Month: August 2015

soccer

Single-Digit Soccer: What is this about?

Posted on by Beau Dure

Single-Digit Soccer is a book that will make youth soccer parents and coaches laugh, then push for change.

Single-Digit SoccerYouth soccer at this age (9 and below, hence “single-digit”) is fun. And funny. There’s no shortage of fun stories to tell, and I put a couple of them in the excerpt in SoccerWire.

But we also get into more serious topics. U.S. Soccer is trying to step up its game so we’ll have better players emerging from youth soccer. Yet the most obvious solutions aren’t always the best, and in the unique landscape of the United States, they’re often counterproductive.

So that leads us to some of the topics Single-Digit Soccer covers:

1. When do you start travel soccer? In most cases, we’re starting far earlier than development-minded coaches want. U.S. Youth Soccer actually says we should be holding off past the Single-Digit years. We’re obviously not.

2. Help! I’m coaching! What do I do? The book steers you to some good information online and reminds you that you can’t coach 6-year-olds the same way you’d coach 16-year-olds. It also gives you some fun prototypes to consider. Are you The Superfan? The “Fun” Coach? Mr. Passion? Take a look and take your pick!

3. How much do you emphasize winning? None. That’s the short answer. But it’s really hard to drill it in people’s skulls. And, at times, I see a few reasonable exceptions.

4. Are we inclusive? Or are we driving kids away from the sport because it costs too much, is too elitist (especially at too early an age), and stresses vague long-term interests over just making the dadgum game fun for kids to play?

5. Should we be doing more “free play”? Yes, though it’s sometimes a challenge when you don’t just have fields sitting around for the whole neighborhood to race out play pickup games. The book offers some ideas.

6. When should we teach … heading? Team tactics? Diving like Robben? The first two are addressed in the book. Not the third. Shhh. It’s a secret.

7. Why do we have so many different organizations telling us different things we’re supposed to be doing? The follow-up question: What do you do about it?

If you’re still unsure whether to sacrifice that Starbucks latte and buy Single-Digit Soccer instead, check out the excerpt at SoccerWire, my other contributions to SoccerWire, and my Single-Digit Soccer posts here at SportsMyriad. If you want to know more about me, check duresport.com to see much more of my writing and my work history.

You can also get a sense of Single-Digit Soccer from this short video:

The book will be available in paperback sometime in September. Electronically, it’s available now from the store of your choice: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple, Kobo, Scribd, Page Foundry/Inktera and Oyster.

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Single-Digit Soccer: The video (and official release date)

Posted on by Beau Dure

Single-Digit SoccerYou can now read Single-Digit Soccer on the electronic device of your choice.

The paperback edition hit a snag. I’ll keep working through it, and it should be ready in September, hopefully in early September.

If you have not yet read the excerpt posted at SoccerWire, take a look.

To celebrate the release, I’ve posted a video giving people a quick intro to the topic:

Enjoy, and please order on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple or Kobo.

Update: And it’s also available on Scribd, Page Foundry/Inktera and Oyster.

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soccer

Single-Digit Soccer: Why elite coaches should care about being inclusive

Posted on by Beau Dure

Should coaches of really good players from U9 to U19 pay attention to Single-Digit Soccer?

Until time freezes and no one ages, yes. U10s have a funny way of growing up to be U16s.

And while Single-Digit Soccer casts a wide net over everything — rec soccer, semi-serious travel soccer, TOPSoccer and extreme travel soccer — there’s plenty to hold the elite coach’s interest.

One major issue for these coaches: soccer’s dropout rate.

Here’s Kevin Payne, who has dealt with elite players as an MLS executive and continues to do so in his role as U.S. Club Soccer CEO, sums it up:

At the ages of 10, 11, 12, kids’ developmental age can vary as much as plus or minus four years from their chronological age. So you could have a 12-year-old kid and they might be developmentally closer to a 16-year-old, or they might be developmentally – especially physically – closer to an 8-year-old. So when the sport is losing 70 percent of its participants by the age of 12, there’s no way that anybody can tell you they’re not worried about that because that 70 percent is a cohort with no chance of becoming elite players.

