Matthew Owusu has been a stalwart at the vital center back position for the Bucknell men’s soccer team for the last four seasons. A powerful, physical presence on the back line, Matt is known as a strong 1v1 defender who is also adept in the air and deft with the ball at his feet. As one of the top high school recruits coming out of the soccer-rich Baltimore area in the 2020 class, he had many Division I college offers to consider. But ultimately his path to Bucknell was guided by another great Bison center back, Hall-of-Famer Mike Lookingland.
A 2005 Bucknell graduate, Lookingland is quite simply one of the best defensive players in Bison soccer history. He was a two-time Patriot League Defensive Player of the Year, and, remarkably, he played every second of every game during his four-year career. After earning Third Team All-America honors from the College Soccer News as a senior, Lookingland was later selected 13th overall by Real Salt Lake in the 2005 MLS Supplemental Draft. After a brief MLS stint, he gained fame as an all-star indoor player with his hometown Baltimore Blast, with whom he won four Major Indoor Soccer League championships and the 2012 MISL Defender of the Year award.
Since retiring as a player, Lookingland has remained active in the sport as a club coach, starting with the youngest age groups. And that’s where he was first introduced to Matt Owusu.
Matt’s parents, Peter and Cynthia, came to the United States from Ghana and met through mutual friends in Virginia. Matt was born in Virginia, he lived in Ghana from ages two to three, and then his family moved first to Delaware and then ultimately to Maryland, where he and his four siblings (sisters Norina and Grace and twin brother and sister Malachi and Sarai) spent most of their formative years.
Peter was an outstanding soccer player in his own right but ultimately chose an academic scholarship to VCU. Even though he didn’t play collegiately, he later instilled in Matt a love for the sport. Matt played in the streets in Ghana on visits to see his grandparents, and around the age of seven he joined his first club soccer team. One of his teammates and friends was Jake Mayer, who is currently a Patriot League rival at Loyola. Jake was going to play for one of the top clubs in the area, the Baltimore Bays as it was then known, and his parents convinced Matt’s parents that he should also try out.
At the age of seven, Matt tried out for the Bays U9 team, which was coached by Mike Lookingland. And so began a 10-year relationship.
“I’ve known him for so long, and we were very close,” Matt recalls. “I would go to tournaments with him all over the U.S. I knew all about his time at Bucknell and his pro career. He would train with us sometimes, and you could tell that he was a very good player. And of course he talked about Bucknell a lot.”
Lookingland remembers being impressed with Matt’s ability from the moment he first saw him.
“Right away I could tell that he was super athletic and brought a ton of energy,” says Lookingland. “He came from a great family, and even at a young age he had a very good understanding of the game. He was always aggressive and physical and was also very comfortable on the ball. Honestly, his game then was very similar to what it is now at the college level.”
Lookingland was a dominant center back at Bucknell, and he was able to provide first-hand knowledge to Matt as he learned the position while playing for a national championship quality club team. In addition to Mayer, his club teammates also included the likes of current Loyola midfielder Richie Nichols and Penn State’s Peter Mangione, who was the 2021 Big Ten Offensive Player of the Year.
“To this day, that’s the best youth team I’ve ever coached, and I’ve been doing this for 20 years now,” said Lookingland.
“I think probably because of his playing background, he was a very defensive-minded coach, so he was definitely very instrumental in the way that I play now,” Matt says. “He taught me all about positioning, just being in the right spot at the right time relative to where the ball is moving. He stressed being very solid up in the air with headers, and of course 1v1 defending and how to track back and recover.”
When it came time to consider college soccer opportunities, Matt had a number of options. He was a national pool-caliber player with high grades from the recruiting services, but Lookingland remembers that his college conversations with Matt often steered away from just soccer.
“I could tell that Matt had an interest in academics and a total college experience,” Lookingland recalls. “Once he expressed to me that he wanted a school where he could excel academically, be able to have a social life and a wide variety of friends and interests, and also play really good Division I soccer, I told him, ‘Well you have to go to Bucknell.’ When I was choosing a college, I wanted to get the total experience. Listening to him, it was also most like Matt and I were the same person. I knew Bucknell would be a great fit for him.”
