Longtime soccer coach Bill Bell leaves legacy of mentoring young Champions

Liberty University mourns the loss of former men’s soccer Head Coach Bill Bell, who died Tuesday at the age of 85.

After 22 years playing and coaching professionally for Leeds United and other Premier League soccer teams in England and Scotland, Bell led Liberty to a 198-149-40 record over his 21 years as head coach, making him the longest-tenured coach in the men’s soccer program history. The Flames posted winning records in 8 of their 10 Big South Conference seasons with Bell at the helm, reaching three Big South Men’s Soccer Championship games (1994, 1998, and 1999).

Bell was inducted into the Liberty Athletics Hall of Fame in 2011 for his coaching accomplishments, which included helping the team transition from the NCCAA to the NCAA Division I level in 1987.

After succeeding Liberty founding Dean of Students Ed Dobson as Liberty’s second men’s soccer coach in 1980, Bell helped the young program quickly become a melting pot of players from all over the world.

“My first order of business was to expand Liberty’s athletics horizons and look to the international game to provide a pipeline of talent,” Bell wrote in his autobiography, “The Light at the End of the Tunnel.” “Recruiting players from all over America, as well as Mexico, England, and Africa, became my calling card.”

In 1985, he was named the South Atlantic Coach of the Year and was voted the Big South Coach of the Year in 1992 and 1999. During his tenure, he coached two All-Americans, 14 NSCAA South Atlantic All-Region players, Liberty’s only Big South Men’s Soccer Player of the Year, and 22 Big South All-Conference players.

“Coach Bell put Liberty Baptist College, as it was called at the time, on the map from a soccer standpoint in the early 1980s,” said Jeff Alder, a former player under Bell at Liberty who also served as his assistant for nine seasons before taking the helm for 19 more. “During his time, we had players from England, Ghana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. With Liberty’s profile as a global university, we were able to attract players who fit into our Christian environment and culture who wanted to get an education based on biblical principles — and also compete at an elite level.”

After surviving a heart condition that required quadruple bypass surgery in 1993, Bell and his wife, Mary, felt the Lord leading them back to the United Kingdom to share the Good News of Jesus Christ with imprisoned youth. They founded Within the Walls ministry and answered God’s call to leave Liberty and serve in prison ministry full time in England in 2001.

They later returned to the United States and introduced Within the Walls to prisons in South Carolina before returning to Lynchburg, where they enjoyed retirement with their grandchildren.

Some of Bell’s greatest legacies are the lives of the alumni he coached at Liberty who have gone on to serve as Champions for Christ in their respective workplaces and communities.

“He was not only concerned about us winning games, but, more importantly, about us sharing our faith with the opposing teams so they had the opportunity to receive Jesus Christ as their personal Savior,” said Johnny Sasu (’91, ’13), a former recruit of Bell’s from Ghana.

“We wanted boys who would not only be good players, but also be great testimonies for the Lord,” Bell said in 2018. “More than anything, I wanted to mold these boys into men who would play for the Lord and exemplify the spirit of Christ both on and off the field.”

Watch a video produced by Game On (now Flames Central) in 2018.