Tony Meola has donned the goalkeeping gloves for the United States in World Cups, lifted championship trophies and won his place in the National Soccer Hall of Fame.

He's the only man ever to play under coaches who have won both soccer's World Cup and football's Super Bowl.

Now, the American soccer legend is touching down on the First Coast as the coach of the Jacksonville Armada.

Why did the First Coast become the first destination on the former international goalkeeper's coaching career? It's about the competition.

"I loved competing with the next guy, with the next team, and that's what I want this team to feel when they go out every day," Meola said.

Appointed in November after the Armada cycled through three coaches in its 2015 North American Soccer League debut, Meola has spent the last weeks preparing to direct the second-year North American Soccer League club into a new era. The Armada plays a preseason match against the Philadelphia Union of MLS on Saturday at the Baseball Grounds of Jacksonville. The regular season begins two months after that.

Although it's his first head coaching job above the youth level, Meola is not worried about the transition to the professional game.

"You're not so much a teacher of technique, you're more a teacher of the big picture, where at the youth level a lot of the time it's individual stuff to make individuals better," he said. "So far, it looks like the guys are responding."

Armada goalkeeper Miguel Gallardo is looking forward to playing under someone that he's followed for years.

"He's just the way he was portrayed on the TV when I used to watch him play," Gallardo said. "Obviously, he's very excited about this first job, his first opportunity to be a head coach, and I'm very humbled and very appreciative of the fact that he's decided to give me a chance."

Less than a month into his first preseason camp, Meola is relishing the challenge.

"I called my wife after the second day," he said. "I said I feel like I've found what I was supposed to do at this level, now that my playing career is over."

Household name

For longtime fans of American soccer, the November hiring of Meola, a 46-year-old from Kearny, N.J., brought a household name to Jacksonville.

A college star at Virginia who played his first international game before turning 20, he played his part in an American soccer milestone when the national team ended a 40-year drought to qualify for the World Cup in 1990.

He went on to play in a second World Cup on home soil in 1994, serving as the vocal, ponytailed team captain as the U.S. cleared the opening round for the first time since 1930 and helped launch the game onto the national sports map.

He even lent his name to a 1993 video game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Tony Meola's Sidekicks Soccer, which further bolstered his image as a national soccer icon.

"It's sort of ironic. I used to look up to him when I was little... he was a legend," Gallardo said. "I used to watch him play, with his long hair, just a real cool dude."

Meola eventually appeared 100 times for the national team during a career that stretched from 1988 to 2006. He made a third World Cup roster in 2002 but stayed on the bench during the tournament in South Korea.

He also starred in Major League Soccer with the New York/New Jersey MetroStars (now the New York Red Bulls) and Kansas City Wizards from 1996 to 2006, winning the MVP in Kansas City's 2000 MLS Cup-winning campaign.

After his retirement as a player, Meola was involved in youth coaching as well as television and radio work. But his competitive drive led him back to the sidelines.

"I used to go home and say all the time to my family, someone would say you did a good job, but I never felt like I was winning or losing while I was doing it [broadcasting]," he said. "As I've gotten older, I want to experiment and feel the excitement of winning again."

Breaking the mold

Meola is the latest to try to break through the mesh ceiling for former goalkeepers, who sometimes find it difficult to rise in the coaching ranks above the specialized role of goalkeeping coach.

One who did make the jump is George Mason University coach Greg Andrulis, the MLS Coach of the Year with the Columbus Crew in 2004.

"A lot of the time as a young goalkeeping coach, you get pigeonholed," Andrulis said.

Meola is the only former goalkeeper working as a head coach in the 12-team NASL, although two others (Daryl Shore and Juergen Sommer) have coached in the league previously.

"I turned down goalkeeper coaching jobs for the last five or six years, only because I knew if I got into that, that's what it would be," Meola said. "I didn't think, eventually, when I'm 55, 60 years old that my body could do what that position demands."

His big break in coaching didn't occur until three years ago, when former World Cup teammate Tab Ramos called him to work with the U.S. Under-20 national team. He subsequently assisted another international teammate, Hugo Perez, on the Under-15 squad.

Breaking the mold is nothing new for Meola.

During his playing career, he took time out to try out for the New York Jets immediately after the World Cup in 1994 (he was cut in preseason) and appear in a 1995 Off-Broadway show.

Meola plans to show that his background as a goalkeeper rather than a field player is a positive, not a negative.

"It's a huge advantage, because my whole career was about organizing the group, and that's what you've got to do here," he said.

Andrulis sees the situation similarly. One key, he said, is assembling a strong staff that helps complement the head coach's strengths and weaknesses.

Meola will be working with Jim Rooney, a longtime colleague going back to his New York days in the 1990s, and Mark Lowry, who also served as assistant during Eric Dade's interim stint at the end of 2015.

"Goalkeepers make terrific head coaches because they're used to being leaders," Andrulis said. "They say you're the last line of defense and the first line of offense, so you get an appreciation of both ends."

