Mild, sunny weather. A couple thousand fans nearly filling the stands and spreading out over the hillside. Crystal Dunn creating chance after chance.
Washington Spirit fans had a lot to enjoy Saturday afternoon at the SoccerPlex. The result — a 2-0 win over Penn State — wasn’t particularly important, though longtime Spirit fans will be relieved to see the team no longer losing these preseason encounters with college squads. More important was the promise of quality play on a lovely spring day.
That said, it’s still a team in preseason, with a few things to iron out:
– New central defender Shelina Zadorsky gifted a chance to Penn State’s Frannie Crouse.
– Goalkeeper Kelsey Wys, keeping alive the Ashlyn Harris “keeper/sweeper” tradition, was caught out when Crouse got the ball and retreated, not quickly enough to do anything about the shot. Fortunately for her, Crouse’s chip hit the crossbar.
– Plenty of chances were created but not finished. Just a few moments of indecision from Francisca Ordega and rookie Cheyna Williams.
None of which should cause Jim Gabarra any real concern.
“It was really good that they were willing to press us and force us into mistakes,” the new Spirit coach said. “That’s how you learn, and in the first half, I thought we were cheating a little bit in our passing and our defensive spacing.”
Diana Matheson was in good form and good spirits, even if some ill-timed PA announcements ruined my recording of our interview. Let me check: “We have a new coach and staff, but I think they’ve worked to keep a lot of SEASON-TICKET HOLDERS, THE RED ZONE IS FOR LOADING AND UNLOADING ONLY continuity with what was working BE SURE TO HAVE YOUR WRISTBANDS AND DON’T LEAN ON THE RAILING keep possession and try to get that quality instead of rushing IF YOU ARE NOT HERE FOR THE MEET-AND-GREET, PLEASE GO TO RED ROBIN AND FORM A MASSIVE LINE …”
Crystal Dunn was happy with the chemistry she and Williams have already developed. That was evident on the first goal, right after halftime, with Williams getting to the end line and crossing back for Dunn to rip it into the net.
“The game kind of calmed down as it went on, and that made a difference,” Dunn said.
And yes, Gabarra is happy to be back in front of a big crowd at the SoccerPlex (it filled in considerably after this pregame picture), where he led the Washington Freedom for years.
“It’s great. Some things don’t change, and then there’s a lot of changes. Five years is a long time, but it’s still one of the best facilities in the country. Glad to be here and hopefully add some value to the club and get us to the next step.”
Those are the lessons of the Duke lacrosse case from 10 years ago. Three men suffered the horror of being flung into the spotlight as wrongly accused rape defendants, and the collateral damage went far and wide. “The momentum of a country hungry for justice overtook any serious investigation of the alleged crime,” writes Christina Cauterucci in Slate.
So when I heard ESPN’s excellent 30 for 30 series was releasing a documentary on the case called Fantastic Lies, I had a bit of trepidation. I had hoped the last word had come three years ago. Too many people had already made political points or a few bucks while unfairly trashing my alma mater’s reputation one way or the other — either as a bastion of white privilege or a school so eager for political correctness that it cares little about the truth.
There’s a grain of truth in each of those perceptions. But neither defines Duke. It’s much more diverse than outsiders realize. It has thriving religious communities — mainline Protestant (more or less Duke Chapel’s focus), Catholic, evangelical, Jewish, Islamic — alongside people who couldn’t care less. Hippies and preppies share the quads. A lot of kids are rich, but a lot of kids are on financial aid.
(One quick aside that bugged the crap out of me in grad school: I was in the master’s of liberal studies program, and one of my classes met for its final session at the professor’s home. She said she enjoyed teaching our classes because they were so much more diverse than Duke undergrads. I recalled that in another liberal studies class, two-thirds of the people in the room said they were listening to NPR at a specific time on Sunday afternoon. We may have been different ages, ranging from early 20s to mid-60s, but that ain’t diverse.)
We were MUCH hipper than the lacrosse team in the late 80s.
