle injury ended his pursuit of a playing career, and he returned to the U. S. in 2009.
Now Geeplah, 42, is helping other young players chase the dream as coach of the Laurel-based Bridge Sports Club, which he founded in 2020.
The club’s top team plays in the United Premier Soccer League, a national organization that describes itself as a developmental league three levels down from the MLS. Playing against highly competitive teams in Maryland and Northern Virginia this year, Geeplah’s team finished the season undefeated (11-0) before losing in a playoff game to Columbia’s Sure Sports FC on June 30.
A year ago, the team went 11-1 in the regular season, won the D.C.-area playoffs and made it to the championship game of the Northeast Regionals in New York. A loss there on penalty kicks kept the team from joining the Elite 8 at the league’s national championships.
Geeplah said his goal is to take the team to the national finals. After last month’s playoff loss, “we have to go back and see what we need to do as a team,” he said.
The coach says his team is composed of top high school athletes, players from schools such as Howard University and St. Mary’s College, and other young men seeking to play after leaving school. “Eighty percent of the team wants to play professional soccer,” Geeplah said.
Courtesy of Sampson Geeplah.
He said his club has partnered with the Maryland Bobcats, a semi-professional team one tier up that pays players up to $1,400 a month. Four of Geeplah’s former players are now Bobcats, and two others are playing lower-division professional soccer in Argentina and Germany.
“My soccer background started in Liberia, where I was born,” Geeplah said. He played on a local team that practiced every day and played matches on weekends. “It was very competitive and very serious,” he said.
His family moved to the U.S. when he was 16, and he immediately became a standout defensive midfielder at Montgomery Blair High School, in Silver Spring. At one point his team was fourth in The Washington Post’s rankings of teams in the DMV, and Geeplah was named All-State by the Maryland Association of Coaches of Soccer.
He then played one year at Washington Adventist University and a second at Prince George’s Community College before pursuing opportunities overseas.
After returning to the U.S. in 2009, Geeplah began working in private security for various companies. Meanwhile, one of his coaches from Prince George’s Community College recruited him to coach a 13- and 14-year-old girls team. “I fell in love with it,” he said. “I felt I could make a difference in young people’s lives.” Coaching stints with a Liberian community team and with a team at Laurel’s Chesapeake Math and IT Academy North High School followed.
Geeplah is gratified with his club team’s success, and thinks he can keep it going. “Players who play for me started to spread the word out — Coach Sampson knows what he is doing. … When players see those things, they want to be part of that.”