The fact is, within that 70 percent there undoubtedly are players who could’ve become elite players. They just never got the chance, because they were subjected to such an intense and unpleasant experience, largely shaped by a very outcome-driven culture that they just said, ‘this isn’t fun any more, so I’m leaving.’

Those kids and the people around them never got the chance to figure out whether maybe they could be a serious player. It’s way, way too early to be expecting young players to exhibit the qualities necessary … We think it’s an absolutely critical element of player development in the U.S. to keep a much higher percentage of our soccer population involved in the game longer.

So if you’re focusing on the top 1 percent at U9, you’re not just missing out. You’re cutting down our country’s future player pool.

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Numbers on NWSL TV invisibility don’t add up

Posted on by Beau Dure

Fox made a big splash this year with the Bundesliga, easily one of the four best leagues in the world and one that holds a certain charm for U.S. fans, especially us old folks who remember Soccer Made In Germany.

The early ratings are in, and they’re not good. The only games drawing more than 50,000 viewers were broadcast on two channels in two languages, and you have to add them together to break 50K.

The NWSL, with far less fanfare and far fewer resources sunk into production, did better than that when it debuted in 2013.

So would someone care to explain to me why the NWSL doesn’t deserve a better TV deal? At least as good as whatever Fox is paying for the men’s Bundesliga?

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Alex Morgan and the Bedbugs That Ate the NWSL

Posted on by Beau Dure

As with many other Internet shoutfests, it all started with an innocuous tweet:

Can’t blame Sinclair for venting there. Bedbugs are every traveler’s nightmare. The big hype about bedbug resurgence came about a couple of years ago, and I’m still putting my bags up on hard surfaces to minimize the risk of anything hitching a ride back to my place. (I draw the line at the “pry the headboard off the wall, put your bags in the bathtub and wrap anything that you own in several layers of Saran Wrap” survivalism that was en vogue for a while.)

So we have one incident in which a hotel — one with a fairly notable brand name — had bedbugs. This won’t escalate into any sort of —

Uh oh.

Morgan’s since-deleted tweet says “There’s no other way to address continuing problems.”

If you go around and ask NWSL people, you’ll get the response, “What continuing problems? This was a one-time thing. It’s been handled.”

And bedbugs are, frankly, luck of the draw.

For the record, I was wrong about MLS. Alexi Lalas has clarified.

Morgan also mentioned mold, which should actually raise larger long-term concerns about this hotel because (A) it can make you sick and (B) given proper maintenance, it simply should not appear.

None of these nuances, of course, made it into the Twitter response.

https://twitter.com/alassadee13/status/633423425457946624

But some on Twitter at least shifted blame from the NWSL:

https://twitter.com/et_home13/status/633731045456609280

And there were these clever ones:

https://twitter.com/nathan_scott35/status/633714466232864769

And there’s this angle:

https://twitter.com/THEADMIRAL6/status/633425957311766528

The mainstream media, on the other hand, pretty much took the ball and ran:

(From that story: “The bed bug fiasco is just one example of the inequalities between male and female professional soccer players. As a simple point of comparison, the all-male New York City Football Club announced its partnership with the four-star Grand Hyatt back in March. No bed bugs have been found there…yet.” Yeah, that’s a fair comparison.)

https://twitter.com/STERLINGMHOLMES/status/633685515330392064

Well that’s fair and balanced.

Let’s be real clear ourselves here — no one is saying anyone should take a vow of silence over a bedbug encounter. And no one is saying we don’t wish women’s soccer players had it better. If it were up to me, women’s soccer players would live in Dan Borislow’s condos but have a professional training staff at all times. Best of both worlds.

But let’s also acknowledge this — professional women’s soccer is fragile. If you think living conditions and wages for the Ella Masars and Chantel Joneses of the world are grim, consider what Lori Lindsey, Sarah Huffman and Becky Sauerbrunn did when they played amateur ball. We can’t change this just by yelling at people.

