Michigan State has quietly but methodically become a national soccer power. Only Stanford has as many Elite Eight appearances (four) as Michigan State since 2013.

But the Spartans can’t entertain thoughts of becoming a superpower unless they win a National Championship.

Michigan State will play in its first national semifinal game, also known as the College Cup, tonight at 8 p.m. (ET) in Santa Barbara, Calif., against perennial power Akron (ESPNU). It will be MSU’s first appearance in soccer’s final four since 1968.

Michigan State won a share of the National Championship in 1967 and 1968 when the title games were declared draws - once due to inclement weather (vs. Saint Louis), and once due to a tie with Maryland after two overtimes.

Former long-time Michigan State head coach Joe Baum was goalie for the Spartans in those two games.

Baum became head coach at Michigan State from 1978-2008 and arranged for Damon Rensing, a former MSU player and then-MSU assistant, to become head coach designate in 2008.

Rensing, a three-time All-Big Ten player at Michigan State, is in his 10th season as head coach. He has a record of 117-64-30 and is 11-5-3 in the NCAA Tournament.

Rensing sat down with SpartanMag.com publisher Jim Comparoni earlier this week to discuss how the program emerged from being a limited-scholarship also-ran into a national power, and why a broken leg, and George Perles were key elements in bringing Rensing and Michigan State soccer to the doorstep of a National Championship.

JIM COMPARONI: Damon, you said during a press conference earlier this week that it was noteworthy to you that your program advanced to the College Cup with Michigan players and Midwestern players, and that you thought years ago that it was possible to do so. Why did you think this was possible?

DAMON RENSING: Well, I believe in these kind of players. I’ve seen good Michigan players. I’ve also seen good players leave the state and go to other programs where they have gone on and won. One of the things that I’ve really tried to do is keep them home and say, ‘Hey, if you stay in-state, you want to play at Michigan State.’

And as we started to win NCAA Tournament games and go further, we wanted to say, ‘Look, you don’t have to go to Wake Forest. You can be an hour from home and get the same type of soccer experience.’ I don’t know that they could say that back in the 1990s and early 2000s when you had Wake Forest, North Carolina and UCLA going to Final Fours. Now that we’re getting into that arena, they say, ‘Hey, I can get a great degree at Michigan State, I can play high level soccer and have that same experience.’

JC: I’ve heard that youth soccer and club soccer has been strong in Michigan for years, going back to Alexi Lalas era. Is that still the case?

DR: Yes. It’s gotten a lot better, I think. I would say it’s a top 15 state in the country. Like anything else, there are cycles. It might be top 10 one year, then drop to 18 the next, just ball-parking it. But there are some great clubs in Detroit and also the emergence of West Michigan; I don’t think it (soccer) was as big 20 years ago in Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo and even the Lansing community. I mean I’ve got eight freshmen and they are from South Carolina, New Jersey, two from Texas, Detroit and my most minutes are from guys from Haslett (Farai Mutatu) and DeWitt (Jack Beck).”

JC: And Mutatu set up one of the goals in the James Madison game.

DR: Yes.

JC: So how far from home do players from DeWitt and Haslett have to go in club soccer to develop into a Michigan State level player?

DR: Farai and Jack played for the (Michigan) Wolves, which is out of Detroit, so they would usually commute to Wixom or to Schoolcraft College to train. There are two huge clubs that a lot of our players come from, the (Michigan) Wolves and Vardar. Even some of the kids from West Michigan like Giuseppe Barone would drive from Grand Rapids to Detroit. But there’s also Midwestern United from Grand Rapids that we get players from as well.

JC: And Midwestern soccer being able to go toe-to-toe with the best regions in the country, is this a recent revelation? I know Indiana soccer has been strong for a long time, and Saint Louis. But you have three Midwestern teams in the Final Four, plus a Big Ten team in Maryland.

DR: I think there’s always been good players. I just don’t think it’s recognized enough. It’s kind of like in football where everyone assumes it’s three yards and a cloud of dust in this part of the country, and in soccer there is some blue collar here, some toughness, but there’s some talent too. It’s really kind of grown.

Nationally, Texas and California are strong, with warm weather, able to train outdoors year around. New Jersey is strong. Chicago. Mainly around the big cities, where the populations are.

JC: You were an assistant for long-time Michigan State coach Joe Baum for 10 years and played for him here. What was your vision for what could happen here in soccer?

DR: Every player says you’re going to win a National Championship. We weren’t quite there. Our goal ended up just trying to make the NCAA Tournament and we fell just short in my senior year (in 1996). Back then, Joe had some things working against him. We didn’t have a facility. There were some scholarship things. As he started to get more scholarships …

JC: Scholarships from the university?

DR: Yeah. From George Perles. In the 1960s, Michigan State soccer had the full 9.9 scholarships. For whatever reason, I don’t know the reasons, it was reduced in the 1970s to one total scholarship here.

JC: One scholarship to be divided among the entire team?

DR: Yes. For a lot of years, in the ‘70s, ‘80s and early ‘90s, Joe was working with one scholarship. So he did it that way.

But then when Perles became the athletic director, he started to re-infuse some scholarships and got us back to that 9.9 (NCAA limit), and that’s when you started to see the success. That was a huge, huge piece. Now, having DeMartin Stadium, that stuff has been great.

