Behind the ball: Shawn Cartmill

In February of 1984, goalkeeper Shawn Cartmill was a transfer student who walked on to the Clemson men’s soccer team. He was sitting in his dorm room in Johnstone F-1 Hall when he experienced a “God-given vision.”

The vision entailed Cartmill starting a game for Clemson. He would start indoors for a national championship game and save penalty kicks to win a game for the Tigers.

He would go on to do all of those things throughout the next season.

The Atlanta, Georgia, native was a walk-on for the team, transferring in from Auburn after his freshman year. Despite not being recruited in high school — after playing at Lakeside High School in Atlanta and winning a state championship — Cartmill called Clemson head coach I.M. Ibrahim to try out. Cartmill then made the team.

Cartmill sat behind goalkeeper Jamie Swanner, who played on the U.S. Olympic men’s soccer team in 1984, during the 1982 and 1983 seasons. However, even after being Swanner’s backup over two seasons, Ibrahim brought Cartmill into his office to speak about his role during the 1984 season, dulling his hopes of playing in net.

The team had two recruits, two All-Americans and a transfer goalkeeper, who won Missouri Valley Player of the Year, coming in to take his position. This left Ibrahim with a tough decision on his hands.

“Shawn, if you ever want to play college soccer, you need to transfer because you will never play for Clemson,” Ibrahim told Cartmill. “There’s just not going to be a spot for you.”

“Coach, I believe that I’m going to start a game for you,” Cartmill responded.

The goalkeeper stood on his word in the weight room, spending the entire summer of 1984 putting in an extra hour before practices began. Still, when the team began to train altogether in August for the fall season, nine goalkeepers tried out for the Tigers.

“I’m, at best, fourth-string because they had the Orange and White game and I was not on the dress list,” Cartmill said in an interview with The Tiger. “Then, they have the team photo, and I am not in the team photo.”

Before the Tigers’ first game, for which Cartmill wasn’t on the dress list, he went for a motorcycle ride to clear his head before deciding that he would go to Historic Riggs Field to watch the team’s season-opener to support Clemson.

When he returned to the field, his roommate was jumping up and down to try to get his attention: one of the goalkeepers was sick, and the team needed Cartmill to dress for the game.

Due to injuries and other factors that ended up with the team that year, Cartmill would move up to the backup spot during the season, with Ibrahim putting his walk-on into the game at certain times, even when it was competitive.

“There were some points in time when coach would put me in the second half when the score was 0-0,” Cartmill said, “so I felt like I was competing for the starting spot, but I never got (it).”

The 1984 Tigers moved into the NCAA tournament with a 17-4 record and faced NC State in their first game of the tournament. Clemson would then progress to face Alabama A&M.

Despite Clemson scoring three quick goals, the starting goalkeeper, Tim Genovese, separated his shoulder and had to be carted off the field in the first half. Cartmill then stepped up next in the team’s biggest game.

“I’m nervous as heck and I’m just trying to fill some shoes and feel good about a 3-0 start,” Cartmill told The Tiger.

He only allowed one goal in the final five minutes of the contest, and Clemson moved on to the quarterfinal. A game later in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Tigers beat Virginia 1-0, which marked Cartmill’s first start in his collegiate career.

After a 4-1 victory over UCLA in Los Angeles in the semifinal, the Tigers were playing for a national championship. They were set to play No. 1 Indiana at the Kingdome in Seattle, Washington — the first time that a national championship game would be played indoors.

While Cartmill was warming up pregame, a feeling of excitement began to run through him, and he remembered one of the three points of what he had visualized nine months before.

“I’m warming up, and it is picture-perfect compared to my vision,” Cartmill said. “The warming up, the stadium, the Astroturf, the goals, the lighting and I am just an overcharged battery because I’m like holy cow, this is actually going to happen.”

Gary Conner scored the first goal for the Tigers to open the game, but the team allowed a goal to level the score. With two minutes on the clock, on a designed corner kick, winger Maxwell Amatasiro sent a ball that eventually found the head of attacker John Lee, who would score the game-winning goal.

The clock struck zero, and Cartmill and the Tigers recorded the program’s first national championship.

But the team wasn’t done yet; they went on to play in the World Collegiate Soccer Championship in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Despite playing the Mexican national champions, forbidding Ibrahim to coach his team and only allowing six returning players to be on the team, the Tigers were able to defeat their opponent on penalty kicks.

Cartmill had pink eye during the game but still saved three of the Mexican team’s four penalties, earning the title of MVP of the World Collegiate Championships.

“Not bad for someone who sat in Coach Ibrahim’s office, and he had told me that I’d never play for Clemson,” he said.

Cartmill earned a degree in finance in December of 1986 before he was asked by a former teammate if he ever thought of playing professionally.

The teammate, Geno O’Brien, had a connection to the youth coach at Leicester City in England. Two weeks later, Cartmill found himself training overseas with the LC Foxes. He went on to train with assistant coach Alan Hodgkinson, who was the first goalkeeper-specific coach in the entire English Premier League.

“I’m there, and I’m training with guys that have played in the World Cup,” Cartmill told The Tiger. “It was surreal. It was amazing. It was fantastic. I couldn’t believe the quality of these players.”

Six weeks later, the Leicester top manager, Bryan Hamilton, brought Cartmill in to tell him that he would be transferred to Chelsea FC in London. He would make two starts with the Blues on the reserve team.

The first was a 3-0 shutout against Brighton & Hove Albion in April 1987. Cartmill was chosen to play again for the team at Stanford Bridge, Chelsea’s home stadium, three days later against Southampton in a 2-1 win.

The two appearances label Cartmill as the first American to play for Chelsea FC, regardless of first-team status, because the games were reserve league.

While still in Europe, Ibrahim called Cartmill and asked him to be the Tigers’ goalkeepers coach. The Atlanta native returned to Historic Riggs Field in 1987 to help the team win another national championship. The team was led by Bruce Murray, who would become the team’s first MAC Hermann Trophy winner in program history.

Ibrahim provided Cartmill a lot of advice throughout his college career, leaving the goalkeeper with plenty of praise from the legendary Clemson head coach.

“I’m so grateful to Clemson University and specifically, Coach Ibrahim, for teaching me so much,” he said. “I played under him for four years, and I coached under him for three years and the amount of soccer knowledge I gained was incredible. He had an amazing soccer mind, and I’m so grateful for the lessons I learned through (him).”

Cartmill went on to earn a master’s in business administration at The Citadel and was the assistant coach of the College of Charleston’s men’s soccer team for eight years. He was also a player-coach for the Charleston Battery and helped the team win a championship in the USISL Pro League.

After Ibrahim died in 2012, his wife, Julie, asked Cartmill to help manage The Tiger Sports Shop in Clemson. Since then, he’s had local ties around the city and resides in Clemson.

You can find Cartmill attending many games at Historic Riggs Field, where he cheers on head coach Mike Noonan and the Tigers each fall.

“I get great joy of watching the current team and Coach Noonan, who’s doing an incredible job of keeping the winning tradition alive at Clemson,” Cartmill told The Tiger. “It’s really fun to watch.”