You can certainly blame the media. They’ve added the “s” to “bedbug-ridden hotel” without making the slightest effort to clarify what Morgan was talking about with “continuing problems.”

And no one even asked the NWSL. It took me all of 12 minutes to get this response:

“During a recent road trip, a Portland Thorns FC player reported finding bed bugs in her hotel room at the team hotel in Kansas City. The hotel apologized, quickly provided a new room, and insisted the problem had been corrected. Upon learning of the situation, the League immediately spoke with both clubs, and FC Kansas City had already addressed the issue. For the remainder of the season, rooms have already been secured at another hotel. Player safety and comfort is important to all teams of the NWSL, and we are always seeking ways to improve our club and League operations. We regret this situation and apologize to the player involved.”

In any case, the damage has been done. The NWSL is now the league with the bedbugs. And if you care about conditions for players, you might also wonder if this was the best way to go about business for a league that still needs sponsors and a real TV deal to turn the corner.

Little wonder Morgan deleted the tweet. She knows the power of her words with her 2 million Twitter followers. If she didn’t before, she surely knows now. Because as much as we question the national team players’ dedication to the NWSL, they don’t want it to disappear. Right?

So maybe the next time something good happens in the NWSL, she might consider mentioning it?

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soccer

“Rock ‘n’ Roll Soccer” vs. NASL revisionism

Posted on by Beau Dure

Want a better U.S. soccer league? Try global dysfunction.

Yes, that’s a cynical clickbait headline. But it’s empirically true.

In Ian Plenderleith’s rollicking Rock ‘n’ Roll Soccer: The Short Life and Fast Times of the North American Soccer League, we learn a few reasons why international players were drawn to the USA in the late 70s and early 80s.

  1. Pay, of course. At the time, wages were limited in Europe, and the NASL could outbid most top-tier clubs, let alone the lower divisions.
  2. Mood of the country. “There is little doubt that in the 1970s the United States was a more glamourous and opulent place to live than Great Britain, with its endless strikes, shutdowns, power cuts and three-day weeks,” Plenderleith writes. In Northern Ireland, of course, things were much worse, with fear of terrorism and police brutality rampant. And if you wanted to leave England or Germany, where else were you going to go? The Soviet Union?
  3. Playing conditions. Yes, the NASL played on thin artificial turf in a lot of cities. In England, where groundskeeping had not yet advanced to today’s state, they played in cold mud. The sun and the stable surfaces were great NASL recruiting tools.
  4. Dour playing styles. The NASL’s heyday coincided with the final decade of the 2-1-0 points system, giving teams that much more incentive to “get a result.” Two draws equaled one win, and a lot of teams were content to get that. The NASL, Plenderleith says, gave players a fresh new slate. (And weird rules with bonus points for goals, etc.)

So if you want to re-create the old NASL’s drawing power to bring today’s Franz Beckenbauers and Rodney Marshes to the USA, you can’t just spend a little more money. The USA today isn’t a considerably better place to live than many places in Western Europe. The big leagues of Europe have immaculate grounds, stable countries, diverse play, and money, money, money.

And even in the glory days, it wasn’t as if the old NASL brought European stars to the USA at any younger of an age than MLS brings them today. Pele was already retired and in his mid-30s, with more than 700 competitive games on his resume, by the time he joined the New York Cosmos. Beckenbauer and Marsh were in their early 30s. George Best also was in his early 30s but had punished his body with hard living, playing his last pre-NASL season with Cork Celtic and second-tier Fulham. Thierry Henry, Kaka and David Beckham were also on the good side of 35 before crossing the pond.

The “retirement league” label, which seems more than fair to apply to the NASL in Plenderleith’s telling, is one of several reasons why it’s so strange to see fans of the latter-day NASL pushing for more traditional / authentic club cultures and league systems. A lot of players talk openly about their relief to find a place with a little less pressure than Munich or Manchester.