So I was a little frustrated when the documentary opened by repeating the old depiction of the lacrosse team as the “cool kids” on campus. To whom? Duke has no defined “in crowd.” Given the backlash against the team, it was pretty clear that a lot of people at Duke found the lacrosse players’ behavior not cool, even before the rape accusation. (I did, however, enjoy the comments from Jim Cooney, a Duke grad who represented one of the players and laughed at the scarcity of Southern accents on campus. He also recalled a judge who said he had spent his whole life in North Carolina … except for the four years he spent at Duke.)
But Fantastic Lies improved from there. Even without the cooperation of Duke administrators or most of the team, it presents a compelling restatement of the case. And unlike most of the media that sprawled up around this case, it’s not out to judge. Even Crystal Mangum, the accuser who is now in prison for murder, gets a bit of sympathy from lacrosse player Tony McDevitt, who sees her as a mentally unstable woman being used as a pawn.
So instead of reopening a lot of old wounds, Fantastic Lies succeeds as a sobering but fascinating take that may actually build some bridges and help us better understand how to avoid going through something like this again.
Extremists on each side won’t be happy. I’ve skirmished a bit with people who won’t rest until Duke runs a lot of administrators and faculty out of town on a rail. And you may still find a few people out there who insist, against all evidence to the contrary, that someone on the lacrosse team must be guilty of rape. (Or something. See William D. Cohan below.)
But for the rest of us, Fantastic Lies has a lot to offer:
– A legal tour de force. One lawyer, Bradley Bannon, says at the outset that all lawyers know most people accused of crimes are guilty, and he had “no problem” believing a bunch of rich white kids would do such a thing to an African-American woman. He turns out to be the hero in the best part of the film, in which three lawyers who represented different defendants go through the case point-by-point. Prosecutor Mike Nifong tried to catch the defense off guard by bringing his DNA expert to a preliminary hearing and inviting them to cross-examine him, and a nervous Bannon stepped up and called on the countless hours he spent teaching himself about DNA and reading the expert’s 2,500-page report.
It’s like a case on Elementary, though Sherlock and Watson usually have to deal with more competent criminals.
– Journalists’ self-examination. Dan Okrent, then the NYT’s public editor, calls the media’s breathless takes on the case “a journalistic tragedy.” Former News and Observer columnist Ruth Sheehan reads an excerpt of her column calling on someone from the team to step forward to say what happened, then another excerpt of her subsequent apology.
Some people might never accept such apologies — Sheehan is still being pilloried by the remnants of the online mob, even as other central figures recognize her eventual contributions:
Ruth is one of the few reporters to examine facts and reverse course in this mess. https://t.co/UPtdBAc1EJ
(Neff is the News and Observer reporter who did a terrific job seeing the case through. Johnson’s role is more complicated. He’s a history professor elsewhere who found the case curious and wound up blogging constantly about it, helping to shed light on some of the issues but also playing a little too readily into the hands of right-wing extremists with an ax to grind against “political correctness.” He is, though, quick to credit people who did the right thing, including Sheehan.)
– The face of pure evil. That would be Mike Nifong, the district attorney running to keep his job (he had been appointed to the post but had to run for election that year) who literally would not listen to exculpatory evidence.
We get some insight into Crystal Mangum, the accuser. Her former minister, Delois Burnette, tells us with a sad tone of resignation that Mangum was a bright girl who had her priorities in the wrong place, and she returns later to say she wasn’t stable. Faculty member James Coleman echoes McDevitt, saying Nifong put a mentally unstable person in this position.
We get no such insight into Nifong. That’s not a complaint about the film. I’m not sure there’s any explanation for what he did. He had motive — prosecuting those easy scapegoats would play well in Durham’s African-American community at the time — but it’s astounding to think he could get away with ignoring the evidence that clearly cleared the suspects.
Reade Seligmann’s mother has a telling quote. As the film recaps the lawyers’ demolition of Nifong’s DNA guy, she says, “I felt like my head had exploded. They had to work to get to the place where these kids are right now.”
That hearing must have been equal parts reassuring and frightening. Reassuring in the sense that they knew the momentum of the case had swung. Frightening in the realization that someone had actually conspired to make them seem guilty. By this point, it wasn’t an accident.
IS THIS THE LAST WORD ON THE CASE?
Johnson is clearly happy with the film, though I’m sure some of his followers wanted more emphasis on those bad old Duke administrators who should’ve somehow silenced the howling mobs of activists and made things much easier for a team of rape suspects.
