Zeenni’s parents met at his grandfather’s soccer shop in East LA, where his dad, Hassan, a civil engineer from Lebanon, was conducting a code inspection. “My dad came in and said, ‘hey, we need to check everything,’ and my grandfather was like, ‘you need to speak to my daughter. She’s going to translate for us.’” Hassan hit it off with that daughter, Merci; fast forward a few years, and the two were married with three kids.
Both of Zeenni’s parents have soccer in their blood, but it was his mom’s side, a Mexican-American family from Montebello, who were most embedded in the sport.
The game was an ever-present part of family life. “We had mini-goals in the backyard,” Zeenni remembers. “Since I was small, my grandfather, my uncle, people would come over for barbecues and they would be shooting on me.”
That uncle, who happened to be a professional goalkeeper in Mexico, was where Zeenni first got the idea that soccer could take him places.
“When I was six or seven, my family started taking more trips to Mexico,” he says. “My uncle was playing professionally for a team called Tecos in Guadalajara, and seeing what he was doing as a professional goalkeeper got me excited. I just liked seeing him at work.”
The young Zeenni got more and more serious about soccer as he got older. He’s been a keeper since early on, joking that as he advanced through the age groups and the field started to get bigger, he got less interested in playing a field position. Plus he was tall—almost six feet by age 12.
He’d be up early in the morning on weekends so he could catch the Arsenal match before his own games. “My dad would tell me, ‘I want you to watch and observe where the goalkeeper sets the wall, what kind of pass he makes in the 90th minute with his team up one-zero, all the little things,’” Zeenni says. “So from an early age, I was watching it through that lens. I just became obsessed with it.”
He kept moving up the ranks with the dream of one day playing professionally, moving to the LA Galaxy Academy for his last two years of high school, then to UC Davis to play college ball.
But in 2014, Zeenni’s dream was cut short when he tore his ACL.
He tried to start a career outside of soccer, but like many athletes who are forced to retire young, he had trouble adjusting. “I was trying to do different jobs and seeing what the corporate world was,” he says. “I always resisted a life in soccer because I thought I had to follow into a more mainstream career. It was always just taking jobs to get to a bottom line. At the end of the day it wasn't going to make me happy.”
But Mom knew best.
“My mom was like, ‘hey, so what the heck is going on? You keep taking these jobs. You're quitting after a few months. And we come home and you've done nothing all day,’” he remembers. “She's like, ‘this is what's going to happen: we will support you with a roof over your head. We will support you financially. But we want you to start doing things that you love. And goalkeeping is what you love.’”
“‘She told me, ‘We don't care how much money you make. We care that you're happy. And right now, you don't look happy.’”
Zeenni took that advice to heart. He started helping out at his old youth club in Pasadena, offering some of the goalkeepers private training sessions on the side. He also started a YouTube and Instagram channel, @progkacademy_, where he posted drills and film clips for young keepers.
He started filming in his backyard with his younger brother Kareem, and later with former college teammate Armando Quezada. “It was not glamorous at all,” he says. “But that’s where I started to iron out my training methodology.”
Between his private coaching and his social media accounts, Zeenni grew his network little by little. One thing led to another, and after about two years, he got his first-ever coaching job—a part-time job at Cal State LA paying a few thousand dollars for the season.
He stayed at Cal State LA for three years, winning the Division II national championship in 2021, before landing a job with LAFC’s second team under US Men’s Soccer Hall of Famer Steve Cherundolo. The following season, when Cherundolo moved up to coach the first team, Zeenni stayed with the USL side, but was often called up by the first-team goalkeeping coach, Oka Nikolov, to join sessions.
“He would say, ‘I want you to take Maxime Crépeau, or John McCarthy, today,’” Zeenni remembers. “Those are guys who have massive personalities and are so professional, and at first I was like, ‘if I miskick a ball or I give an instruction that's not right, what's going to happen to me?’ But Oka said, ‘I don't care, I will support you. When you draw up the session and you execute it, don't look at me. I want you to be the one to make the decision.’ That gave me the belief that I could coach goalkeepers at the highest level.”
As a coach, Zeenni takes bits and pieces from all the coaches he’s worked with. He says his coach at the Galaxy academy, for example, taught him a huge amount about the position, but was “a bit too serious and always kept me on my toes.” His college coach, Jason Hotaling, “liked to joke around with me, but when we crossed the lines, we both understood it was time to turn it on"—teaching Zeenni the importance of embracing players for who they are off the field in order to get the best out of them on the field.
Zeenni also credits then-Las Vegas Lights coaches Enrique Duran and Stephen Campos with his growth as a coach. Duran, who took over for Cherundolo when the latter moved to the first team, challenged Zeenni to work outside of goalkeeping and pitch in scouting opponents. "They spent countless hours teaching me the game from a different perspective," he says. "Enrique’s influence was invaluable. He set the standard every single day and never let me get away with half-hearted work, and that’s trickled down into every aspect of my life.”
In short, when Angel City called, Zeenni was more than ready for his first role leading the GK union at a top-tier club.
ACFC, as he points out, was the last remaining LA pro club he didn’t already have some connection to, so the move felt like a natural next step. “Being from LA, I was a big Galaxy fan,” he says. “I grew up going to the Rose Bowl every week in Pasadena. Seeing Beckham and all that, and then being in the academy—and then Cal State LA and LAFC.”
His multicultural upbringing, too, is pure LA: a Lebanese immigrant dad having his Mexican in-laws over for carne asada; a Chicana mom who gets up before dawn to make suhoor during Ramadan.
“Both the Middle Eastern culture and the Hispanic culture are so family-oriented,” says Zeenni. “My family's here, so it's just been pivotal for me to continue to see the game grow in LA. This is where I'm from.”