And the NASL was as far removed from soccer traditions as any league that has actually taken the field. (That rules out League One America.) They had the shootout, the 35-yard offside rule, six points for a win, bonus points for goals scored, additional points for wearing fringe, etc. (OK, not the last one, unfortunately for the Colorado Caribous.)

Moving into the present day … how in the world has NASL 2.0 become the beacon of traditional soccer with promotion/relegation and the works? Or to be more precise, could the pro/rel crowd have chosen a less likely brand on which to make its stand?

NASL teams didn’t bother with the Open Cup. (And yes, there was a second division — the ASL — which had a few teams that might have been able to claim some NASL scalps in a Cup.) They tinkered with every rule. Pro/rel? Ha!

So hitching your “the way the rest of the world does it” wagon to the NASL brand is a bit like taking the most artificial, Autotuned pop star on today’s radio and declaring him/her the standard-bearer of modern punk rock. (Somewhere, someone is trying to write the article declaring T-Pain and Ke$ha the modern answer to the Clash and the Sex Pistols. I’d love to read that just to see contortions involved.)

But Plenderleith’s look back is a fond one. Some of the rule changes won over the players who had battled in the top European leagues, and though they’re not in common use today, they were an important part of the global discussion on opening up the game. We’re used to 3 points for a win and restrictions on passing back to the keeper, two of the soundest ideas that emerged from this bundle of ideas.

And the NASL did indeed bring together some quality players onto diverse teams. That was revolutionary. At the time, English clubs were English and Scottish, with the occasional Irish or Welsh player tossed in. German clubs were German, with the faintest smattering of players from outside.

That’s yet another reason why a modern-day Cosmos can never be quite the same as the old. When the English clubs are picking from England and you’re picking from the rest of the world, you might have a chance of compiling a team that can compete with the best from England. Now that the clubs in the Premier League, La Liga and the Bundesliga can simply buy the world’s best talent, the gap is much larger. The novelty factor of a cosmopolitan club is dead in the post-Bosman age.

If you’re expecting a lot of rock ‘n’ roll in Rock ‘n’ Roll Soccer, you’ll be disappointed. Plenderleith dismisses the fun Cosmos documentary Once in a Lifetime, and this is not a collection of stories of Pele, Chinaglia and Mick Jagger at Studio 54.

Instead, you get an entertaining but level-headed look back at a league that broke a lot of rules and a lot of barriers. It’s fun to remember it for what it was rather than what it wasn’t. And it’s safe to say there will never again be a league quite like it.

The book is available for pre-order at Amazon, or if you can’t wait, get the UK edition from a third party at Amazon.

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The NASL, NPSL, and why there’s no pleasing pro/rel advocates

Posted on by Beau Dure

If you read all my tweets and replies on Twitter, you may have noticed that I’ve eased up a bit on ignoring the crowd that pushes for promotion and relegation in U.S. soccer. It’s intentional. I think we’re starting to see some ideas that go beyond shouting anti-MLS slogans. And given the scarcity of MLS content I’m writing these days, it’s almost like tripping down Memory Lane, like going back to a high school reunion and chatting amiably with the guy who was a total jerk and bully the whole time.

Wait a minute. Scratch that. That guy still doesn’t get it. Hope he gags on the hors d’oeuvres.

And that’s kind of how it is in the pro/rel world. Today’s conversation was a perfect demonstration.

Start with this intriguing story:

https://twitter.com/Rborba23/status/631482183895674882

So the NPSL, the mostly amateur league that shares unofficial fourth division status with the PDL and recently drew more than 18,000 fans for its final in Chattanooga, would work something out with the NASL, which has long (well, at least in Bill Peterson’s tenure) made noises about wanting promotion/relegation in U.S. soccer.

