Aug. 17, 2004
By Pete LaFleur When the varsity monograms were awarded for Notre Dame’s 2003 women’s soccer season, there was added significance for two of the recipients. Current junior midfielder Annie Schefter (Yakima, Wash.) and sophomore forward Molly Iarocci (Carefree, Ariz.) both had followed in their fathers’ footsteps by lettering for their respective teams at Notre Dame. As things turn out, both families have a deep – and growing – connection to Notre Dame. (Note – this story now includes “playing-days” photos of Rob Schefter and Tony Iarocci, see below.) Rob Schefter, Sr., graduated from Notre Dame in 1937 and his namesake, Rob, Jr., then followed his bother Tom by attending Notre Dame in the early 1970s. Schefter had grown up in Yakima and was an accomplished all-around athlete, with his skills ranging from the tennis courts to the ski slopes to the basketball hardwood. The second-youngest of six children, Schefter honed his athletic ability by competing against his older siblings (a path that his daughter Annie would follow some 20 years later). The younger Rob Schefter came to Notre Dame content to be just a student (i.e. not a student-athlete) but he took a chance at the start of his freshman year by competing in a challenge tournament set up by legendary tennis coach Tom Fallon. The winner of this campus-wide “non-varsity” tournament then would have the chance to play a current member of the Irish team for the right to be on the squad. Schefter won the tournament and the challenge match … and three years later, the walk-on (in the truest sense of the word) was playing No. 1 doubles and serving as captain of the 1973 team.
Rob Schefter captained the 1973 Notre Dame tennis team, back in the days of wood rackets and distinctive shirts with embroidered names.
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Another important part of the Schefter family story happened during that memorable sophomore year, as the pre-med student met a Saint Mary’s co-ed named Grace Hartigan. The couple married after graduation and completed the long process of medical school (at Creighton) and residency (at the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minn.) before returning to Yakima to set up an ENT private practice … with five kids in tow. “We ended up being pretty far from Notre Dame and never came back to campus for games or anything like that,” says Annie Schefter, who has another parallel to her father as a pre-professional studies major (and an accomplished one to boot, with a 3.73 cumulative GPA that could earn her Academic All-America honors this fall). “Notre Dame still was a big part of our lives growing up. We would wear the ND gear and watch the games with our dad. But we weren’t some kind of hard-core Notre Dame family.” When it came time to select a college, Schefter was a prime recruit (Soccer America rated her as the nation’s 11th-best incoming freshman for 2002) and had her pick of the nation’s top programs. “My family connections to the school actually did not play as big of a role in my decision as did the fact that I was just swept under the spell of Notre Dame,” says Schefter, who has uncles on both sides of her family – Richard Hendricks (`63) and Daniel Hartigan (`76) – who also are Notre Dame graduates. “When I came for my visit, it was my first time on campus but I was sold. My dad kind of stayed out of the whole process … but both of my parents were so excited and they knew how much I would love the place. It has a special place in their hearts.”
Annie Schefter is the fourth child in her family to play college soccer.
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Annie Schefter is not the first child from her family to play collegiate soccer – far from it, as her brothers Bob (’02 graduate) and Mike( (’03) both played at Seattle-Pacific while another brother John played at the University of Washington during the 2001 and ’02 seasons. The oldest of the Schefter children, Katie, did not play college sports but led the way as a college graduate (from the University of Washington). Rob Schefter attended his Notre Dame 30th class reunion during the summer of 2003 and “had an unbelievable time,” according to his daughter. One of his yearly rituals has been crosschecking the Notre Dame home football and soccer schedules for prime weekend viewing back on campus. “Both of my parents love that I am here and my brothers have just gone nuts, they are Notre Dame crazy now,” she says. “My dad will say things like `This looks like a good weekend to come’ or `That’s convenient with those games on that weekend.’ All of his best friends and all my brothers are coming out for the weekend when we play Washington in football. Now that, for my family, is going to be big.” Schefter has one more connection to Notre Dame athletics, as a former teammate of current senior basketball center Teresa Borton. The pair played together starting in the fifth grade – with a Yakima Elite travel team coached by Borton’s father and brother-in-law – and they later helped lead West Valley High School to the 2001 state title, with Schefter serving as the starting point guard on the WVHS team that went 26-2 during that junior season (she then captained the ’01-’02 team and averaged a team-best 17 points per game).
Former Notre Dame catcher Tony Iarocci and his wife Diann have seen their daughter Molly go on to play soccer with the Irish.
