Massapequa Soccer Shop, iconic family-run store, to close June 30 after 52 years

A Massapequa Park store, whose founders began by selling equipment out of the garage of their nearby home, has announced it will close its doors June 30 after more than 52 years in business.

Calling it a "bittersweet" decision, Helen Fishman, daughter of the late founders, Fay and Gene Bodenstein, said the decision to close the iconic Massapequa Soccer Shop on Park Boulevard was made simply because she and her brother Mark Bodenstein decided it was time to retire.

The landmark store, which became one of the biggest brick-and-mortar soccer specialty shops in the country, was founded in 1973.

"Like all good athletes you have to know when it’s time," Fishman said Tuesday. "Luckily, we’re doing this on our terms. Nobody forced us out, it’s not like we’re losing our lease or my landlord forced me out.

"It’s just time," she said.

Long-known in the Long Island and national soccer community, store customers once included some of the biggest names in U.S. soccer — among them, one-time U.S. men’s national team captain Mike Windischmann, goalkeeper Tony Meola, star midfielders John Harkes and Chris Armas and even famed former New York Cosmos goalie Shep Messing, an All-American player from Wheatley High School.

In the 1970s, Fay Bodenstein was the seamstress for the Cosmos, sewing their early team jerseys — among them, that of the legendary Pele.

Retired University of Rochester sports information director Dennis O’Donnell, a longtime editor of Soccer Week, a paper located in the storefront above the store’s original brick-and-mortar location on Front Street in Massapequa Park, said Tuesday: "Massapequa was one of the pillars of the Long Island soccer community. The Soccer Shop was a gathering place for cognoscenti for a wide range of reasons.

"It will be missed," he said.

The business began when Alan Bodenstein, as a boy, said he wanted to play for the fledgling Massapequa Soccer Club, a youth league.

There were few soccer supply stores on Long Island then and so Gene Bodenstein, a construction contractor in New York City, would buy supplies in Manhattan and lug them home on the Long Island Rail Road. Soon, Fay Bodenstein decided the couple should sell the goods out of the garage at modest markups of 50 cents or a dollar.

"People would come by at dinnertime and my mom would make them dinner and they’d get their cleats, a uniform, whatever, and would be on their way," Fishman said. "My mom came from Belgium after the war [World War II]. She knew soccer; my father, from Brooklyn, didn’t have a clue. But my mom was always a people person — and she was a chance-taker. Soon, she decided to start the store."

Both of the Bodenstein boys — Alan and Mark — played soccer at Massapequa High School, Alan later playing at Hofstra University. All the children went to Hofstra, where Helen became the first female athletic trainer to travel with the men’s teams.

She later met her husband, Yuri, who was from Ukraine and was an All-America soccer player at Princeton University, when he played in the Maccabiah Games where she was a trainer.

Beginning as a 13-year-old junior high student, Helen helped out at the store and has worked there — first part-time, later full-time — since then. She and brother Mark became co-owners after the deaths of their parents — Fay, a Holocaust survivor, in 2016; Gene in 2022. Brother Alan, who like his siblings also worked at the store, lives in Indiana.

"Back when my parents started, nobody really knew soccer in America," Fishman said. "You had some local leagues, you had ethnic groups who followed, but it wasn’t an American sport. But we survived everybody else in the business — a lot of box stores, a lot of soccer stores — and that’s because we were honest and because what we did we did well."

By John Valenti

john.valenti@newsday.com

John Valenti, a reporter at Newsday since 1981, has been honored nationally by the Associated Press and Society of the Silurians for investigative, enterprise and breaking news reporting, as well as column writing, and is the author of “Swee'pea,” a book about former New York playground basketball star Lloyd Daniels. Valenti is featured in the Emmy Award-winning ESPN 30-for-30 film “Big Shot.”