Sigi Schmid sat on a patio in the Catalina Foothills sketching imaginary formations with his hands, trying to bring to life what he saw only in his mind’s eye, his excitement infectious.

This was in February of 2016, at Sounders training camp, five months or so before his tenure as Seattle’s head coach would come to an unceremonious end. If some part of Schmid foresaw the coming doom, he didn’t let on.

If anything, the veteran head coach was luminous, as rejuvenated as he’d seemed in years.

Hotshot incoming rookie Jordan Morris had signed with his hometown club the month prior; Obafemi Martins hadn’t yet headed to China. Far from daunted by the task of making so many mismatched pieces fit on the field, Schmid was thrilled by the potential of what he saw as the most potent attack in Major League Soccer.

There was something else behind his buoyant disposition that evening: the health scare he’d survived the previous autumn. Few outside Schmid’s tight inner circle knew the specifics, only that it was heart-related, serious enough that he was hospitalized for four days, and that he was forced to take in a Sounders home match from a hospital bed.

Schmid polled his wife, Valerie, and their four children on whether or not he should retire. Assured by the doctor that there was no inordinate risk if he were to return to the sidelines, the verdict was unanimous. They knew better than anybody just how much soccer meant to him, how much the sport could light him up from within. Of course you could keep coaching, Schmid’s family told him. Catching the look in his eye that February evening, it’s impossible to imagine them having returned any other answer.

“There was a void,” Schmid said, the Arizona sun slowly setting over his shoulder. “Going through what I did, it just reinforced to me that this is what I love to do. I want to do it for as long as I can and as long as people think I’m capable of doing it. It’s still what drives me. I’m still excited about it every day.”

Sigi Schmid died on Christmas day, aged 65, at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in his adopted home of Los Angeles, from what his family called a personal health matter.

Many of the obituaries written in the coming days will focus on the raw numbers of his achievements—the record amount of MLS wins, the championships won at both the collegiate and professional levels. And lauding those achievements is worthwhile, if only as a reminder of Schmid’s power at the top of his game, which was somewhat forgotten in the frustrating final few years of his coaching career.

But those stats don’t fully capture the depth of the passion that inspired them, or explain why the American soccer world is a slightly dimmer place now.

Siegfried Schmid was born on March 20, 1953 in Tubingen, West Germany, and moved with his family to Southern California when he was three years old. His father, Fritz, was a German prisoner of war in World War II, and many years later Schmid would recall the taunts he often heard in his youth.

“You got called Nazi and stuff like that,” Schmid said. “You would start to wonder, ‘Why is that?’”

Since his parents spoke German at home, Schmid began school without much of a grasp on English, and, as a teenager, developed a stutter that intensified whenever he was asked to speak in front of groups. Soccer, from the very beginning, served as an outlet—something at which he was naturally talented, and a vehicle for growing his self-esteem.

His mother, Doris, was a towering figure in his life, his emotional support system, and the one with whom he shared his soft side. Her death, when Sigi was 23, also left an indelible mark. Many years later, during his induction into the American Soccer Hall of Fame, his sadness that she couldn’t be there for such a professional triumph still choked him up and brought him to tears.

Schmid’s relationship with Fritz was more fraught. Once, in high school, Fritz refused to allow his son to attend a Friday night football game, just because. His explanation was simple, if maddening to Sigi: “Because you need to learn what ‘no’ means.”

Fritz would offer more useful advice when Sigi was considering his choice of college major. Schmid originally wanted to be a writer, but his father implored him to consider something more practical. Sigi got a degree in accounting that he would put to use during his first few years following graduation, coaching youth camps on the side to keep the embers of his ultimate dream alive.

Such was the tenuous state of soccer in the United States in that era that Schmid made himself a deal upon behind hired by UCLA as its full-time head coach in 1980: win a national title within three years or give up his fantasy and go back to accounting for good. It took five seasons, but his Bruins showed enough promise to keep him engaged.

Schmid’s teams won national championships in 1985, 1990, and 1997. He quickly established himself as one of the leading coaches of his generation, alongside Bruce Arena at the University of Virginia and Bob Bradley at Princeton. Their personal battles helped each hone his respective craft, even if none of them would have admitted as much at the time. They also helped form the bedrock of American soccer coaching philosophy for a generation.

That Schmid was the only one of the trio never to have gotten a shot to coach the U.S. men’s national team gnawed at him to the end. He did, however, head up the U.S. U-20s on two separate occasions, most notably beating Lionel Messi’s Argentina in the group stage of the 2005 World Youth Championship. Schmid also gradually made peace with the most glaring omission from his resume by piling up as many club victories as possible.