The credits listed three consultants: Johnson, Neff and one “John Ryan McFadyen.” Barring extraordinary coincidence, that would be the player then known as Ryan McFadyen whose email, citing the disgusting book American Psycho, caused him to be suspended. He actually returned to Duke, not just to finish his undergraduate degree and play lacrosse, but to get a master’s in liberal studies (like me). But today, he calls himself John McFadyen to avoid Google searches that turn up that email, and he blames himself for coach Mike Pressler’s resignation.
Also listed separately as a “consulting producer” is William D. Cohan, who has written a book on the case and wrote the follow-up on McFadyen’s life two years ago. But Cohan is most unhappy with the film, writing that the filmmakers started out basing things on his book and then went in a totally different direction:
Fantastic Lies presents the narrative that the parents of the indicted players and their defense attorneys have been busily trying to preserve in amber for years: that the players were falsely accused, and that the Durham police, aided and abetted by Nifong, the rape nurse, and the media created an epic conflagration. Instead of grappling with why there never was a trial and how the North Carolina State Bar was used to subvert justice, the film once again spews the defense version that justice was served, even though it was not, and that no amount of money, not even $20 million, could ever compensate the three players for what Mangum and Nifong did to them.
Cohan thinks some questions are still unresolved. That strikes me as odd. Some of the behavior is certainly questionable — the same neighbor whose recall of events contributed to the players’ alibi also says he heard a racial slur — but it’s still virtually impossible that Mangum was assaulted by anyone at the party. On Twitter, he’s continuing to defend his position — though he doesn’t seem to be responding to Johnson’s flame-throwing tweets — while also cheering on Duke in the NCAA basketball tournament. He’s a Duke alumnus.
So Johnson and Cohan may be arguing until the end of time. And we’ll always have plenty of people who hate Duke — some anti-PC crusaders, some who have never forgiven Christian Laettner.
Aside from that, I think this film is a rite of healing.
LESSONS FOR ALL
Even for people who did little to nothing wrong, this case has lessons to teach:
– Duke administration: One thing I loved about the film is that it shows, in stark terms, how much pressure they were under. There’s a scene of then-provost Peter Lange trying to pacify a mob of people yelling at him to … I don’t know, hand them the players’ heads? When the case turned, with full benefit of unsympathetic hindsight, Johnson and his followers have castigated Duke’s administration for failing to silence faculty members with bad things to say about the lacrosse team. Some people think the season shouldn’t have been suspended, which is ludicrous. It’s all unfair.
That said, would the administration today have plenty of little things it could’ve done differently? Sure.
And now, I’ve come to think Mike Pressler should’ve kept his job. I’ve become less enamored of the idea that coaches are responsible for players’ behavior. If I’d hired a stripper when I was at Duke or sent a frightening email, would they have fired the Wind Symphony conductor?
The definitive word on Pressler, from a report cited twice below: “Although some administrators claim that they communicated their concerns to Coach Pressler, there is no evidence that they adequately did so.”
– Duke faculty. At a reunion, I spoke with a friend of mine who was in the “Group of 88” — the signatories of a Chronicle ad saying “We’re listening” to people with complaints of racism and sexism. She’s a good, sincere person, and I’ve hated seeing her and some of my former teachers dehumanized by Johnson’s followers. But the tone and timing were perfect examples of ivory-tower thinking. I recall seeing a complaint that these are professors who are experts at using their words. I’d respond that academics have long forgotten how to write to anyone but each other.
I understand what the faculty — at least, the well-intentioned ones like my friend — were trying to say, as they explain to some extent in a follow-up. They didn’t say it well.
Frankly, neither did the professors who responded to the Group of 88. “Tarred and feathered”? Really? (That author, Stephen Baldwin, later apologized.)
They’re not the evil demons you’ll see portrayed on Johnson’s blog. Their timing and phrasing, though, was off.
– Activists. The film digs up a lot of startling footage from the time. We see the “potbangers” — people who showed up outside the off-campus house where the fateful party happened to bang on pots and pans. They even held up a sign that read “CASTRATE.” In retrospect, that’s not a good look. (Actually, I’m not sure that’s ever a good look, even if you’re addressing a legitimately convicted rapist.)
