Eric Bracy, a former assistant coach with Amherst College’s NCAA Champion men’s soccer program and most recently, a volunteer assistant with Brown University in the Ivy League, joins Arkansas for his first season and will focus on the goalkeepers.
Bracy helped lead Brown to a second-place finish in the Ivy League standings in 2016, marking its highest finish in the league table since winning the conference title in 1994. The Bears earned points in 14 of their 16 matches on the season and finished in the top half of the league standings in back-to-back years for the first time since 1993-94. Brown closed the year with its highest winning percentages both overall (.719) and in conference play (.714) since the year 2000.
He aided in the tutelage of Christine Etzel ’19, the unanimous 2016 Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year, to a season in which the goalkeeper ranked second in the NCAA in save percentage (0.921), fourth in goals-against average (0.361) and 13th in shutouts (10) at the end of the regular season. He also helped coached Carly Gould ’17 and Maclaine Lehan ’18 to First Team All-Ivy honors.
An assistant coach at Amherst during the 2015-16 season, Bracy helped the men’s soccer team win the 2015 NCAA Division III National Championship with an 18-1-2 overall record. Amherst also won the NESCAC regular season title with a conference mark of 9-0-1. Bracy mentored Thomas Bull, the Division III Goalkeeper of the Year, as Bracy’s goalkeeping contingent allowed just five goals on the season.
Bracy has gained additional experience at the collegiate level and in a variety of camp settings. He assisted Amherst’s women’s program during the spring of 2016 and coached at several camps at his alma mater, Hendrix College, from 2012-15. Bracy has worked with No. 1 Soccer Camps, acting as the Goalkeeper Camp Director in Danbury, Conn., while also serving as a coach with the program’s camps in Irving, Texas. He acted as the Director of Goalkeeping at Arkansas Rush Soccer Club from 2013-15 and worked as a self-employed goalkeeping coach from 2011-13.
Bracy played on the Hendrix men’s soccer team from 2012-15, captaining the Warriors as a senior and also stepping in as a student assistant coach with the program. He acted as a SAAC member as a senior and interned with the school’s athletic department during the summer of 2014. Bracy also competed for Trinity University in Texas in the fall of 2011.
A 2015 graduate from Hendrix College with a degree in Kinesiology and a focus in Sports Management, Bracy earned All-State honors in the state of Arkansas at Bentonville High School. He holds a United States Soccer Federation D License.