Easier said than done, of course. The NPSL uses mostly young amateur players, many of them in college. So most of their teams are bound by NCAA restrictions on how they can assemble their teams, maintaining amateur status, and wrapping up the season early so kids can dash back to their college teams for preseason. Then you add U.S. Soccer’s onerous second-division standards (one owner has to have $20 million, which has always struck me as absurd), and you can see a few hurdles.

But if you really want to see promotion/relegation make the transition from “hot-button Internet cult shoutfest issue” to “something that might actually happen,” you’d think this would be good news. And so, consistent with what I’ve said earlier about the best path to pro/rel being a strong NASL forcing a merger, I said the following:

I even went back and dug up my own pro/rel plan:

And so we all joined hands, sang a few songs of praise, and talked about the details of what a future U.S. pro landscape might look like.

Oh, wait. No, we didn’t.

One hint of the problem was a tweet that came in just as I was writing mine:

And indeed, the man who has devoted the last 6-8 years of his life tweeting about pro/rel fantasies was not happy with a proposal to actually talk about actually doing it.

(That said, the NASL tossed cold water on this idea itself:)

But to be fair, he has long insisted that leagues shouldn’t go it alone, and that the federation should drive it. I don’t see why, personally, but he is indeed consistent.

And so is the vitriol I received from elsewhere:

When I have my midlife crisis and form a Husker Du cover band, I might call it “Antiquated Zealotry.”

https://twitter.com/American_red13/status/631487748260646912

(And yes, I made a typo. At this point, I was tweeting about as quickly as I could type. That’s not good.)

https://twitter.com/TheSoccerDcn/status/631488195440607237

So he’s not reading what I’m tweeting, he surely didn’t notice that the last substantial piece I wrote about MLS was ripping the league for its stance in collective bargaining, and yet he feels he can sum up my opinions. OK.

Yeah, he clearly skipped my proposal on Brazilian-style state leagues. And my tweet on the NASL/NPSL thing.

I get all this flack from the pro/rel crowd for a few reasons. First, I’ve pointed out a few inconvenient truths on the matter:

1. Soccer was an ignored and often despised sport in this country through much of the 20th century, giving the rest of the world a bit of a head start. Read Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism or the definitive U.S. soccer history Soccer in a Football World for the full story. 

2. The people willing to take the risk to do professional soccer at a strong but sustainable level had to appeal to investors by minimizing risk (I wrote a book that mentions all this, a bit), hence the “single entity” system and cost containment.

3. More investors have bought into MLS with the implicit understanding that they are buying into the USA’s first-division league.

4. Many investors have bought into lower-division leagues with the implicit understanding that they’re aren’t going to jump up to a Division I or Division II budget if they win too many games.

5. Promotion/relegation would be cool, but it’s not necessary. Barcelona isn’t Barcelona because they fear relegation. They fear losing the championship to Real Madrid. As they should. Real Madrid is the club of the old corrupt monarchy. But that’s another rant.

And so on — see all the previous posts.

Second, I have actually engaged with a lot of these people and continue to do so even as most journalists — you might say the saner, more intelligent journalists — have cut off contact.

(I once had someone tell me I should take it as a compliment that these folks go after me instead of Big Name Journalist X because they find me a lot smarter and better than Big Name Journalist X. I’m really not. I just have bad compulsive behavior, as illustrated here:)

But let’s get back to today’s conversation, summing up as follows:

Me: “Hey, neat promotion/relegation idea.”

Them: “Shut up, you MLSbot antiquated zealot turnip walnut.”

The underlying lesson from this conversation:

There is no pleasing the promotion/relegation zealots.

You might say it’s just me, and no matter how many schemes I put forward, no matter how many times I say I really could see the NASL building up with a pyramid that forces a merger with MLS down the road, they won’t listen.

But no. It’s not just me.

These are the people who have to be different. They have to feel superior. They’re the ones who saw R.E.M. have hit songs and make real videos and smirked, “They’ve sold out.” They’re the ones who only like the U.K. version of The Office — not that they’ve ever seen any of the U.S. episodes past Season 1.

