Month: November 2016

women's soccer, work portfolio

U.S. women and 60 Minutes: What we still don’t know

Posted on by Beau Dure

Yes, Carli Lloyd actually said the women’s team deserves to be paid more than the men.

We still don’t know what that means.

So my Guardian piece on the matter covers some familiar ground. But we do have some news, and it’s probably not good. This labor dispute has no signs of progress. The next round of talks has been delayed, and we don’t know why. The EEOC doesn’t seem to be close to issuing any sort of guidance.

The women are willing to talk about the issues. But only on their terms.

A few other thoughts:

  • I’m not comfortable calling the women’s soccer team the greatest team in women’s sports history. Not when the USA had to catch up to other countries in basketball and is now overwhelmingly No. 1 in a sense that the women’s soccer team never was.
  • The piece wasn’t bad, especially given its generalist audience, but some of the editing made little sense. Rich Nichols made a point about the similarities (or differences?) between the U.S. soccer dispute and the NBA/WNBA, and the context of his point wasn’t at all clear. Hope Solo made a point about the men getting paid “win or lose” — in the context of U.S. women’s salaries that are paid, you guessed, win or lose. (Or sit out entirely.)
  • The points raised on travel are misleading if not outright false. The men travel business class when they’re flying to camp from their European club teams and on a charter when they’re going some place like San Pedro Sula. They’ve sometimes been in coach in other situations, though I don’t know how recently. The women’s Memorandum of Understanding says flights over three hours are business class or charter. If USSF is violating that deal, then that’s a point worth mentioning. (That said, the sides are trying to negotiate what happens in the future.)
  • We still don’t know how any of this affects the NWSL. Some people who chatted with me say it’s not fair to expect the U.S. women’s deal to have any NWSL ramifications. Maybe it’s not. But if U.S. Soccer is going to continue subsidizing salaries for its players in the NWSL, then it’ll be difficult to write a labor deal that doesn’t address that fact.

Here’s the story, which has a surprising number of comments considering that the U.S. soccer community has been preoccupied with the Klinsmann matter: The USA women’s national team are demanding equal pay. Is it realistic? | Football | The Guardian

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culture, women's soccer

To my LGBTQ friends, colleagues and readers …

Posted on by Beau Dure

I’m not going to lie. I grew up with a backwards attitude. Yeah, Athens is a college town, but it’s still in Georgia. At both my rough-and-tumble public school and my vaguely Christian-ish (and generally wonderful) private school, homophobia reigned. “Gay” meant “weak.”

It took me a few years to realize that I knew gay people. Those guys we knew in Savannah who lived together with their bulldogs? Yeah. My relative who only married a woman as a business deal of sorts? Yeah.

In college, I met plenty of people who were out. And my attitude changed.

College will do that to you if you go to the right place. My perceptions on Muslims changed. I had known a couple of Jewish neighbors at home, but now I was seeing observances of all the holidays and learning much more about the religion and the culture. And I met gay people, some of whom didn’t conform to any stereotype that had been instilled in me in Athens.

I don’t think I actively hated anyone growing up. But I was ignorant. Surely insensitive at times.

And my attitude on sexual identity was still framed by my church and the “muscular Christianity” youth groups that had taught me to play football very well and soccer very badly. I needed a few years out in the real world to see that things weren’t always what a hyper-literal and biased interpretation of the Bible could make them seem.

At the same time, I’d always been open to women’s sports. I went to women’s basketball games at Duke when maybe 200 people would show up. I had friends on the volleyball team and soccer team. I nearly got in a fight at N.C. State during a volleyball match. (Those guys were jerks.)

So whenever I’ve been in sports journalism, in and out over the last 25 years, I’ve covered women’s sports, ranging from UNC Wilmington basketball games that no one saw and Women’s World Cup games that packed stadiums in Germany.

And through the years, acceptance of gay players and fans has grown. At UNC Wilmington, there were occasional whispers. Now I cover soccer teams with multiple lesbian players and a large LGBTQ fan base.

Why am I talking about this now?

Because we just had an election, and I see a lot of people who are scared. I think the gay-bashing rhetoric we saw in the election has little change of becoming law, but a lot of hateful people now feel empowered, and that’s legitimately frightening.

So I’m writing now to say this …

I’ve got your back.

Maybe 30 years ago, when I was a naive high school kid in Georgia, I wouldn’t have said that. I wouldn’t have understood why it was important to say it.