JC: I covered Michigan State soccer for the Lansing State Journal when I was a student here and I never knew that Michigan State was operating at such a scholarship disadvantage, and Joe Baum certainly didn’t mention it.

DR: No, that’s something you don’t mention, but I think now the story needs to be told. That’s part of it, when you go down there and lose to Indiana, it was 10 scholarships to one.

JC: You’ve been at 9.9 scholarships for how long?

DR: In the mid-1990s is about when it started. By the time I graduated in ’96, we were pretty close to operating at 9.9.

And if you look at our NCAA Tournaments, the correlation is right there. As soon as we got the full scholarships and started to recruit and use them for a couple of years, from 2001 to 2018, we were in the NCAA Tournament pretty consistently.

So you see that, and you start to get into the NCAA Tournament, and then once you get into the NCAA Tournament on a consistent basis you start to realize that, ‘Hey, we’re pretty good, and we’re not that far off.’

I don’t think I knew that we would get there, but once we started to see that stuff come in, and get to an NCAA Tournament a couple of times, starting in 2001, I was like, ‘We can do this. We can get to a Final Four.’

JC: And as you get there, you realize you can go further? In talking to Ryan Sierakowski, your senior who scored both goals against James Madison, he is from McHenry, Ill., and his recruiting choices came down to Michigan State and Indiana. The fact that he has been your leading goal scorer, coming from Chicagoland, choosing Michigan State over Indiana, he kind of typifies the climb to this next level, right?

DR: Yes.

JC: That’s the type of guy Michigan State might have had trouble getting eight or 10 years ago?

DR: Absolutely. Absolutely. That would be a tough get for us. He looked at both schools, and there are other kids, like Giuseppe Barone, who could have gone to an ACC school but decided to stay here. He was a youth National Team player. So you have some of those players where you keep those kids at home. That’s been huge.

JC: So when you were an assistant coach at Michigan State, coming of age, did you start to network through those club programs and set the recruiting foundation for what you have today?

DR: Yes, you work with the club teams, establish a relationship with the clubs around the Midwest that, ‘Hey, we are going to do things the right way at Michigan State. Joe does things the right way, and your son is going to have a good experience if he comes to Michigan State.’ And as we started to get more successful. The combination really took hold and now there’s a ton of players that want to come to Michigan State.

JC: DeMartin Stadium was full for the NCAA Quarterfinal victory over James Madison. What was the official attendance for that?

DR: The official attendance was 1,800 but I mean there were more. I think it was 2,000 to 3,000. The official capacity is 2,500, and it was full. And there were people coming in through those gates, standing around the perimeter.

JC: A day or two before hand, you thought the weather was going to be an obstacle.

DR: Then when the rain kind of stayed away, I thought we could get a turnout here. When there were about 400 people there about 35 minutes before kickoff, I was like, ‘This is going to fill up,’ because usually it’s a late-arriving crowd. It was rocking and it was packed.

JC: You grew up in St. Louis, Mo., which was a hotbed of soccer, maybe one of the few in this country, back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Why did you come to Michigan State?

DR: Joe Baum and my dad went to high school together. Joe is from St. Louis. They knew each other. My dad was an All-American soccer player at Saint Louis U. So I was basically looking at those two programs (Michigan State and Saint Louis).

I broke my leg my senior year and Saint Louis kind of backed off. And I got a chance to look at Michigan State.

Missouri and Illinois don’t have soccer programs. So I knew of Saint Louis University but when I got to Michigan State, I had never really seen a Big Ten school and what a Big Ten campus was about and I was just blown away. I loved it, being around basketball, football, a beautiful, huge campus, and I loved it.

JC: How is Joe Baum doing?

DR: Great. He comes out to the games. He’ll be out in California. He bounces around to different parts of the country at different times of the year. But he was at the (James Madison) game. He and his wife will be with us as part of the travel party. He has been excited and he’s just been a great fan.

He’s been awesome. I learned this from Joe: He has never made it about him. It’s about the players and the program. That’s what made it such an easy transition even though he had been there for 32 years.

JC: You were named head coach in waiting when you were an assistant. What went into that? Whose brilliant decision was that?

DR: Mark Hollis and Shelly Appelbaum. Joe helped start this when he started to see a potential end in his career, he went to Mark and said, ‘Hey, I think Damon’s the guy.’ He talked to Shelly (who oversaw non-revenue sports at the time), and they sat down, and then Joe came to me and said, ‘Hey, I think this is a possibility but I have one other request. I want to stay on-staff as an assistant for two years.’

At the time, we only had a part-time second assistant so Shelly and Mark made both their men’s and women’s programs full-time. And Joe was my assistant for two years in 2009 and 2010, which was great. You wouldn’t think that would work, but it worked awesome. It was a great two years for him to mentor me and for me to learn as I go.

JC: George Perles is stepping down now from the Board of Trustees and he doesn’t get around like he used to, but have you had a chance to talk to him? He deserves some credit for this too, right?

DR: Yes, he does. I think that first year in 2001 when we got to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in years, I know that George was one of the first ones that Joe called. I’m going to give George a ring for sure. It’s guys like him and Ron Mason, who really took a focus on some Olympic sports when he was the A.D., and Mark Hollis who brought me in and was great - all of those guys had a piece in this.