Their greatest fear is that someone will do exactly what they want. Because then they’d have to find another cause.

Like Jason Street when he was paralyzed or Tim Riggins when he finished school, they would lose their identity.

And that identity is more important to them than the cause itself.

They know we aren’t likely to see MLS integrated into a promotion/relegation system for all the reason I’ve listed above and more. So they’re safe.

And that’s why, even as we see occasional glimmers of reason in the national pro/rel discussion, we’re a long, long way from any of this being taken seriously.

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NWSL, Spirit-Flash report: We want more of this &*&&%ing league

Posted on by Beau Dure

Tonight’s Washington Spirit-Western New York Flash game was infuriating, frustrating, bizarre, comical and downright baffling. And I’m pissed off.

I’m pissed off because … the season is almost over. And I want more of this.

I don’t want to see a bunch of national team players who’ve already had a ticker-tape parade and endorsement deals strutting around on a dadgum “Victory Tour” playing meaningless exhibitions. Not now, anyway.

I don’t want to see sycophantic pseudo-journalists and radio hosts booking these players for interviews in which every question is some variant of “So how did it feel when you got that medal?”

I want to see Crystal Dunn racing toward the goal, stopped only by the skill, speed and impeccable timing of Whitney Engen.

I want to see Chantel Jones atoning for a howler by flinging herself across the goal and to the upper corner to swat away Dunn’s best shot of the night.

I want to see Franny Ordega turning a defender one way, then another, then another.

I want to see Christine Nairn blasting 35-yard shots that either go in or rattle the crossbar.

Farther afield, I want to see Christen Press challenging Becky Sauerbrunn. I want to see Alyssa Naeher single-handedly keeping the Boston Breakers from utter catastrophe.

I want to see stuff like this:

And I want to see players develop. I want to see Nairn shake the habit she showed tonight of getting caught in possession. I want to see Kealia Ohai pushing herself to make that extra move to create chances. I want to see Julie Johnston trying to organize a back line to contain Dunn, Ordega and Diana Matheson.

Last and not least, I want to see referees develop. I want to see Kari Seitz and Margaret Domka come back from the accolades of a World Cup or Olympic assignment and be humbled by botching a domestic game. (I can only hope their assessors are honest with them.) I want to see PRO called to account for refs who think grabbing an opponent’s shoulder and shoving her down is a legal shoulder charge.

There’s some debate over a play late in tonight’s game in which Ali Krieger tried to take a quick restart, only to find Michelle Heyman standing in her way. Krieger kicked, and the ball wound up on a Spirit arm. The call: handball on the Spirit. I thought it was an atrocious call, figuring Heyman deserved yellow for delaying the restart. At the time, I based this solely on that old standby of referee critics: “What I recall seeing in other games.” Others have told me Krieger was supposed to ask ref to give her the 10 yards.

I think I’m right, based on this passage from the U.S. Soccer Advice to Referees:

Typical examples of causing a delay in this way are kicking the ball away when a decision has gone against them, picking up the ball and not giving the ball to the attacking team or to the referee, moving to retrieve a ball some distance away and then walking slowly to bring the ball back, and standing so close by the ball as to effectively interfere with all reasonably likely directions for the restart. These ploys must be met with an immediate response because, as a result, a delay is no longer theoretical; it has been forced and the challenge to Law 13 must be dealt with swiftly.

Heyman was practically on top of the ball, so I think the part in bold applies.

But the part that had Mark Parsons engaging in a lengthy postgame rant was just basic control of the match. It wasn’t even so much this match as it was his team’s last two or three, where he says referees have just let obvious fouls go. This match, he says, wasn’t proper soccer and was difficult to watch. Parsons went out of his way to say the ref didn’t decide the outcome of the game. Just its quality.

Refs, like players, aren’t going to get better prancing around the country like the Harlem Globetrotters. They’re going to get better when they’re on the field for a domestic league game that matters.

