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Branco, who was inducted into the Hall in 2005, died after the Cadillac CTS he was driving crashed into a guard rail on Richardson Ave. around 2:40am, according to a police statement. He was taken by ambulance to Rhode Island Hospital, where he was later pronounced dead.<\/p>\n
Norton police are investigating the cause of the crash.<\/p>\n
Branco, who lived in Norton,\u00a0served as a gameday staffer for the Revolution, and was\u00a0a familiar face near the team’s technical area in recent years.<\/p>\n
He served as the boys soccer coach at Brockton High School and coached at Stonehill College, as well.\u00a0\u00a0Under his watch, Stonehill men’s\u00a0side went\u00a0151-118-25 (.556) in 15 seasons from 1984 through 1998, and led the squad to Northeast-10 championships in 1985, 1990 and 1991. He was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame shortly after his retirement.<\/p>\n
Although the Portugal-born Branco had retired as a coach and educator, he remained invested in the game. He attended the 2013 New England Soccer Hall of Fame induction ceremony\u00a0last month, and was on the field for September’s Brazil-Portugal friendly at Gillette Stadium.<\/p>\n
Branco is survived by his wife, Jennifer, and their three children, Tiffany, Jordan and Morgan. Jordan Branco played for the Western Mass Pioneers in 2012.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ernie Branco, a well-respected member of the New England soccer community, was killed in a car crash on Sunday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23084"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23084"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23111,"href":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23084\/revisions\/23111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}