Author: Beau Dure

The guy who wrote a bunch of soccer books and now runs a Gen X-themed podcast while substitute teaching and continuing to write freelance stuff.
us soccer, youth soccer

Why coaching youth soccer is impossible

Posted on by Beau Dure

There’s something funny about listening to a chat between the great soccer coaching gurus John O’Sullivan and Sam Snow while dodging baseballs lobbed over a bunch of Little League All-Stars and the right field fence by a baseball coach might be a little too excited over this coaching gig.

As I retrieved a ball that had sailed over my head, several yards beyond the fence on the park’s walking trail, I heard O’Sullivan and Snow talk about things that make them cringe as they see soccer coaches in action.

I laughed at the first few items. Starting a practice with laps is so 1983, isn’t it?

Then Sam, someone who has been a wonderful resource for me and thousands of others, lamented the warmup drill in which players line up, play the ball forward to a coach, run on to the square pass the coach sends them, and blast it at the goal.

Hey, wait a minute. That’s my gameday warmup.

Sam’s objection — in addition, I presume, to the fact that we coaches are supposed to avoid “lines, laps and lectures” as much as possible — is that it doesn’t mimic the game.

“Well,” I objected in my head as I continued my walk on the uphill section and started breathing a little heavier, “if you have a forward who understands playing his back to goal, you might see a give-and-go combination … OK, Sam, you’re right.”

But what I didn’t hear was what I’m supposed to do instead.

I’m sure some hotshot Self-Appointed Elite coach who only works with top-tier talent will tell me what I’m supposed to do. Maybe it’s some sort of dazzling drill in which the ball is played out to the wing and a defender applies some pressure before it’s played back into the center. Or maybe I’m supposed to do what every NWSL team does — possession drills and some sort of painful-looking exercise involving large rubber bands.

Let me explain a few things to the SAE coach:

  1. I’m not coaching D.C. United’s U-18s. I’m coaching rec league players. If I have 11 players by the time the ref calls us over to check our shin guards, I consider myself lucky. I don’t have a lot of time to explain anything. I need to keep it simple.
  2. Why do we think of finishing as dessert? (I can’t cite the originator of that analogy because it’s quite old.) Do your 5,000 short touches, juggle 3,000 times, run 20 possession drills with no passes longer than five yards, and then we might let you take a shot. And then we wonder why no one can score a danged goal.

So I hear what Sam’s saying. But then how do I learn what I’m supposed to do instead?

Google didn’t help. The first item that came up on my search was a warmup drill that’s basically free kicks with no defense. How realistic is that?

Here’s the next problem: We have so many different philosophies. John didn’t use the word “rondo” but stepped into The Great Rondo Kerfuffle of 2018 by fretting about “directionless” drills. (Granted, after seeing Spain crash out of the World Cup because it ran a 120-minute rondo against Russia and neglected to set up meaningful scoring chances, perhaps the U.S. idea of adding “direction” to possession drills will gain some traction. Or, again, maybe we should work on finishing on occasion?)

But the biggest problem was something John and Sam mentioned as a positive of older-skewing licenses. In the National Youth License, coaches are taught how to teach. They’re taught about the “psychosocial” aspects of coaching.

Those of us who coach at the earliest stages of the game are taught nothing of the sort. And yes, I’ve taken the new “grassroots” modules — at least the ones that are out now. The F license, which was discarded for reasons known only to people in Chicago, taught a bit of it, at least by the example of seeing Shannon MacMillan teach.

The licensing courses have typically focused on practice plans. Is that really the first priority for grassroots coaches? Shouldn’t we be getting our practice plans from those who have really studied them?

Unfortunately, the practice plans we get generally aren’t helpful. They’re written for other members of the technical staff, full of jargon that Coach A and Coach B might understand but not the befuddled coaches of the C-teams and the recreational kids.

The new “Play-Practice-Play” practice plans, admittedly a good bit simpler than the “Warmup-Small Sided Game-Expanded Small Sided Game Because You’re Supposed to Guess The Difference Between That and the Small-Sided Game-Scrimmage With Caveats” practice plan we were taught a couple of years ago, are interesting. But the first set of plans I saw (I’m not going to name the state association that posted them) had something interesting. I checked out the U14 plans, which had nice names like “attacking from wide areas” and “defending crosses.” Take away the titles, and every practice was almost exactly the same. Get the kids to warmup with some 2v2, 3v3 and dynamic stretching while you talk to them about their day. (The last bit is a nice touch — finally teaching us how to teach.) Then move into the “practice” phase — which is basically a half-field setup in which seven players are trying to score against six. Doesn’t matter what topic it is. It’s an odd-number attack.