And even today, I have to limit my political statements for a variety of reasons. I’m not going to argue federal income tax with anyone.

But today I understand that basic human decency means treating people with dignity. So if anyone tries to invalidate the lives and loves of their fellow human beings, I will speak up.

Yell at me about my women’s soccer coverage. That’s fine. We have controversies. But just know that when it comes to what’s really important, I’m on your side.

My favorite tweet of the past two days:

Joanna Lohman is a lot stronger than most of us. She’s certainly stronger than I am, so I doubt she really needs my help.

But I’ve got her back. And yours. And yours.

 

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youth soccer

Youth soccer and credible voices (or, should parents shut up?)

Posted on by Beau Dure

I’m generally no fan of postmodernism. On matters like climate change, vaccines and economics, I think we should listen to experts, not just whoever’s shouting the loudest or is deemed to be the most disenfranchised.

But it’s always good to get a variety of perspectives, as long as we take them for what they are.

In youth soccer, we have a variety of credible voices. The trick is getting them to listen to each other.

The most obvious credible voices are coaches with a track record of helping players get better. They’re the experts on practice plans and training tips. And we should certainly listen to them when they point to systemic problems that keep them from doing what they do.

Then we have the groups studying the big picture, expressing different but overlapping concerns. These include Project Play, which is mostly concerned with keeping sports accessible for all so kids get exercise and positive experiences. Then we have the Changing the Game Project, started by a soccer coach who has done some deep-diving on psychology to challenge the old-school ways on sports from rec level to elite level. Then there’s the U.S. Olympic Committee, which is certainly interested in the elite level but whose American Development Model has some conclusions that coincide with Project Play’s concerns.

An example of the overlap: Project Play’s home page currently highlights an American Academy of Pediatrics study warning against early specialization in sports. That study points to the trend toward “long-term athlete development,” which is an underpinning of … the American Development Model.

single-digit-soccer1My book, Single-Digit Soccer, is a synthesis of these trends in youth soccer discourse as they apply to the youngest players. Hopefully, it’s not quite that dry. It’s leavened with plenty of anecdotes to illustrate the situations and keep the reader awake.

And there are some things for which I only have anecdotal evidence. Not perfect, but in some cases, studies either don’t exist or would be impossible to conduct.

One of those anecdotal items: I’m finding that many parents are catching on to the modern ways while many coaches are not.

That’s surprising. If you’ve ever reffed a youth game, you’ve probably come away rolling your eyes at the nonsense you hear from parents, often contradicting what the coach is trying to get them to do. It takes some restraint not to turn around and yell, “The next parent who yells BOOT IT will be watching from the parking lot!”

But consider this situation: A U9 game in which one team was having a lot of trouble with goal kicks. That’s common — it’s why U.S. Soccer has mandated a new “buildout” line to let teams work it out of the back. The other team eagerly swarmed around hapless defenders waiting for slow-rolling goal kicks to get there, and they scored goal after goal.

The coach was perfectly happy with the proceedings. The parents were yelling at their kids to play actual soccer. So which group was properly emphasizing “development” over “winning”? Maybe the parents aren’t always wrong.

On a larger scale, I find a lot of resistance from soccer coaches to Single-Digit Soccer ideas. They’d like to dismiss them as the foolish rantings of a journalist-turned-parent coach who is never going to develop a player for anything beyond second-tier travel soccer.

So it gets back to credible voices and assessing their expertise and experience. When it comes to drawing up a practice plan for a U16 elite team, go with the experienced coach.

When it comes to the bigger picture, we have a lot of credible voices. They might be Project Play researchers finding pediatricians and sport scientists whose work challenges the old ways of doing things. They might be parents who aren’t soccer experts but are unwilling to have their kids sacrifice a normal childhood so their chances of being professional soccer players rise from 0.01% to 0.1%. And yes, they might be coaches who see obstacles toward proper development.

We need all these voices. My work has sought to amplify them.

But we also need to listen to them. Don’t just shoot the messenger and walk away.

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women's soccer, work portfolio

Turmoil in U.S. women’s soccer and NWSL player pool

Posted on by Beau Dure

My latest for The Guardian looks at the start of a possible player exodus from the NWSL while the U.S. women’s national team negotiations — which directly affect the league — race toward the year-end deadline.

How turmoil in US women’s soccer could drive players to Europe | Football | The Guardian

Related: Yesterday’s post about Hope Solo’s court case showing no signs of ending any time soon.

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