Coleman: “People treated it like a Christmas tree, and they put their lights on it, and their ornaments. But this is the wrong case for that.”
– Duke and Durham. Durham Mayor Bill Bell, who has presided over the city’s transformation from an old tobacco town to a thriving tech capital, sounded an optimistic tone about town-and-gown relations. As the Cuban Missile Crisis encouraged the USA and USSR to establish better communication, this crisis helped Duke and Durham become better neighbors.
– Lacrosse team. Maybe dial back the partying. Don’t hire strippers. If you’re living off campus, be better neighbors.
A conclusion from a sprawling Duke report: “1. The members of the Duke Lacrosse team have been academically and athletically responsible students. In general, faculty who have had lacrosse players in their classes have not experienced disciplinary problems with the players. Over the last five years, however, many lacrosse players increasingly have been socially irresponsible consumers of alcohol. Their extensive record of repetitive misconduct should have alarmed administrators responsible for student discipline.”
– Duke students living off campus: From the same report: “Captain Sarvis said the types of student behavior about which residents of District 2 complained included late-night noise and loud parties, excessive drinking, littering, public urination, and some damage to cars parked in the neighborhoods. None of the complaints related to physical assaults of any type. …
“Captain Sarvis said lacrosse players did not represent a special or unique problem in District 2; in fact, none of the houses rented by lacrosse players was among the worst of those whose loud parties attracted hundreds of disorderly Duke students on weekends. Although lacrosse players rented a large house at 1206 W. Markham, Captain Sarvis said it was not among the top 10 houses about which neighbors complained the most. 22 Nor did lacrosse players as a group stand out as the worst student offenders. Captain Sarvis said the fraternity-affiliated houses presented a greater challenge to police than any of the houses rented by athletes. 23 The committee senses that since the March 13th incident, some Trinity Park/Trinity Heights residents’ legitimate frustrations with Duke students have been inappropriately attributed to lacrosse players.”
Come on, kids. Clean it up.
– Journalists and pundits. Don’t be so wedded to “the narrative.” An AV Club review puts it well:
For the most part though, Zenovich gets what’s so queasily compelling about this story. The activists and commentators who used this case to address larger issues weren’t wrong, exactly. If the Duke lacrosse players had been guilty, then the university’s athletic department would’ve had a lot to answer for, from creating an environment where their students felt this kind of party was okay, to presuming that merely forfeiting games in response to the controversy constituted “a severe penalty.” But in retrospect, the media’s demands that the players admit to something that didn’t happen—as well as the general lack of concern in some quarters over the many, many provable facts that didn’t fit into the larger narrative—should serve as a cautionary tale to anyone who rushes to hammer alleged malefactors with hashtags, before anyone really knows what they actually did.
Seligmann’s father says there are no more Murrows and Cronkites in today’s media. I can picture Neff, along with the great staff of The Chronicle, saying, “Hey, wait!”
– The falsely accused. In a clip after their exoneration, Reade Seligmann said it was eye-opening to see how a rogue prosecutor and police can run roughshod over people. He realized some people didn’t have the resources to hire sharp lawyers who could expose the truth. He and his co-defendants have worked with The Innocence Project to help others who have been falsely accused. Check out Seligmann’s testimony on the project.
At the same time, McDevitt expresses sympathy for rape victims whose burden of proof only got more difficult in the wake of this case.
And there’s a postscript that the film curiously omitted — perhaps my biggest complaint with the film, and something I now see in a totally different light …
Most of the lacrosse team came back to Duke. Star player Matt Danowski’s father, John Danowski, took over as coach. And they did very well. They won the next three ACC championships. In 2007, they made it the national final, losing by one goal to Johns Hopkins — just as they had in 2005, the year before the party. In 2008, they lost to Hopkins again, this time in the semifinals. They made the semifinals again in 2009 and lost to Syracuse.
Finally, in 2010, Duke beat Notre Dame in overtime to win the national championship. Because players who lost the canceled 2006 season were granted an extra year of eligibility (McDevitt used his to pursue an MBA, even as he and other players sued the school), the Blue Devils still included seven players who were on the lacrosse team when all this happened.
They’ve since done it twice more, winning back-to-back titles in 2013 and 2014.
At the time, it’s safe to say I wasn’t rooting for the team. Johnson’s followers and the lawsuit left a bitter taste for me.