Maybe we should simply admit it. “OK, coach of a team from U12 on up. You’re going to do the same thing every practice. You’re going to do small-sided scrimmages, then basically a halfcourt scrimmage. We’re just going to ask you to emphasize different points in each one.”

So instead of a bunch of diagrams that spell out the same thing every practice, you just give us a list. Hey, we can put that on our phones. Nice.

Even then, though, we still won’t have much idea how to teach a lot of valuable skills. How do you teach someone to shoot like Denis Cheryshev? How do you teach someone to drop a 50-yard pass effortlessly into the stride of a teammate? (Granted, those might be beyond the capacity of a rec-leaguer, anyway.)

I’m going into my U16 and U14 seasons with two goals.

  1. Get players a lot of touches on the ball in varying situations. Futsal is nice, but it doesn’t teach you how to switch the point of attack on a full-sized field or deal with a hard-hit ball at chest level.
  2. Learn how to move on a big field.

That’ll be tough, because my practice space is generally one-fourth of a field. But we’ll give it a shot.

I’m open for ideas. Especially a new warmup exercise for unskilled finishers with short attention spans.

 

1
youth soccer

Why School of Rock is better than youth soccer

Posted on by Beau Dure

We’ve made a decision in our household. Less soccer. More music.

Don’t adjust Project Play’s dreary stats on quitting sports. We still have soccer players under our roof. (I’ll actually be the only non-player in the house this fall, and I’ll be coaching and possibly reffing.) But the year-round commitment? Three practices and a game in the typical fall or spring week? Long drives out to the exurbs and beyond? Done.

Instead, the top activity will be School of Rock. And even as someone who has devoted most of his professional career to sports, especially soccer, I’m thrilled.

School-of-rock

As a parent, I can say with no doubt whatsoever that School of Rock isn’t just a different experience than youth soccer. It’s better.

Sure, I’m glad my kids will continue to play soccer in some form. They’ll learn teamwork in situations in which the outcome is far from certain. They have to deal with winning and losing at some point in life. Better to do it now.

Plus, there’s the whole “don’t be a slug as a child and grow up to be 300 pounds with all sorts of health issues” thing. If your kids aren’t playing soccer or any other team sport, they need to be cycling or running or swimming or something else to stay active. Then we have to keep up the pace as adults, especially when we hit 40 and our metabolism slows to a crawl.

But School of Rock offers so many things youth soccer does not.

Kids truly progress according to their own aptitude and effort. There’s no “U10” or “U12” at School of Rock. At my kid’s very first show, he was maybe 9 years old, playing a few relatively complex parts. A few other young kids were playing parts of various complexity. And a few older kids were stomping out awesome bass grooves and guitar solos while singing and strutting across the stage like they’re auditioning to replace Ann Wilson or Roger Daltrey.

School of Rock students get whatever parts they can handle. The big high school senior who plays rock-steady bass parts will be the guy who holds Disco Inferno together. The scared elementary schooler who can barely reach the drum pedals will play a simple beat on a simple song. And everything in between.

It’s not like youth soccer, where we recreational coaches toss out a kid on the field to play his required half of the game, knowing full well we’re going to have a massive hole in the lineup that will be exploited by the bigger, faster, ruthless attackers on the other team. And it’s not like a travel soccer game in which one team might not be challenged. If I Love Rock and Roll is too easy for you, try this …

Or maybe this …

Those two songs featured in the little one’s last show. He played keyboards on the first. The second was held together by a high schooler who’s a pretty good soccer player but also an amazing drummer. (And guitarist.)

I majored in music. (And philosophy, because I collect useless degrees.) My son surpassed me in terms of ear training and general keyboard skills before he finished elementary school.

And one factor in that development is this …

The older kids encourage the younger kids. One student we’re going to miss at School of Rock now that she’s graduated is a charismatic, ever-smiling singer. Earlier this year, at the CBGB-themed show, I saw her sing Blondie’s Call Me and then point over at my kid when it was time for the keyboard solo.