A game that makes fans stand up and applaud when a Nigerian player leaves the field after a terrific effort. A game that makes fans in the USA’s capital embrace a Canadian. A game that rattles coaches’ senses so strongly that Flash coach Aaran Lines thinks he had a perfect view of the goal line when he’s 70 yards away on a bench. (And thinks his team had momentum at the end of the game.)

Bottom line: This NWSL season is ending far too quickly. Players need more. Refs need more. Fans need more.

So next year, my advice would be to take a break for the Olympics. Play a few friendlies — give the non-international players a couple of games to stay sharp and the fans a nice discounted night out. But then play longer into the fall.

That might cut down on players spending their offseasons elsewhere, but maybe that’s not a bad thing. Tori Huster has been going back and forth between the NWSL and Australia, and now she’s banged up and not starting.

Regardless of how long the season goes, it deserves more attention. You want development? It’s here. You want drama? It’s here.

And I’ll give the reminder I always give the posers who’d rather sit around eating meat pies in their basements watching soccer on TV instead of going out to see the supposedly lesser games live … nothing beats live soccer.

TV isn’t going to do Crystal Dunn’s slicing offensive moves any justice. YouTube certainly won’t. You have to be there.

Not just once every couple of years, when the national team decides to come to your town to walk through a game, graciously accept your applause and then sign about 8,000 autographs. Several times a year, whenever you can make it to the stadium. (Weeknight driving to the SoccerPlex is not fun.)

You’ll see drama. You’ll see development.

The Spirit only have one more home game left this season.

And that pisses me off. Not that I think they deserve a home playoff game — based on their current results, they don’t. I just want to see more.

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Single-Digit Soccer: Book available for pre-order

Posted on by Beau Dure

Single-Digit SoccerIf you can’t wait to read Single-Digit Soccer, here’s good news: You … only have to wait a couple more weeks. But you can be ready to read it the second it’s available if you pre-order now.

The electronic version will be available August 27. I’m hoping to have the print version ready the same day, but I can’t promise that just yet.

If you check today, you may find the book is listed at 27 or 32 pages. It’ll be longer than that — somewhere in the high 100s. That page measurement was taken from a place-holding sample.

I’ll link to each outlet as the pre-ordering availability comes online. Here goes:

1. Amazon (the print edition will also be here at some point)

2. Barnes and Noble (new, August 7)

3. Apple/iTunes

4. Kobo (they’ve actually pulled a small sample from the rough draft)

5. Scribd (not yet as of August 7)

6. PageFoundry (not yet as of August 7)

7. Oyster (not yet as of August 7)

I’ll update this list as I see new links.

This book, like coaching youth soccer, has been difficult but rewarding. I’m so grateful to everyone who has helped out. Here’s a partial list:

People I interviewed (the last four indirectly): Sam Snow (U.S. Youth Soccer), Christian Lavers (U.S. Club Soccer), Rick Wolff, Robin Fraser, Julie Foudy, Tiffany Weimer, Garth Lagerwey, Alexi Lalas, Kofi Sarkodie, Andrew Driver, Mike Chabala and Bobby Boswell.

People who helped me gather interviews: Monique Bowman (NSCAA), Lester Gretsch (Houston Dynamo).

People who’ve kicked around ideas with me: Kate Markgraf, Brandi Chastain, Joanna Lohman, Charles Boehm, Jon Townsend, and tons of anonymous people at BigSoccer.

Editors who’ve put up with my self-indulgent soccer writing: Boehm, Chris Hummer, Deb Barrington, Steve Berkowitz and Gary Kicinski.

Editor who is making this book much cleaner and coherent: Laurel Robinson.

People at my club: Mike Allen, Pete Wacht, Jane Dawber, Eddie Lima, Mike Gurdak, Ryan Phair, Andrew Ritter, Lee Chichester, Jason Steiner, Damon Lee, Michele Sullivan, Chris Hegedus, Rob Lancaster and Mike Lyons.

My workplace: Mary and the crew at Starbucks at Vienna Marketplace.