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Tony Iarocci did not exactly grow up in the shadow of the Golden Dome but he was close enough (in terms of miles and family connections) to develop an early love for the University. A basketball and baseball star at Bishop Noll High School in nearby Highland, Ind. (located some 90 minutes from campus), Iarocci had been indoctrinated to Notre Dame lore by his football-crazed mother Anne Iarocci. Her brother, Arthur Jehle, had attended Notre Dame in the 1930s and ’40s and the family had remained huge fans of everything associated with the blue and gold (Jehle’s daughter Eve later would attend Notre Dame at the same time as her cousin, Tony Iarocci). Iarocci made his mother the proudest woman in Highland when he headed off to Notre Dame and earned three monograms with as a catcher with the Irish baseball team before graduating in 1975. A government major, he went to work as a sales rep in Chicago with Inland Steel (while earning his MBA in finance from the University of Chicago) and it was in the Windy City that he met Diann Streck, a University of Iowa graduate. The couple later married and followed Iarocci’s parents out west to Arizona, living in the Paradise Valley and North Scottsdale areas while raising four kids (Iarocci now is a financial advisor for a local brokerage firm).
Tony Iarocci earned three monograms as a catcher with the Notre Dame baseball team.
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Each of the four Iarocci children has a love for Notre Dame but Molly concedes that her older sister Emily (who will be a senior at ND in ’04-’05) and her younger brother Andy (a junior soccer player at Brophy Prep) are the family’s diehard Notre Dame fans – after grandma, that is. “We have gone to the Fiesta Bowl games when Notre Dame has played in them and we used to be a host family for players on the baseball team when they would come in to play Arizona State,” she says. “But the true Notre Dame fan in the family is really my grandma. She is a loyal subscriber to the magazine Blue and Gold Illustrated and she knows all the football players and their positions. She watches every game with her Blue and Gold opened up and she always gives me advice that I’m supposed to pass on to the coaches and players. She’s pretty into it and that’s great.” Iarocci recently has been comparing notes with Schefter about each father’s Notre Dame experience. “It’s the same with both of us, each year we are at Notre Dame we learn more about our dads when they were here,” she says. “He will tell me little things – like `you’ve got to have the chocolate milk in the dining hall, it’s great’ or will remember neat stories about how Ara Parsegian always would come by their indoor practices in the Joyce Center and would throw his lefthanded knuckleball to some of the batters. Ara was like a god back then, so that was a big deal.”
Molly Iacrocci has been able to attend Notre Dame alongside her sister Emily, who is set to graduate in 2005.
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When the letters of acceptance arrived at the Iarocci household for Emily and then Molly, it marked a big moment in the family’s history. “With us going to Notre Dame, I’m sure it means more to my dad than any of us really know,” says Molly, whose older brother T.J. played baseball at Tulane but has developed into an ND fan in his own right. “Notre Dame always will be a part of our family and my dad even has bought a little condo back in South Bend because he wants to come back more and more. He walks around the campus like he’s a student again and goes to all sorts of sporting events and even practices.” The youngest Iarocci currently on campus also has found herself wrapped in the special family that is the sophomore class of the women’s soccer team, a group of 10 spunky individuals who hail from all corners of the United States. “Notre Dame already has become a home away from home and the other girls in my class are a big part of that,” she says. “I’ve had the best time getting to know them and we’re already talking about being in each other’s weddings and coming back for reunions. We are very close and not many people on every team can say that.” Tony Iarocci’s story would not be complete without more connections to the current Notre Dame women’s soccer family. As things turn out, he was friends with the parents of current junior defender Miranda Ford – Kevin (a JV baseball player and ’75 grad) and Celeste Ford (’78) – while the former Shelley Muller (mother of freshman midfielder Kelly Simon) was a Notre Dame cheerleader and 1976 graduate who also was a friend of Iarocci’s during their days on the Notre Dame campus. Two other current members of the Irish squad – senior defender Kate Tulisiak (Terry, ’74) and freshman forward Susan Pinnick (Pat, ’85 MBA) – also are second-generation Notre Dame students. Schefter and Iarocci are two of six Notre Dame women’s soccer players who have followed their fathers as ND monogram winners. The others include: baseball outfielder/catcher and current director of the ND Alumni Association Chuck Lennon (’61 grad.; Joliet, Ill.) and defender Molly Lennon (’92; product of South Bend’s Adams HS); All-America football quarterback Terry Hanratty (’69; product of Butler, Pa., HS) and defender Kelly Hanratty (played on ’88 and ’89 teams; from Denver East HS); pole vaulter Ed Kelly (’64; from Philadelphia’s LaSalle College HS) and midfielder Mary Kate Kelly (played on ’90 and ’91 teams; South Bend Adams HS); and football manager Paul McCarthy (’64 season) and ace forward Michelle McCarthy (helped ’95 team win national title in her senior season; attended Visitation Academy in St. Louis).