At the last show for her and the big bass guy, I thanked both of them for encouraging my son so much. She gave him a big hug and told him how awesome he is.

You might get that sort of atmosphere at your local soccer club. We were lucky to have a small travel club in which the older kids set a nice example and got the younger kids juggling more without even realizing what they were doing. But most of the time, the U18 team is off doing its own thing while the U9s never see anyone older.

“But this is an unfair comparison,” you might say. “You can’t throw elementary schoolers on the same field as high schoolers, and team sports teach kids to deal with adversity.”

Sure, but you can find ways to mix the age groups without having a 16-year-old run over a 10-year-old. And as for adversity …

School of Rock teaches kids to deal with failure. Every once in a while, a song turns into a train wreck. The drummer’s concentration wavers on a difficult part. The singer can’t quite hit all the notes and is rattled to the point of missing a few words. It’s just as painful to watch as a parent as a defensive breakdown or a whiffed shot on the soccer field.

So what happens next? You play the next song. It’s not like soccer, where if you have a bad game, you have a week to deal with it. If you know a season’s going down the tubes, you’re SOL. Gotta stay in that division for the rest of that season — or longer, if you have the misfortune of being in an “elite” league with no promotion/relegation or other mechanism for pulling an overmatched team out of the fray.

And you have to try out to make the top bands. We have a “House” band that’s basically the opposite of “House” soccer. It’s the best of the best. There are some damn good musicians in the “JV” House band and some more who, like a recreational soccer player, simply can’t make the commitment to the extra practices required here. Kids might try out and not make it.

So you’re not sheltered from anything at School of Rock. Even on an individual level, the frustration of not being able to nail a difficult part is just as hard to handle as the frustration of missing that crucial shot or failing to meet your juggling goals.

So what can youth soccer learn from School of Rock? 

A few things:

  1. Don’t get locked into age groups. Let kids progress according to their abilities, a plan I fleshed out at SoccerWire a couple of years ago.
  2. Foster a sense of belonging to a club. The “club-centric” model is ridiculous for leagues but not a bad idea for the occasional showcase, especially if it’s set up so teams in the same club can actually watch each other play. Have pickup games or mixed scrimmages so kids can get to know players in other age groups. Have club-wide social events.
  3. Teach better. Work with kids both one-on-one and in group settings. Let them explore their strengths and weaknesses.
  4. Embrace diverse approaches. The School of Rock teaching style, basically tailored to each student, is a refreshing change from the pedantic egomaniacs who pontificate on coaching youth soccer the “right” way and scoff at everything else. They’ll always teach ear training, just as any good soccer coach is going to work on foot skills in some way, shape or form, but if Student A learns a part differently from Student B, that’s fine.

Maybe then, youth soccer will rock almost as much as School of Rock. Almost.

rocks

 

 

1
pro soccer, us soccer, youth soccer

SafeSport, SUM and other U.S. Soccer issues

Posted on by Beau Dure

Funny thing about engaging with Soccer Twitter: You can find yourself assigned a lot of volunteer work. A bunch of people who will never donate to your Patreon page or buy a book from your Amazon affiliate links (in some cases, they even think it’s an imposition to go to your blog, where you’ll make 0.01 cents on their visit) will demand that you do X, Y or Z, just because you’re a soccer journalist.

But every once in a while, there’s a legitimate question that I can answer. That happened this morning …

https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1012297332124258304

Good question, and I did some recent reporting on it that was trimmed from a story — not for any nefarious reason but because it was a long story, and this didn’t fit that well.

So here’s the part that was trimmed:

(START)

The U.S. governing bodies for several other sports — gymnastics, volleyball, taekwondo and swimming — are dealing with horrific sexual-abuse scandals. Congress has responded with the Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse and Safe Sport Authorization Act of 2017 was signed — despite the name, it was signed in 2018 (Feb. 14).

A month later, U.S. Soccer member programs manager Caitlin Carducci discussed the law with state associations and affiliates. A couple of weeks later, U.S. Soccer issued a statement on the basics, specifically the need to report abuse allegations to law enforcement within 24 hours.

U.S. Club Soccer has gone a few steps farther, requiring online SafeSport training of its members.