After seeing this film, I’m proud of them. I’m proud to call them fellow Duke grads, and I wish them well.
One of my projects for this year is to wrap up a book on my experiences covering mixed martial arts. I promise it’ll be a fun read.
So I was happy to see SI’s terrific media reporter, Richard Deitsch, hosting a roundtable of MMA journalists. He got a good cross-section — people are very much “in” the UFC orbit (Heidi Fang, Ariel Helwani) and those who are “out” (Josh Gross).
Boxer James Toney, soaking up attention in a Boston hotel lobby before his lone UFC fight.
It’s a unique environment. I’ve never covered another sport that handed out copies of Playboy featuring an employee. I’ve rarely found athletes in other sports who’ll just chat, though that’s largely a function of having media and athletes in the same hotels.
I’ve also rarely seen qualified journalists — in some cases, the best in the sport — denied credentials for obviously petty reasons. And I hated that. Not only did it strike me as unfair, but it gave readers the impression that those of us who were “in” had sold our souls and agreed not to say anything negative about the UFC.
So it was refreshing to see this roundtable address that issue and a lot of other things that you’ll see in my book whenever I get around to finishing it.
In order of appearance in the roundtable:
Fans on press row, real journalists not: Fang mentions this in her first answer, and she’s right. To an extent, it’s simply a function of having reporters who didn’t go through the dues-paying you get at a local newspaper. I experienced the same thing when I was courtside at the ACC basketball tournament in the late 90s alongside a couple of kids fresh out of college working for a new whiz-bang website, cheering for N.C. State over Duke while I swallowed my tongue.
Helwani says every reporter working for a credible outlet should be credentialed. And that’s something Kevin Iole and others get into as well later in the roundtable.
Media access: Fighters are, for the most part, quite accessible. I interviewed Tom Lawlor while he was going in and out of the sauna to cut weight. Randy Couture saved a seat for me in the stands backstage at a weigh-in so we could do our interview. Kimbo Slice teased me in a small-group interview, which was hilarious.
Helwani raises a good point — fighters only compete 2-4 times per year, so it’s not like they’re doing locker-room interviews 100 times a year. There’s no time for familiarity to breed contempt.
Some are more private than others. I needed a bit of back-and-forth through PR reps to get a phone interview with Brock Lesnar, and he called me from a number that came up as “Private Number” on my called ID. But the interview was just fine.
Rampage Jackson is another story.
Dana White access: Helwani points out the UFC boss isn’t as accessible today as he was a few years ago, back when I was on the beat. When I was at USA TODAY, he’d chat with me regularly. He has withdrawn over the years, to the point of actually not being present at some press conferences. I think it’s a function of rapid UFC expansion — they put on so many fights each year now, and he can’t be everywhere.
Social media: Some of the nastiest stuff I’ve ever read has been directed at female MMA journalists. The MMA fan base is generally more civil than you’d think from afar, but Twitter gives the idiots a platform.
Of course, I’ve been threatened by Alex Morgan fans, so perhaps it’s not unique to MMA. But I don’t want to trivialize the abuse female journalists have received, on Twitter and on message boards. Some people need Royce Gracie to knee them in a place where it used to be legal.
Will your job exist in 20 years?: I don’t know. I think writing jobs are going to decline. Multimedia jobs are safer. And organizations are likely to demand more control.
The roundtable is a good read, with good thoughtful people. Enjoy.
Yes, I’m still planning to do Olympic projections this year. I’m switching to a different system, though, and the projections won’t be up until early summer.
In preparing for that, I compiled a massive list of dates that will determine which Americans go to Rio to compete. That means I had to read every available “selection criteria” document, which is an easy way to get a headache.
I don’t expect this post to go viral, but I figured it was worth sharing for Oly-philes. Enjoy.
Feb. 7-14: Sailing, 49er/49erFX/Nacra World Championships (U.S. qual)
Feb. 13: Track and field, USA marathon trial (U.S. qual)
Feb. 19-24: Diving, World Cup (quota)
Feb. 21: Track and field, 50k race walk (U.S. qual)
I’ve been writing about U.S. Soccer’s efforts to cultivate elite play even if it means breaking up teams and long-established ways of organizing competition. Turns out there’s a similar story in curling.
