Hendricken coach Mickey Rooney talks with his players at halftime on Saturday.

Journal / Glenn Osmundson

PROVIDENCE — The irony is that Mickey Rooney had figured his American experience would last only a few months.

“I was being recruited to play college soccer in America. I thought, ‘Why not, it would be a good chance to see another country.’ I figured I would go over there, play soccer for a few months, then go back home,” said Rooney.

That was 39 years ago, and Rooney is still in America and still has his distinctly British accent.

It was Saturday afternoon and Rooney was standing on the sideline at a soccer field coaching the Hendricken booters, just like he has been doing for 30 years.

“Where have the years gone?” Rooney had said about his tenure as the Hendricken coach, which now makes him the longest-serving boys high school soccer coach in Rhode Island.

But even for somebody who has been coaching for 30 years, Saturday was special because Hendricken was playing Chariho in the Division I title game.

It was the culmination of one of those dream coaching seasons. A team that wasn’t expected to be in the hunt for a state title, but that worked hard and got better as the season progressed and found itself playing for the championship.

If the storyline had been written in Hollywood, the game would have ended with Rooney being bathed in Gatorade. Instead, the game was played on the real-world turf at Rhode Island College, and a talented Chariho team posted a 2-0 victory over the Hawks.

But then, it isn’t championships that have kept Rooney on the sideline for three decades.

“I love the game — always have, always will,” said Rooney.

It’s not that that he hasn’t felt the thrill of celebrating state titles. His teams have won four state championships, and he has also directed teams in five other state title games. But at Hendricken, a school that needs more than one trophy case to handle all its state championship hardware, the four state titles and nine title-game appearances make Rooney only one of the school’s moderately successful coaches.

He’s the last coaching survivor of a group of that played a major role in the development of high school boys soccer in Rhode Island during the early stages of the sport in the 1970s and ’80s. The others were East Providence’s George Poli, South Kingstown’s Bob Cavanagh, Barrington’s Ed Bradley, Tiverton’s Jim Cook, Chariho’s Bert Roberts and a few more.

Now, only Rooney is still on the sidelines coaching a high school team. He’s the last connection with what, in some ways, may have been the heyday of Rhode Island high school soccer. In the late 1970s and ’80s, the state title games were shown on one of Rhode Island’s TV stations, back before there was such a thing as cable and pod casting.

Now there are more kids than ever playing soccer, but it seems fewer people are paying attention to the game. Too many other things to do for the players’ classmates and the general public –– everything from sitting at home looking at Facebook to playing video games to shopping at the malls or watching a dozen all-sports cable channels.

“We need to get second and third generations of families going to soccer games together and understanding what’s going on,” Rooney said. “We’re into the second generation now.”

Nobody knows about tradition and soccer more than Rooney.

He was born and grew up in Slough, England, a small town directly under the flight path of Heathrow Airport, a few miles outside London.

Like most kids in his town, he grew up playing soccer, and he was good at it. It was the late 1960s, but even then American college coaches were recruiting in foreign lands. A few colleges talked to him, but he decided on Keene State in New Hampshire because a former resident of his town had played there.

“After I was in America for a month or two, I said, ‘Wait a minute, this is nice,’ ” Rooney said about the American lifestyle.

Then, in his words, “I met a girl from Warwick.”

That Warwick girl, the former Sue Manning, became his wife, and after they graduated from college they started the journey that eventually would bring them to his wife’s hometown to raise their family. It was a journey that included early stops in Chicago and Tacoma, Wash., while Rooney, who earned college-division All-America honors at Keene, played in the North American Soccer League.

He actually didn’t apply for the Hendricken coaching job — his wife did.

“I was coaching at a soccer clinic in New York and my wife called me. She said there’s an opening for a coach at Hendricken and I applied for you.”

The rest is, as they say, history — a very long history of coaching teenage soccer players.

He liked this year’s Hendricken team because it exemplified the concept of teamwork, something he thinks might be missing more and more in high school soccer these days.

“We have a lot of premier (youth) teams now, and if you’re not playing premier you’re not considered a good player. I think the star (player) concept is definitely there. The team concept has been hurt over the years,” said Rooney.

He still loves the game as much now as when he was a kid playing soccer in England — maybe even more.

Heck, on Saturday, the 58-year-old father of two was standing on the sideline with a cast on his foot and leaning on crutches because of an injury he suffered while playing in a men’s soccer league game a few weeks ago.

“Thirty years is a long time. How much longer do you think you are going to be doing this?” Rooney was asked about his coaching duties.

“I take it year by year; I still love it,” he said.

Even if he once thought he was going to be in America for only a few months.

jgillool@projo.com