About this site

This site is several things. It’s a resume. It’s a clip file. It’s a blog.

You’ll find my most recent work for The Guardian, FourFourTwo, OZY, SoccerWire, Huffington Post, Popdose and Bleacher Report here, as well as archives of my best work for USA TODAY, ESPN, Fox Soccer and others.

You’ll also find info on my three books. The most recent is Single-Digit Soccer: Keeping Sanity in the Earliest Ages of the Beautiful Game, published in August 2015. It’s the culmination of several years of research and interviews attempting to answer questions such as:

• Are we getting too serious, too soon? Should we hold off on travel, tryouts and keeping score?
• Can we cover a country as large and diverse as the United States with one curriculum and one style of play?
• Which pop culture references are best or worst when you’re a youth coach trying to demonstrate something?
• What’s the benefit of burping simultaneously while a U8 team is resting?

About me

I write. Constantly.

For several years, I edited and tinkered with HTML, JavaScript, XML and whatever else would make a website run. I’m currently taking a series of online courses in data science. But mostly, I write.

I’m best known for writing about soccer, including the underserved niches of women’s soccer and youth soccer. At USA TODAY, I was also the paper’s first mixed martial arts writer and an enthusiastic Olympics editor/reporter.

And still, I have aspirations of being the next great writer for Rolling Stone or some other musical/cultural magazine, keeping a blog and writing occasionally on entertainment and social issues.

My career path has been a strange one. I majored in philosophy and music at Duke, then went into copy editing. Even after my grad-school project cast doubt upon journalism as a long-term career choice, I stuck with it and spent a decade at USA TODAY. I left in 2010 to take control of my own time, dividing it between my books, my blogging, and my family. Not in that order.

My writing style is adaptable. I managed to squeeze a little bit of personality into the confines of USA TODAY’s brevity-first approach. I can write a straight game story with efficiency, clarity and style. I love the challenge of Twitter. I’ve dabbled into true multimedia storytelling. And I’ve written what we now call “long-form” — as the growing number of books under my name will attest.

Since leaving USA TODAY, I’ve been free to build my own brand and my voice. I’m honest and sometimes controversial without the nonsense and vitriol of talk radio. I share the Millennials’ irreverence, but I think snark is lazy. I love to explore new ways of doing things.

Any editors and publishers who want me to write for them can contact me at duresport at gmail.

If you just want to read what I’ve written already, browse away.