Part of the issue: The High Performance program, which takes top players and forms teams under a national-team staff. Another part of the issue: The World Championship berths at stake are decided by a convoluted points system that robs the national championship of some of its suspense.
And so some people on the CurlingZone forums are a bit cynical about the big event going on in Jacksonville this week. Between the lack of a shot at the World Championships and the travel to Florida, the women’s tournament only has seven teams. One blogger offers a really cynical take — and please bear in mind I haven’t fact-checked his accusations, though I can verify that the Jacksonville crowd is bigger than “tens.”
But it’s easy to understand what USA Curling is trying to do. You could argue, perhaps, that the High Performance program should be team-based rather than based on individuals. The two top teams, John Shuster’s and Erika Brown’s, weren’t formed through tryouts. (Shuster is now in the HP program; Brown is not.)
The points system debate is shakier. Should one team represent the USA just because it got hot one week or figured out the ice in an unfamiliar venue? I’m inclined to say no.
The first couple of days of the championships saw another controversy. In the showdown between Alex Leichter and Heath McCormick, someone threw popcorn on the ice. Curling is largely self-officiated, but in this case, they needed to call in officials to decide whether a do-over was in order. It was not. But people kept their sense of humor.
The women’s competition has had few surprises. Brown’s team and the three High Performance teams, including the juniors led by Cory Christensen, are a level above the other three teams. Jamie Sinclair beat Brown’s team in the only result I’d call an upset.
The absences hurt. The top four teams are all in the top 50 in the Order of Merit. The other skips in the top 100 — Alexandra Carlson, Patti Lank and Courtney George — are not at nationals. The next highest-ranked skip is Abigayle Lindgren at 169. The Order of Merit rankings don’t tell all — they reward teams that play a lot of tournaments with points on the line — but that’s a big gap.
The men’s competition is less predictable. Here’s how I ranked the teams coming into the tournament, with Order of Merit rankings in parentheses:
John Shuster (14)
Craig Brown (24)
Brady Clark (50)
Pete Fenson (44)
Todd Birr (90)
Korey Dropkin (105)
Alex Leichter (123)
Heath McCormick (77)
Brandon Corbett (109)
Hunter Clawson (194)
But who’s undefeated through five games? Brady Clark, who is not in the HP program but has beaten Shuster and Fenson. Then we have four teams at 3-2, including three HP teams (Shuster, Brown, Dropkin) and Clawson. Torino Olympic medalist Fenson opened with a win against Leichter but dropped the next four games.
Yesterday evening’s draw was full of upsets. Leichter beat Brown. Clawson beat Fenson. Dropkin (the HP junior team) beat Shuster. And though they’re close in my rankings, a lot of people would be surprised to see Corbett beat former national champion McCormick.
That’s certainly enough to keep things interesting. Whatever your opinion of the programs, this is a national championship worth watching on its own merits. And yes, it’s live-streamed. Enjoy.
Snyder criticized the U.S. Soccer E and D license programs, saying they’re geared toward coaches on a professional track and don’t address the needs of parent coaches, who make up the majority of coaches that work with kids in their formative years under age 12. He pointed fingers at “superclubs” who have tryouts and cut 6-year-olds to fuel big business. He said the Philadelphia Union Academy has hula hoops and other gear to teach kids physical literacy — lessons they should have received around age 5-8 but didn’t because we were too busy coaching them win a bleeping U7 game.
The hammer, which would have echoed through Twitter if Snyder were a Hall of Fame player like Wynalda: Elite players will make it despite our involvement. In other words, players make players. Coaches don’t.
And while we’re trying to make prodigies out of our U7s, we’re driving a lot of them away from the game. Fewer players. And therefore, down the line, fewer elite players.
Add to that the elephant in the Baltimore Convention Center — the change to birth-year age groups. Communication on that topic has been abysmal. U.S. youth leaders simply don’t know what they’re allowed to do. Plenty of clubs’ coaches and technical directors think the change might make sense for the oldest and most competitive levels of youth soccer, but they don’t understand why they have to do it with their U-Littles. (They don’t, but the USSF simply hasn’t broadcast that fact.)
Bottom line: “Elite” coaches have declared war on recreational play. Both sides are guaranteed to lose.
