Twelve miles from the ocean and two years away from the World Cup, Bora Milutinović materialized in Mission Viejo, California, unceremoniously, to build a soccer team out of a group of men most Americans had never heard of. The training site and structure weren’t even ready, and thanks to the El Niño season of nonstop rain, the grassy swamp that was to be their field wasn’t ready either. But Bora was. “We have a beach,” he said.

For months, a group of players who had fought their way into a training camp for one of twenty-two spots, would run miles and miles along the Pacific Ocean, every single day. “I think Bora understood,” said Alexi Lalas, defender for the 1994 U.S. Men’s National Team, “I’m only gonna get so much out of them as soccer players. But they can run. And they can run hard. And they can run forever.” It was a test of mental fortitude, disguised as an endurance drill, designed to filter out who could handle the doubt of the unknown and who would crumble under the weight of uncertainty.

The U.S. Men’s National Team was starting from scratch, handed to a Serbian-born coach who had already guided Mexico and Costa Rica to surprising World Cup runs. The 1994 World Cup would be the first ever hosted on American soil, and professional soccer as we know it today didn’t yet exist. This was a unique problem that required a miracle, and Bora’s earned nickname “The Miracle Worker” seemed to qualify him for the job. Summer of ’94, directed by Dave LaMattina and Chad Walker, captures the unlikely magic of what happens when the grit and preparation of a team collide with the vision of a coach nobody could quite decode.

Where other coaches ruled by........

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