U.S. Club’s Kevin Payne stresses the urgency. A well-meaning coach, he says, could end up violating federal law by taking internal steps without meeting the 24-hour window to report to law enforcement.

“People who’ve devoted their lives to youth sports will have their lives destroyed because they didn’t report something quickly enough,” Payne says.

So the U.S. Club effort here is essential. It costs a bit more money, but it’s one soccer expense that is absolutely worthwhile. Better to pay a little more now than defend a lawsuit or deal with the horror of abuse.

(END)

So there you have it. Some info compiled from public statements, then a bit more from an interview, along with some context and even a recommendation. Do with it what you will. It’s a good question, it’s an issue I’ll keep pursuing down the road, and everyone else should feel free to keep asking as well.

Then there’s SUM, on which I get stuff like this:

https://twitter.com/duresport/status/1012287440571297795

https://twitter.com/duresport/status/1012288098519146497

https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1012289261532581888

https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1012296841592000519

Good grief. We know immigrant children are being separated from their parents. We don’t know SUM, USSF and MLS are doing anything objectionable beyond the things we know about (to which some people have objected — some reasonably, some a little tinfoil-y).

I think that’s reasonable. And perhaps people can come up with good ways to apply pressure for more transparency. Carlos Cordeiro said he’d be more transparent, and he actually has worked as VP to change the governance. That may not be enough, and there’s nothing wrong with pressing USSF to open up a bit more, especially when the next deal comes up.

I might be able to answer other questions:

From my reporting before and after the election, the full board (including people who aren’t part of the supposed cabal) has always approved everything with SUM —  unanimously. I even specifically asked if the “unanimous votes” were all shenanigans, like the local hospital board I once covered that had a split vote (roughly 6-3 or something like that) but immediately moved to let the record show that the vote was unanimous. I was told — again, by people in and out of the supposed cabal — that the votes were legitimately unanimous.

Now — you could argue that the board shouldn’t be holding so many executive sessions, or that the minutes should reflect what was discussed in executive session. (Not “we all ganged up to silence a Youth Council rep and then gave a national-team coach a negative performance review,” but perhaps “the board then went into executive session, where it discussed the renewal of Soccer United Marketing’s contract and the latest complaint from the North American Suing League.”) I’d frankly like to see a delegate raise that point from the floor at the next Annual General Meeting, if not sooner.

But yelling at one freelance journalist (which, to be clear, Nick isn’t doing) isn’t going to get us very far. I’m actually in less of a position to get to anything than, say, this guy …

Good on you for asking, Chris.

And yeah, perhaps it would help if people with full-time journalism gigs would ask. So go harass the people swimming in venture capital at The Athletic.

Because from my perch on the thinnest branch of the U.S. soccer tree, I see things this way:

  1. It’s a lot easier to get answers when you’re (A) inside the organization or (B) working for a major news organization.
  2. In terms of major issues facing U.S. Soccer right now, I consider the January formalizing of the SUM deal very far down the list. For these reasons:
    1. USSF and SUM were demonstrably acting with a deal already in place well before 2018.
    2. At some point, we have to ask why we’re so angry about a deal that provides USSF a considerable amount of money. Same with Copa Centenario. You’re welcome to argue that the SUM deal and other USSF governance oddities give MLS too much power, but you don’t need me to spend a month investigating things for free to make your case there.
    3. Youth soccer is a freaking mess, and that’s where every U.S. player starts (aside from those we import from Germany).

Besides, there’s a lot of nastiness in the world today. I often think about ditching soccer journalism entirely to do something that might help turn back the fascist tide in this country. That might happen one day.

In the meantime, if it’s OK with everyone on Twitter, I’m going to get back to youth soccer.

After the morning World Cup games, of course.

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us soccer, world soccer

The old “secret society” of soccer fandom and what we’ve lost

Posted on by Beau Dure

Remember when the U.S. soccer community was all united and welcoming?

No? Then you’ll have to trust me. It did indeed happen.

If you don’t trust me, trust Michael J. Agovino, author of The Soccer Diaries: An American’s Thirty-Year Pursuit of the International Game (coincidentally, thanks to a buyout of my publisher, now issued by the same press — University of Nebraska — as my book Long-Range Goals) and a recent guest on Tim Hanlon’s “Good Seats Still Available” podcast.