But I covered some of these issues at SoccerWire and will add to that in the next week, and you all want to read more about Wynalda’s session. That’s fine. The point I wanted to make first was that the most pressing issues are not what Wynalda talked about. I’m making you eat your vegetables (youth issues) before getting your dessert (the Wynalda talk).
Before Wynalda started, he and I talked a bit about getting older (we’re close to the same age) and how we care a lot less about what other people think. He also says he’s impatient. He wants to see the USA win a World Cup in his lifetime.
And yet, Wynalda seems more conciliatory and more generous than he came across in the past. He may throw a little bit of red meat to the MLS-bashing fringe on Twitter, but he doesn’t hate the league or those in it. He wants it to be better.
The issue isn’t talent or coaching, he insists. It’s whether players are challenged.
He tells a fun story from his Bundesliga days. After a loss, he made what seemed to be an innocuous joke about his sock. A teammate threw a shoe at him, opening a cut on his face that required stitches. The trainer suggested he go apologize for joking.
So how do we replicate that mentality in MLS? (We’ll assume for sake of argument that we want to — maybe we’d rather see swashbuckling teams that attack all the time and shrug off the occasional 4-3 loss as the season’s going OK.) He says promotion and relegation would help bring that about.
That said, he has a pragmatic streak. He’s not expecting pro/rel to happen tomorrow.
Still, I’d disagree with some of his depictions of pro finances and ambitions in this country. He harped on MLS’s alleged $100 million annual losses (not as frightening as it seems in a 19-team league, and also said in the context of a CBA negotiation, so take it with a grain of salt) and posited that they need to feed the beast with expansion fees. The counterargument: MLS isn’t “losing” money — it’s reinvesting. If they weren’t building facilities, expanding staffs and raising salaries, they’d surely be making money. But they’re doing all those things because they want to keep progressing.
Wynalda also said the lack of promotion crushed the dreams of hundreds of clubs across the country. But most lower-division clubs are there by choice. A couple of clubs have stars in their eyes about how their NPSL membership should grant them the chance to move up the pyramid strictly by merit, ignoring both the difficulties of establishing such a pyramid merely 20 years after top-level pro soccer was dead in this country and the fact that European teams don’t climb to the top without megarich owners in search of a new plaything. (I love the Bournemouth story, too, but does it happen without a Russian petrochemical bigwig? No.)
He has convinced me (and he got the room to applaud my conversion) that MLS should play a fall-to-spring schedule, with the caveat that it should take a long winter break. It could be awkward — the midseason break might end up longer than the break between seasons — but I now think the pros outweigh the cons. Play MLS Cup in June, away from football (which Wynalda, again showing his pragmatic streak, knows will be TV’s big dog for the foreseeable future). Align the transfer windows with Europe.
Now, to be honest, I haven’t really changed. I floated an Apertura/Clausura model with late-spring playoffs back in 2010.
So Wynalda’s session was full of fun discussion threads. I enjoyed it, and I enjoy my Twitter banter with him.
But these are, for the most part, idle discussions. Pro/rel isn’t happening soon.
I do wonder if we can change the culture in MLS to make it more challenging. I don’t think that change has to come from a systemic overhaul. My guess is German teams threw shoes in the locker room generations ago, before the big money rolled in.
And I’m not sure that’s an accurate depiction of MLS locker rooms these days, anyway. When I regularly went to MLS locker rooms in the mid- to late 00s, the losing team’s locker room usually had a dank pall seeping in. Taylor Twellman was not a pleasant person when the Revs lost.
Here’s a story to counter Wynalda’s story: Brian Straus and I were once part of a small group of journalists stuck in the RFK corridor while the Houston Dynamo broke league rules and kept the locker room door shut for about 30 minutes after the game. When we finally got in, Dom Kinnear was pleasantly professional. But a whiteboard behind him had a fresh fist-sized hole in it.
Change comes slowly in MLS, at least after Garber’s first couple of years, when he ditched the shootout, started SUM, etc. The single-entity structure has evolved, but it’s hard to see why it still necessary at all. The last CBA could’ve given players a bit more.