Parade of coaches

If Meola is going to be the man to turn around the Armada's on-field fortunes, he can point to a playing career in which he learned from some of the sport's leading minds.

"You go to a different team or get a different coach, you take something from one, you take something from another and you try to build yourself," he said.

The parade of elite coaches in Meola's career:

• Bruce Arena, University of Virginia: Meola played with the Cavaliers under Arena, who was then building an NCAA dynasty (five national titles in six years from 1989 to 1994) and went on to become the nation's most successful coach.

• Bob Gansler, Bora Milutinovic, U.S. national team: Meola played the 1990 World Cup under Gansler, then four years under well-traveled Serbian Bora Milutinovic and finally Arena once more in his last national team stint from 1999 to 2006.

• Major League Soccer. In turbulent New York, there were too many to count (including Brazil's 1994 World Cup-winning coach Carlos Alberto Parreira, Portugal's Carlos Queiroz, Milutinovic again, future U.S. coach Bob Bradley, and Arena again), while he had stability under Gansler in Kansas City.

• And, not to be forgotten, the NFL's Jets, where he went through preseason under first-year coach Pete Carroll.

Yes, that Pete Carroll.

Meola said he remains in touch with Carroll, who went on to win NCAA football titles at USC and Super Bowl XLVIII in his current job with the Seattle Seahawks.

"He used to come to our games [in New York, while Carroll was coaching the New England Patriots] and jump in the locker room and say hi all the time," Meola said. "It doesn't matter that it's not our sport, it's about the energy that you bring to the game, and he's outstanding."

Though Meola said he's learned from all of them, he cites Los Angeles Galaxy coach Arena, who directed the national team for eight years and led the 2002 surge to the World Cup quarterfinals, as the biggest influence in his coaching philosophy.

Meola said Arena strongly encouraged him to take the Armada job when it became available in November.

"With Bruce Arena, it's all about attitude," Meola said. "He'll be the first to tell you it's not all about X's and O's. It's about the attitude you take every day on the field."

Revamping the roster

For the Armada, the change to Meola from the Argentine regime of 2015, first with Jose Luis Villarreal and then Guillermo Hoyos, will be pronounced - and players are already taking notice.

The 2015 Armada too often fired forward recklessly, leaving its net exposed to the counterattack. Meola has made it clear that this year's team needs to maintain its defensive shape.

"We want to focus on making sure we always have three at the back, never numbers down or numbers even. We always want to be numbers up," defender Matt Bahner said. "That's a big emphasis right now."

On the whole, Meola's more cautious approach contrasts with the bombs-away offense instilled by Hoyos, which promised thrills but didn't hold up under real-world conditions.

Whereas Hoyos and former general manager Dario Sala built the team around foreign imports with no experience in the country, most of Meola's signings have played for years in the various tiers of the American game.

Exhibits A and B: Bryan Burke, named the top defender last year in the third-level United Soccer League, and winger Alex Dixon, who has played for MLS, NASL and USL clubs.

All eight of the Armada's additions to the squad speak English, including Pekka Lagerblom from Finland and Junior Sandoval from Honduras. That's a contrast to 2015, when the entire coaching staff and as many as half the team's starters spoke only Spanish, resulting in a language barrier that impeded communication.

In addition to the defensive acquisitions, Meola also anticipates big contributions from players like Sandoval ("a guy like Sandoval will get at you with pace"), Lagerblom ("gets box-to-box all the time"), and English winger Danny Barrow ("all about attack").

Holding it all together will be Richie Ryan, named to the NASL's Best XI team as the central hub of the Ottawa squad that reached the championship game in its second season.

Meola has also assumed the role of technical director, which gives him authority over player acquisitions.

"It was really important," he said. "It's a discussion that [Armada owner] Mark [Frisch] and I had that we got on the same page right away."

Meola's name recognition and national connections don't hurt efforts to recruit talent, either.

That's what brought defender Beto Navarro, who previously played under Meola's World Cup teammate Eric Wynalda, to Jacksonville. Navarro described Meola as a "coach that you just want to play for."

Learning from 2015

On the heels of its last-place debut campaign, the Armada's players have endured more than a year's worth of hard knocks.

"A friend of mine who's a prominent coach called me and said, 'You learn about yourself as a coach and as a team when you lose at home 4-0,' " Meola said. "And at some point, that stuff's going to happen, and that's when we're going to learn what we're made of."

He's hopeful that the revamped roster will make sure it happens less often than in 2015, when the Armada went winless in its 15 road games.

"We tried to mix it up, fill holes where I thought the roster was unbalanced," he said.

Will that quest for balance bring this first-year coach a boost in his club's second season? Andrulis, who coached against Meola's Kansas City team for four years in MLS, believes the Armada's future looks bright.

"For somebody like Tony who's seen it all, done it all, been through all the ups and downs, [coaching] is the natural progression," he said. "At the end of the day, he's a winner, he's won at everything he's done, and I think he'll make Jacksonville a winning franchise."

Clayton Freeman: (904) 359-4111