Agovino talks about discovering the game in the early 1980s while living in New York City, where it wasn’t particularly easy for him to get to Cosmos games. Like a lot of us that age, he sought out magazines and whatever broadcasts could be found in whatever language.

Without mainstream acceptance, soccer fans formed what Agovino called a “secret society” before backtracking because the “secret” adjective implies some sort of exclusivity that soccer fans weren’t seeking. Soccer fans were welcoming, Agovino says. If you found someone else who liked the game, you found a friend.

And that’s how I remember things as well — not just in 1982 but even in the late 1990s. I was excited to move to the D.C. area in part because I knew there was this sports bar called Summers that showed soccer. I could go and see soccer with other soccer fans. Sure, Greensboro had the late, lamented Keegan’s Pub, where 4-5 people would show up for Saturday morning EPL broadcasts, but this would be different.

We were still outnumbered by a wide margin. People hated soccer. Hated it. It’s not like cricket or rugby, toward which nearly everyone I met was indifferent. Hated it.

So perhaps we soccer fans were nice to each other because we were united against a common enemy. Perhaps we had to cling to each other because we simply didn’t have many other people who shared our interests.

Or perhaps Twitter hadn’t been invented yet.

 

1
us soccer, world soccer

American exceptionalism and other things that aren’t great but are

Posted on by Beau Dure

Am I understanding “American exceptionalism” incorrectly?

Yesterday, I tweeted the following:

https://twitter.com/duresport/status/1011435039547121664

At the time, I think I was thinking more about politics than soccer. But it was a little of both.

A couple of responses:

https://twitter.com/NipunChopra7/status/1011436252300808193

https://twitter.com/dmwahl/status/1011460577582092288

So I said this (specifically responding to Dr. Chopra, a neuroscientist in addition to being a soccer journalist):

https://twitter.com/duresport/status/1011563238780219392

https://twitter.com/NipunChopra7/status/1011583420353470469

I can agree with that. But not everyone can …

https://twitter.com/TheDukeNGS/status/1011584261860753408

If you go to Wikipedia, you’ll find several attempts to define (or, in some cases, redefine) the term. Start with the greatest observer of 19th century America, Alexis de Tocqueville:

The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes, of which I have only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward; his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven. Let us cease, then, to view all democratic nations under the example of the American people.

(Yes, feel free to argue that we are indeed “lapsing into barbarism” now. De Tocqueville was perceptive and eloquent, not psychic.)

Another definition from an AP Government crib sheet: “the belief that the US is special and unique because we have an optimistic and humanistic view on society to change the future and learn from the past.”

Really? Hmmmm. Maybe AP courses really aren’t that useful.

Back to Wikipedia for what I’ve found is the best-written definition, from Scottish political scientist Richard Rose: “America marches to a different drummer. Its uniqueness is explained by any or all of a variety of reasons: history, size, geography, political institutions, and culture.”

Go through that quote, the rest of the Wikipedia summary of scholarly debate and other sources, and you come up with the following things that are different about the USA:

  • Our Protestant/Puritan history
  • The absence of a feudal history
  • The lack of a monarch that has ever reigned on U.S. soil (King George III was an absentee monarch. And an amusing lunatic. See Monty Python.)
  • Everyone here is from somewhere else. A handful of people can trace their ancestry back to pre-Revolutionary America, but even they only arrived 350 years ago, and most of us have been here for a much shorter time.
  • This country is huge. Really huge. Just staggeringly huge.

Now … do those things make us better? It’s an interesting argument in its own right.

  • Pros: We have a blank slate on which the Founders built a new democracy, we benefit from waves of immigrants coming in and bringing their perspectives, and we have a “can-do” attitude dating back to our frontier days.
  • Cons: We overran Native Americans, then turned around and heaped scorn on any immigrant with the temerity to come along after us. Also, we have a lot of fundamentalists who refuse to believe science, and we have a general sense of arrogance. Basically, we do what we want, and we don’t listen to others.

So what does all this have to do with soccer? Why am I writing this on a soccer blog in response to other Soccer Twitter folks?

Well, I did get this accusatory tweet …

It goes back to the essential book Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism (yes, that’s an affiliate link, so if you’re adamantly opposed to Amazon giving me 10 cents, buy it somewhere else).