(Incidentally, if you think the NPSL is the answer to your anti-MLS dreams when it comes to league business practices, take a look at this sheet from the NPSL’s booth …)
So MLS needs watchdogs to prod it along. That’s good. But we have other needs that are more pressing.
Wynalda closed with a comment that drew a rousing ovation, though I’m sure some of the “Klinsmann good, MLS bad” folks on Twitter will be appalled. It’s horrible, he said, to deny kids the opportunity to play high school soccer.
That’s something we can change without asking people to risk even more money than they already have. Maybe we start there?
The first NWSL Draft was held in a private room in the Indianapolis Convention Center, with U.S. Soccer staff ferrying info to a neighboring room where a handful of reporters had gathered.
The next two NWSL Drafts had many more people, all crammed into a small couple of rooms in Philadelphia.
This year, it looks like this:
Which is great. It’ll be a terrific experience for fans. Reporters won’t be dizzy from claustrophobia and heat exhaustion by the third round.
But like the MLS Draft, held yesterday in the same room, there’s a bit of cold water to splash on the proceedings: A lot of these players simply aren’t ready.
I’m not bringing that up to spoil anyone’s big day. A bunch of people with sublime talent and awe-inspiring work ethics are going to get great opportunities today. I’m bringing it up because, in the spirit of the other NSCAA sessions I’m attending, I’m looking at the overall structure of the sport.
If you haven’t listened to the most recent Keeper Notes podcast, race over to your podcasting engine of choice and do so now. Jen Cooper chats with Hal Kaiser and Jen Gordon to go over each team’s needs and the prospects who can fill them.
But it’s clear from the conversation that few teams will walk away from this draft with their immediate needs filled. Kaiser names only three players who stand out — sure-fire No. 1 pick Emily Sonnett (D, Virginia), NCAA Tournament force Raquel Rodriguez (M, Penn State) and Cari Roccaro (D, Notre Dame). And now Roccaro is hurt.
You can say it’s a thin draft class. But in terms of immediate impact, they’ve all been thin classes.
So it’s little wonder that two of the most successful coaches in the NWSL, Seattle’s Laura Harvey and Portland/Washington’s Mark Parsons, haven’t been building through the draft. They realize this is a league that’s quite cruel to 22-year-olds. (And notice that a lot of NWSL teams have now hired coaches from England and Scotland!)
Parsons saw the problem first hand when he took over a young Washington Spirit team. They had young attacking talent to spare — Tiffany McCarty and Caroline Miller had outstanding college resumes, and Stephanie Ochs and Colleen Williams joined McCarty on the U.S. Under-23 team before debuting with the Spirit. Each player had plenty of upside — the book is still open for McCarty and Ochs, long-term. Miller and Williams unfortunately had catastrophic injuries.
But a team simply can’t rely on inexperienced players to do more than fill a hole here and there. Some of the exceptional rookies of the past — Crystal Dunn, Morgan Brian — already had national team experience. Sonnett and Rodriguez bring that experience this time around, and they should be ready to play from Day 1 in the NWSL. North Carolina’s Katie Bowen, who has played for New Zealand, also might be ready to step in right away.
So this year, the priority for NWSL teams beyond the top few picks is to look for players they can bring along over the next couple of years.
The next priority is to step up the development curve so more players are ready.
Parsons was candid late in that first season with the Spirit, lamenting the fundamentals that some of his younger players hadn’t learned. The compressed college season hurts players. Coaches, especially on the men’s side, are pushing for a year-round NCAA schedule so they can play more games with more rest, not relying on waves of substitutions to get exhausted players off the field.
Another factor: Summer play has withered. The decline and demise of the W-League hurts. WPSL play is spotty — some teams can play a quality game, some can’t. The new United Women’s Soccer is trying to fill the void.
Cracking an NWSL lineup as a rookie will never be easy — nor should it be. It’s a credit to the league that the rosters are so strong, filled with experienced players.
But as the league expands (we hope) down the road, development is an issue that needs to be addressed. So when the players drafted today are experienced and ready to lead their teams, they’ll have better and better players coming in to join them.
The new SportsMyriad podcast features me ranting about the U.S. women’s soccer roster, curling, Rio 2016 prep, youth soccer getting too serious, and of course, the bizarre lawsuit filed against Ronda Rousey by a guy who apparently lives at White Castle.
Duresport.com 