Every player and parent on my teams, especially my two sons and my remarkably patient wife.

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Big heart makes women’s soccer special

Posted on by Beau Dure

Yes, women’s soccer can be frustrating. Two U.S. leagues have disappeared in the past 12 years, and the third is redefining “low profile.” Fans (and sometimes players) argue on social media about the strangest stuff. (This 18-month-old Alex Morgan dis was favorited tonight.) The U.S. national team sometimes looks like it was selected five years ago — the tactics sometimes look as if they were drawn up 15 years ago.

Let’s forget all that for a minute and back up.

 

One bias I’ve always had is for the players who fought their way through the Dark Ages of the mid-2000s. Kevin Parker wrote about the ones who passed through Washington, and Jen Cooper covered it in her Mixxed Zone podcast about “the 99ers and the 90 percent.” The “90 percent” refers to the players who aren’t national team stars but make a pro league competitive, providing challenges that the national team players need to stay sharp. And without them, you don’t have local teams that give fans a chance to see these players in person more than once every couple of years.

Some players don’t have a sense of that shared struggle. Some do. Tonight at the SoccerPlex, they did.

Start with the autographs. I don’t really “get” autographs, to be honest, and I’ve seen a few fans who are a little too demanding, insulting players who aren’t the big stars. But you have to be impressed when players sign for as many fans as possible, trying to make that connection. Tonight, Carli Lloyd from the visiting Dash signed a lot. So did Meghan Klingenberg. So did Spirit stars like Ashlyn Harris and, I think, Ali Krieger.

Lloyd even signed one of the cockroach banners the Spirit Squadron held up in reference to … something I missed on Twitter. I didn’t quite get it, but Lloyd did.

Then there’s this:

Typo in Jen’s tweet — she has ALS, sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Lloyd did indeed make time to go over to see her. So did Krieger.

But this fan got much more. As Spirit players left the field one by one, they went over to her. She wound up with as many eight players at a time all chatting with her. She may not have full control over her body any more, but she had a huge smile.

The Spirit players got her up out of her chair for a picture. Then Crystal Dunn, all five-foot-nothing of her, carefully placed her back in the chair before everyone started smiling and laughing again. If laughter’s the best medicine, then this woman is going to pull a Stephen Hawking and live with ALS for decades to come.

In case you forgot, Dunn also did this tonight …

And she scored twice more in the 3-1 win, including a header off a corner kick. Again, she is not tall.

Back to the postgame — I’m in awe of athletes and other celebrities who meet ailing people. Imagine what it’s like to be presented with a person who has been told he or she might live much longer. Now you’re responsible for creating a magical moment. No pressure.

When you see the way these players interact with fans, you see how special they are in ways beyond their skills. It’s almost unfair that these people who have been blessed with talent and determination also have the social graces and kind hearts to make others feel special as well.

And you can see it in how they interact with each other. Houston defender Niki Cross played her final game tonight, and in deference to the time she spent with the Spirit, she was honored with a pregame bouquet courtesy of Ashlyn Harris, who has been close with Cross since they were teammates in the early days of WPS. Fans chanted her name when she came onto the field as a second-half sub.

So women’s soccer is in that sweet spot right now — popular enough to have sought-after stars but still maintaining a sense that we’re all in this together.

You may not guess it from Twitter, but I’m an optimist. I think women’s soccer can maintain this spirit even as the sport matures and the mainstream media picks up the tactical and technical debates the hard-core fans and bloggers are doing now.

The players can handle it. They want to be pros. They deserve to be pros. They deserve the attention not just of the autograph hounds or the pundits who turn up out of the woodwork every four years, but the everyday sports fan.

So I left the SoccerPlex feeling pretty good about the sport. Both teams played dynamic, attacking soccer. They didn’t take advantage of the referee’s lack of attention. It was a great show with a wonderful display of heart.

Tomorrow, we’ll get back to the criticism and debate. It’s all meant to be constructive. We all care. We all see something special in this sport, and tonight reminded us why.

 

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