From Amazon: “The authors argue that when sports culture developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nativism and nationalism were shaping a distinctly American self-image that clashed with the non-American sport of soccer. Baseball and football crowded out the game. Then poor leadership, among other factors, prevented soccer from competing with basketball and hockey as they grew. By the 1920s, the United States was contentedly isolated from what was fast becoming an international obsession.”

The authors, Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman, are hardly out on a limb here. In my book, Long-Range Goals: The Success Story (yes, I’d change the subtitle now if I could) of Major League Soccer, I referenced Offside along with other works — Simon Kuper’s Soccer Against the Enemy and Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World — to demonstrate the history and sociology that work against soccer in the USA. (Read that passage on Google Books if you like. Or buy the damn book.)

So to answer Kyle’s question … um … yes? Maybe?

“Central to my worldview” is a bit of a loaded statement. It implies that I’m happy about American exceptionalism. I am not. I wish we would borrow European ideas on health care, social services, mass transit, and yes, sports.

I do think some of those ideas need to be modified to account for what’s different about the United States. As much as I’d love to be able to go around the country by rail as I did in Germany, that’s not really feasible in the USA, at least when you start going out West. And when we talk about how we’re going to organize sports, we need to account for our unusual sports history.

American exceptionalism exists in the academic definitions listed above. Some aspects of it (the size of this nation, barring secession) will never change. Other aspects are driven by our attitude. We think we’re different; therefore, we are. (To quote Crash Davis alongside Descartes: “If you believe you’re playing well because you’re getting laid, or because you’re not getting laid, or because you wear women’s underwear, then you *are*!”)

We can try to change that attitude. We can at least try to chip away at it so we can have single-payer health care, reasonable gun laws and a more open soccer system. But we can’t deny it exists.

 

 

 

0
youth soccer

A U.S. youth soccer reform update (FourFourTwo piece and beyond)

Posted on by Beau Dure

My FourFourTwo piece from yesterday gave a multi-part plan for rescuing youth soccer from the pit of despair or some other dreary place of your choosing, and it features input from Kyle Martino, Kevin Payne and two U.S. Soccer officials.

The intro:

“Promote a more unified Youth Soccer landscape where our members—rather than fighting each other for players—work together to bring more young people into our ranks as registered players and where we focus on Youth Soccer less as a business and more as a way to develop talent on the field and nurture our next generation of young adults.”

So read the platform of Carlos Cordeiro in his successful campaign for the U.S. Soccer presidency.

Cordeiro has spent the first four months of his presidency traveling the world on behalf of the ultimately successful USA/Canada/Mexico World Cup bid. In the meantime, youth soccer has progressed from a moderate level of chaos to a full-fledged tropical storm mixed with a Nor’easter mixed with Memorial Day beach traffic.

This piece had a long gestation period, but the timing is good. The World Cup bid effort is finished. Now it’s time for Cordeiro to look at the rest of his agenda. His platform has plenty of ideas that look good on paper — I didn’t recall any other candidates arguing against diversity, stronger adult leagues, etc. — but will require some effort to translate into reality.

But with all due respect to the other issues on that platform, youth soccer needs to be his first priority. (The transparency/diversity issues should be addressed concurrently, and other issues certainly shouldn’t be forgotten. Hopefully we can drop the nonsensical idea that Cordeiro’s next priority needs to be rescuing the NASL. We have a functioning Division 1 league and a functioning Division 2 league. If Cordeiro is going to devote a second of his time to any pro league in the next two years, it should be the NWSL. Period.)

One of my goals here is to keep asking questions and providing analysis. The outlets through which I can do so are dwindling. This sort of thing is a little too esoteric for The Athletic — and besides, I need to reach parents.

So I’m going to be working hard over the next few months to build Ranting Soccer Dad into a substantial brand. You can help on Patreon if you like (I’m going to make magnets and T-shirts!), but anything you can do to share my work would be appreciated. Especially if you can share it with parents. Maybe not parents who sit and watch every World Cup game like you do, but any parents looking for a good youth soccer experience.

At some point soon, I need to write about the next contested election. U.S. Youth Soccer holds its Annual General Meeting on July 28, and I know of at least one challenger to incumbent chairman (and USSF Board member) Jesse Harrell.

 

1
world soccer

National anthem parodies: England

Posted on by Beau Dure

This series hasn’t taken off as I thought it would, so I’m not going to do all 32 teams.