Lookingland connected Matt with former coach Brendan Nash, and Matt came up to Lewisburg and had a great visit. He discovered just how much support Bison student-athletes receive in many different areas, his parents liked the school, and ultimately he chose Bucknell over Villanova.
Unfortunately, when Matt arrived at Bucknell, there was no soccer to be played. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of the 2020 fall seasons, and teams were limited to small-group activities. Still, Matt found a silver lining in opportunities to connect with his new teammates.
“I hated not being able to play soccer in the fall season, but it actually brought me really close with the seniors and with the other grades because all we could do was just hang out and get to know each other. There was nothing else to do. We couldn’t really play soccer, so we would just spend a lot of time getting to know each other on a very personal level.”
The team did return to the pitch for a modified spring season, and Matt was a big part of it, starting and playing the full game against both Colgate and Loyola. He has been a key player for the Bison ever since, playing mostly in the back four but also occasionally as a holding center midfielder.
Adjusting to the pace of the college game is always a challenge for freshmen, but Matt says that those off-the-field bonds that were forged during the COVID hiatus ultimately paid dividends, as the upperclassmen were quick to help him get adjusted on the pitch.
“Trevor Wiggins and Eamon O’Connor were senior backs that year, and then junior Colin Eifert was someone I grew close to. Matt Thorsheim was our captain and he was very instrumental. Cody Wax was a number six, so he played right in front of me and also played outside back as well. Those guys helped me out a lot.”
Four years later, Matt is now one of the elder statesmen on one of the youngest teams in the country. Of the 27 players on the 2023 roster, 18 are freshmen and sophomores and only four are seniors. Matt plays in the same back line with promising youngsters such as Jackson Sullivan, Ben Sheffield, and Aidan Kieffer, all sophomores, and he recalls the advice he received from guys like Wiggins and Thorsheim during his rookie season.
“It’s very exciting, but it can also be overwhelming at the same time. It’s a very young team, and as seniors we are expected to lead and be very vocal and direct traffic both in and out of training. Especially early in the year we really had to let the guys know what’s going on at all times in terms of the schedule and things like that. But at the same time, there are so many talented young players and it’s exciting to see them get better and better.”
As Patriot League play heats up and the Bison look to make a postseason push with five league matches remaining, Matt is also looking forward to a future in finance. He was originally considering engineering when he committed to Bucknell, but with a laugh, he recalls that it was an honors-level physics class during his senior year of high school that convinced him to apply to the Freeman College of Management instead.
“Physics is a big part of engineering, so I thought maybe engineering wasn’t going to be right for me. My senior year in high school I took a class in stocks and finance, and I thought it was really interesting. I was looking at stocks in my free time, and it made sense to stick with that.”
Last summer, Matt interned with the private equity firm Hamilton Lane in Philadelphia. He was a real asset analyst, where he was tasked with looking at funds for investments in areas such as real estate, infrastructure, commodities, and natural resources.
“It was a great opportunity. I was able to go on a site visit and meet some general partners, but basically what I did was screenings. I would receive memorandums from the firms that we were looking to invest in, and then I would compile different data points into a spreadsheet that would eventually go to the higher-ups.”
Matt says he would like to get started in the job market and then perhaps go back for a master’s degree. For now, he’s focused on a strong finish to his senior year. Even though it’s been a bit of a whirlwind with COVID and a couple of coaching changes, he shares that he would not trade his Bucknell experience for any other.
“It’s been an unusual path, but I’ll always have that brotherhood of teammates. The biggest thing that I’ll take away is the relationships that I’ve created here. I’ve met a lot of really smart guys, a lot of really hardworking guys, and just a lot of really good friends. Those are the people that I’m definitely going to be talking to and hanging out with and getting advice from and checking in on long after we’ve graduated.”
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