It’s in this sense that the raw numbers really do come in handy when putting Schmid’s career into context. In addition to those national titles at UCLA, Schmid led his hometown Galaxy to both MLS Cup and the Supporters’ Shield in 2002, and the Columbus Crew to another Shield/Cup double in 2008.

At the time of his death, Schmid ranked as the all-time winningest coach in Major League Soccer with 228, 26 more than his longtime rival Arena—though Arena, as per their dynamic, probably wouldn’t hesitate to point to his three more league championships, even now.

With Schmid, soccer was close to ever-present.

When the coach was fired by Seattle in July of 2016, he couldn’t bear to follow along with that weekend’s home match, and instead decided to take Valerie on a long drive up Washington State’s scenic Chuckanut Drive. This is exactly what I needed, Schmid thought to himself… until they had to stop for gas somewhere up in the mountains and the attendant turned out to be a Sounders fan who hadn’t yet heard the news of his firing, and inquired about the state of the team.

Schmid’s passion wouldn’t be satiated, even by long days at the office. Once back home, he’d put on a recorded Bundesliga match or start in on game tape to prep for the following weekend. That drive must have been contagious—two of his three sons, Kurt and Kyle, ended up as professional coaches themselves.

“Sometimes I catch myself doing the things that he does, in the way I express myself,” said Kurt in 2016, then a Sounders scout and now the Galaxy’s director of player personnel and scouting. “He does it a lot through stories, and I do, too.”

Schmid didn’t have many hobbies outside of the game he so loved. He tried to pick up golf in the 1990s, but it never really stuck. He was an avid watcher of Pac-12 basketball, and of the Bundesliga, but it’s hard to say the latter really counts as outside of soccer.

“I’m bad at being unemployed,” Schmid once told me over omelets near his house in Manhattan Beach, Calif. Between his Seattle firing and his final stint with the Galaxy, which ended with his resignation this past September, he spent most of his time trying to excavate his home office from his meticulous and prolific notes. Long after most had gone fully digital, Schmid still preferred to write them out by hand. He even used the same type of yellow graph paper he’d been jotting on going all the way back to his UCLA days—a holdover from his time as an accountant. Schmid took notes during meetings and re-wrote them directly afterward for clarity. He recorded pre- and post-season sit-downs with players and coaches alike, brainstormed tactics, filled out lineups both real and hypothetical.

Upon hearing the news of his passing, I wondered, with an unexpected pang of sadness, what ever happened to all of those yellowed note pads. If he’d thrown them out or if some will survive into posterity. Another twang accompanied going back through that Tucson interview and seeing the passages that involved his health.

Schmid was long sensitive about his wide-bodied figure, and maintained that the previous year’s scare was due to a hereditary condition rather than his weight.

“That had nothing to do with it,” Schmid said. “For me, the weight has always been a situation of when I decide I want to lose weight, I lose weight. Part of the reason for me having not lost weight early in my career was really a stubbornness within me. Somehow there was a perception that I got from some people that, all of a sudden you’re going to become a smarter coach if you lose weight. I thought that was such a stupid thing. … You either know how to coach or you don’t know how to coach. That doesn’t impact it or affect it.”

Schmid spent a long, successful career proving exactly how wrong that perception was. But even without knowing all of the exact details of his passing—which his family, understandably, is keeping to themselves—there is still something deeply sad reading back through those words today.

And yet, if focusing on raw numbers does a disservice to the whole story of Schmid’s career, so would wrapping up with or dwelling on the negative to who he was.

The sensitivity with which he discussed his weight that February in Tucson was fleeting. What came through more clearly, even a few years on, was his undimmed enthusiasm for the game more than 35 years into his career.

Schmid spent part of the offseason prior to his final season in Seattle embedded with AS Roma, studying their training methods. This is what he always loved best—the intellectual pursuit, to be passed on to others.

“You have to thirst for knowledge every day,” Schmid said. “The day you stop doing that is the day that you stagnate and go backwards.”

He was in a reflective mood that evening in Tucson, gathering momentum as he went, and turning more philosophical.

“Everything is cyclical in life,” Schmid said, as the sun sank behind the hills and painted them orange and purple. “That’s one of my core beliefs. Even you in your job, I’m sure there are days where it’s really cool and other days where it can be a drag. When you expand that, there are probably months where it feels like a drag and months where it seems very exciting.

“It’s the same thing for coaches. You go through these waves of games and it’s really good and you’re on the edge. And you sort of—not necessarily become complacent—but you sort of start to flow along. Sometimes it’s because you become distracted and focus on other things. But that’s human nature. At the end of the day, you come back to your team.”

Sigi Schmid went back to his team for as long as they would have him, which was longer than he ever would have imagined. Something tells me he would have been happy with that epitaph.

(Photo: Anne-Marie Sorvin-USA TODAY Sports)