But we just have to do one more …

 

James Bond and British Rail
Python and Holy Grail
Love Actually

If we can win the Cup
We’ll tear our Brexit up
But we’ll more likely (bleep) it up
Mo-ost def’nitely

 

0
world soccer

World Cup anthem parody lyrics: Egypt-Uruguay

Posted on by Beau Dure

Schedule reminder and previous anthem parodies (times ET):

Thursday, 11 a.m.: Russia-Saudi Arabia
Friday, 8 a.m.: this one

EGYPT

These melismas are killing me …

Mo Salah, Mo Salah, Mo Saaaa-lah
Likely you’ll be-e-e our leading scorrrr-er

Bob Bradley, Bob Bradley, Bob Bradley
Thanks to you, we’re now better than the ni-ineties 

We inven-n-ted lots of stuff
Saying “thaaank you” wouldn’t hurrrrrt 

Yes we know the Sphinx lost its nose
We’re sorrrrry Napoleon was blamed

The tourists, the tourists, the tourrrr-ists
Count for twee-lve percent of our worrrrk-force

Repeating, repeating, repeeeeeating …
Does this anthem just ha-ave seven worrrrrds?

URUGUAY

(Instrumental fanfare until the 1:08 mark. Sing “Kill the wabbit” where it fits.)

1930 and then 1950!
Yes, we’ve won this thing once and again

(Repeat)

This is really a long brutal anthem
And it goes on and on and on and on

(Repeat, even though the meter really doesn’t fit — the original has the same problem)

Yes, it goes on and on … 

This is really a long brutal anthem
And it goes on and on and on and on

And it goes on and on …
Four minutes more!

(Seriously, this anthem never ends. Most of it is about dying for your country.)

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podcast, women's soccer, youth soccer

RSD36: Player pathways, college and elite leagues, with Lesle Gallimore

Posted on by Beau Dure

Lesle Gallimore has been head women’s soccer coach at the University of Washington since 1994, and she’s the current president of United Soccer Coaches.

In this conversation, we talk about how college coaches adapt their recruiting to the new “elite league turf war” environment. And we talk about how players adapt and whether they *can* adapt.

For example: Could Gallimore’s most famous player, Hope Solo, work her way through the system today and be discovered?

Coincidentally, Solo made a lot of news this week, and I discuss that before the interview (which was recorded before all that news happened). The Gallimore interview starts around the 10-minute mark.

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world soccer

World Cup anthem parody lyrics: Russia-Saudi Arabia

Posted on by Beau Dure

I’m probably starting too late in the game to make this work, but here’s the goal — I’m going to provide parody lyrics so you can sing along with each nation’s anthem in the World Cup.

We start with the opening game between two totally democratic and peaceful countries, Russia and Saudi Arabia!

RUSSIA

We’re hosting the World Cup
It’s too late to stop us
You say that we’re despots; we say “yo’ mama!”

Our dear shirtless Putin
(This line is redacted)
At least our great leader knows our anthem’s words!

Hooome-laa-annd, home-land
We sing ou-ur praise here
Almost as good as “The Americans” (singing note: stress that last syllable!)

Thank you for casting Keri
But, Sarah Palin, please shut up
Or we will hack all of your xBox games

Yes we wrote an anthem with changes in meter
That should teach you all to leave our (bleep) alone
Our hooligans fighting in woods south of Moscow
It’s better than flying to Vladivostok

Weeeee gave the world Tchaikovsky
And great writers like Tolstoy
So get the hell off all our freaking backs! 

Yes, it is really cold up here
You try living in permafrost
FIFA won’t let us play all the rest

(Actually, they probably won’t even get that far. But it’s in Russia, so who knows?)

SAUDI ARABIA

(Instrumental intro — note where the singing starts in the clip above)

We are free, assuming you are male …
If you aren’t, could you please wear a veil?

Our biggest fear is the electric car (boo, Elon)
(skipping this line)
Oil is ours!

Desert heat … prepares us for the next World Cup
And remember ’94 — that goal! Owairan!

Guns and planes, we’ve got ’em by the ton
And we’ve even got some Cinnabon

Our biggest fear is the electric car (boo, Elon)
(skipping this line)
Oil is ours!

All our team … plays here in our domestic league
Can we sign somewhere that’s cooler — hey, PSG!

 

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