2 Lake Norman teachers, 9 World Cups and a lifetime of soccer memories
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Millions of fans around the world will attend World Cup games in North America this summer starting Thursday, when the 48-team, 2026 version of soccer’s biggest tournament begins.
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But few will be looking forward to it more than two former high school teachers from the Lake Norman area.
Greg Crowley and Terry Shinn are both in their mid-70s now, and the World Cup has been a passion of theirs for 32 years.
The two friends began innocuously, by attending a World Cup match in Washington, D.C., in 1994. After being hooked by the spectacle of a Mexico-Norway match in the old RFK stadium, they have made it to every World Cup since.
In order, after starting in 1994 in America, the duo has attended World Cup games in France (1998), Japan (2002), Germany (2006), South Africa (2010), Brazil (2014), Russia (2018) and Qatar (2022).
Now they will be right back to the U.S., where this whole World Cup quest started for them. Their first game for this quadrennial event is in Atlanta on Monday, when World Cup tournament favorite Spain faces Cape Verde. They see 3-4 matches every World Cup, and usually buy their tickets for the early stages of group play.
“We’re just two average Joes,” Crowley said, “who happen to really love soccer.”
Do they care who they see? Not really.
The World Cup ticket lottery system — which is how they have gotten almost all of their tickets, for face value — allows you to choose games by location. That’s what they have done over the years, picking places they’d like to visit and just seeing what teams end up in those cities. It’s luck of the draw.
They’ve seen players like Messi and Ronaldo, but they’ve also seen memorable games between random teams like Croatia and Australia.
“A lot of times, it turns out to not really be about the soccer,” Shinn said. “It’s more about the people.”
Indeed, the teachers’ favorite memories on many of these trips aren’t about an incredible goal they saw.
Instead, they talk about the two days they spent with their families and a guide in the recesses of the Brazilian jungle, or the elephants emerging out of the bush at a national park in South Africa, or the time when they were lost in Japan and a young woman helped them find their train, handed them some candy from the factory where she worked and thanked them for visiting her country.
Often, their wives or some combination of their children or siblings have gone along on these trips. Crowley’s daughter, Liz, played soccer as a youth and will be attending her seventh World Cup this year.
“I’ve been tagging along ever since I could pay my own way,” she said. And now, Crowley said, while gesturing fondly at her own children: “I’ve got to pay for these knuckleheads.”
Crowley, 74, and Shinn, 77, didn’t grow up loving nor playing competitive soccer themselves. They discovered the intricacies of the game as adults, once their own children started playing it.
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Crowley was a math teacher, mostly at South Iredell High. Shinn was a history and civics teacher, mostly at Mooresville High. Eventually, they each started coaching soccer, too.
In fact, Crowley directed a South Iredell team that won the 3A North Carolina state championship in 1989. He later also took several youth teams to Europe to play in exhibition tournaments, too, and it was there he and the players experienced firsthand how huge of a sport soccer was overseas.
There were some cultural differences, too, on those youth soccer trips. After a game in Germany once, the players from the Lake Norman area were amazed to see 15-year-old German soccer players smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. The Germans, in turn, were amazed that some of the 16-year-old players from the U.S. were actually allowed to drive cars by themselves (as a father of four, this fact has long amazed me too).
It was the culture of soccer overseas that really hooked the duo — how fans all over the world would take off for a full month to follow their team around for the World Cup, and often stick around even when their team was eliminated. Shinn and Crowley have collected rooms full of souvenirs from their trips. At the game in Atlanta Monday, which falls on Crowley’s 75th birthday, he plans to wear a Spain jersey with the number 9 and the nameplate “In A Row.”
Get it? Nine World Cups, in a row.
I first met and wrote about Crowley and Shinn 16 years ago, just before the 2010 World Cup began in South Africa. That was well before Major League Soccer awarded the Charlotte FC franchise to owner David Tepper. Soccer was a minor sport in Charlotte back then, and having an MLS team here seemed like a pipe dream.
It’s not like that any longer. MLS regularly draws 25,000-30,000 fans to home games at Bank of America Stadium. Charlotte will soon host the MLS all-star game for the first time, in late July.
And while the Queen City won’t host any World Cup games, there will be watch parties around Charlotte with various fan contingents.
At those gatherings, there will be fans like these two schoolteachers, who have saved their money for decades to watch the world’s best play all over the world.
In all of that travel in far-flung countries, Shinn and Crowley have never been robbed and never had a much worse experience than getting lost. They’ve seen close to 30 World Cup matches apiece, including the U.S. team three times (the Americans have never won a World Cup game while they have been watching, however).
They’d like to keep going to the 2030 World Cup, which will be held primarily in Spain, Portugal and Morocco. But at this point in their lives, they know that any World Cup could be their last.
This year should be the easiest travel they’ve ever had — a relatively simple four-hour drive down Interstate 85 to Atlanta.
But you never can tell what’s in store. That’s what they like the most. A World Cup game to them is always full of adventure, another door waiting to be opened into the soccer universe they never tire of seeing.
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