The coach is never late.

He’s not just on time, he’s always early.

“He arrives 40 minutes early to every team meeting and every training,” one of his best players, Donovan Palomares, said.

When the players arrive at a meeting, all the instructions are up on the board. When they arrive at training, the coach is on the pitch, waiting.

Michael “Mike” Jacobson, the record-breaking El Camino College men’s soccer team coach, is always ahead of schedule, including a meeting with his destiny.

In his six years as Warriors coach, which included a year when the season was canceled because of the pandemic, Jacobson delivered a state championship and the college’s historic national title.

It was the first national title in the college soccer program’s history.

The feat also earned the soccer program the distinction of being one of only two programs in the Warriors Athletics history to earn a national title. The other one was when the Warriors football team got it in 1987.

Jacobson, who counts the legendary Brazilian soccer player Pele as his idol, said he wrote down what his goals were for the program when he was hired as Warriors coach in 2018.

“It’s funny. You have the vision of ‘OK, in year five–and I have it somewhere down on paper in my house–was try to win a state championship and that was this year,” Jacobson said.

The 48-year-old father of two said it was fantastic to hit the goal of how he planned things out.

“Two years ago, this program did get to a Final Four and honestly that was ahead of schedule,” Jacobson said. “So we’ve been doing some good work leading up to this point.”

The “good work” resulted in a near-perfect record of 24 wins, with the team’s only blemish to its dominating season coming in their third game, a 3-1 loss to Norco College.

The Warriors website calls Jacobson’s squad “one of the greatest teams in El Camino College history.”

The 4-0 win over Cuyamaca College at Mt. San Antonio College on Sunday, Dec. 3, was just the fifth state championship in El Camino’s history and the first in over three decades.

Under Jacobson’s wing, forward Marvin Gamez earned the distinction of being the first Warriors soccer player to receive a National Player of the Year award.

Four of his players, including Gamez and Palomares, were picked in the 2023 United Soccer Coaches’ Junior College Division III All-America Team, the first time in the El Camino soccer program that multiple players were selected in one season.

Steven Barrera, the team’s goalkeeping coach, said Jacobson is both “professional and personable.”

Jacobson coached Barrera at California State University Los Angeles. When Jacobson was hired at El Camino, he asked Barrera, who he trained as a goalkeeping coach, to come work for him as his goalkeeping coach.

“It’s been nothing short of professional. He was very professional as he coached me, and he was just as professional when it came down to coaching right next to him,” Barrera said.

Barrera said it’s not easy to manage a group of 30 competitive players who all wanted to play, but he credits Jacobson’s honesty with the squad as the reason why each player understood his role.

He said what happened after the championship game is a testament to Jacobson’s hard work of ensuring the players connect well.

“When we had won everything, the boys at a certain point all went to him and picked him up and started throwing him up in the air, like a little celebration,” Barrera said.

Miguel Sanchez, the team’s assistant coach, said Jacobson is very good at communicating what he expects from the team, and that’s why everybody in the group can be on the same page.

“Any player whether they’re a starting player or like guy on the bench that is not playing so much, they all feel the same respect and love for coach Mike,” Sanchez said.

Palomares, the goalkeeper who was instrumental in not letting in a single goal in 17 games, said he had a connection with Jacobson.

“He’s a big reason I came here [to El Camino],” Palomares said.

Palomares knew Jacobson from LAFC Academy, he was training there when Jacobson came as an academy coach.

Gamez, whose 28 goals made him the No. 1 goalscorer in the state for the season, credits Jacobson and his two assistant coaches for their record-smashing season.

Aside from making sure the players get the proper meals, training and recovery, they also made sure the players are not neglecting their studies.

“Mike was always on your stuff to make sure your grades are good to be eligible to play, and I feel like we did great with keeping that up,” Gamez said.

Originally from Rochester, New York, Jacobson played college soccer at Syracuse University before playing professionally as a midfielder for the Alleycats, a team from Albany, New York.

It was at Syracuse when he was about to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in physical education, Jacobson decided he wanted to become a soccer coach.

“Dean Foti, my coach at the time, asked me what my interests were. I said like I’d like to do what you do and coach,” Jacobson said.

Jacobson said he felt a great connection with Foti.

“He really was someone that was almost like a mentor to me,” he said.

Foti helped Jacobson get a job at Plattsburgh State University of New York through Chris Waterbury.

“I was young, right out of college and my experience with Plattsburgh and Chris Waterbury was fantastic,” Jacobson said. “It sold me on ‘OK, this is what I want to do with my career.”

He started getting coaching licenses, and the rest, as they say, is (Warriors) history.