Soccer Poet

Sorry for the delay since the last post. You may think that the recent dearth is indicative of the site losing steam, but I can assure you that is hardly the case. On the outside the Poet may seem serene, but under the hood a lot has been happening as we move forward to a newer, better Poet.

For starters I wrote a book. Yep. Took me three days. Okay, it’s no Moby Dick, but I can assure you that many a soccer coach (and hopefully some players) will be thankful. I think it is the skinniest yet most useful soccer book ever penned. A bold statement, yes; but I assure you that it is a fluff-free, pure nuts and bolts handbook for real soccer solutions. But let’s come back to the writing of books thing later.

In addition, I’ve been planning a major overhaul to soccerpoet.com that will bring new life to the site. Now all I need is a second mortgage to afford it. I am hopeful that in a month or two I’ll be able to offer a better product. Poetheads (be certain to include both ‘e’s if you ever use that term) can be divided into two groups. There’s the Xs and Os group that is soccer, soccer, all-the-time soccer. And there are the readers who just enjoy being along for the ride. The problem is that each group is left sifting through the other group’s stuff to find what they’re looking for. So I’m hoping to do more to accommodate both groups by dividing the site between the soccer addicts and the people who I’d like to hang out with. Anyway, with any luck, big changes are a-comin’.

As for the book… this latest creation leaves me with three books in the can with a litany of other unfinished projects and a growing sense of frustration about said place in that can. Writing a book isn’t enough. Anyone who puts in the time to author an entire text, especially the part where you have to re-read and re-write a dozen times, needs to see the finished product. And I have yet to do that.

I’ve come close and am now closer still, but once you finish writing and rewriting, there’s a whole ‘nother level of work still ahead that I have no interest in doing but am obliged to do for my own mental well-being. It’s like the more you have, the more you have to do. Buy a big house? Gotta clean it. Got a big, beautiful yard? Gotta mow it. Got a new digital camera? Gotta download the software and then utilize its many features to maximize your purchase. And if you write a book, you gotta get it to market.

I am promising myself that I will not begin any new projects until at least one of these things is actually a book in book form with a price tag and a picture of me in the back jacket. If nothing else it will save me the frustration of going from three unpublished books to four, and that’s good for everyone.

So Athens got hit with 8 inches of snow on Sunday and the schools have been closed all week – as if I needed one more reason to love the south. I was surprised that the schools were closed yesterday; amazed they were closed today; and utterly mystified that they are shut down again tomorrow. I’m not sure why southerners are allergic to snow, but they treat it like napalm down here. I mean snow is only a hazard when the roads remain icy. When you can see nothing but pavement, which has pretty much been the case since Wednesday, it’s okay to drive. And it’s okay to drive without tapping your brakes every ten feet. Just sayin’.

We were supposed to begin training on Tuesday but if you check out the new pics, you’ll understand why we’ve had to postpone. Sunday night’s snow was followed by freezing rain on Monday, giving our fields the glassy look of first period ice at the Wachovia Center. (Okay, a quick note to southerners… first period ice is a hockey reference. Same goes for Wachovia Center.)

Upon realizing that this entry was utterly boring and pointless, I was one click away from dropping it into the recycle bin. That was moments before I picked up one of the many Sports Illustrateds littering my floor that I haven’t yet found the time to read. And that’s when I came across the story of a Cal coxswain named Jill Costello. I don’t want to spoil the story for you, not even a little bit, so I’ll refrain from offering any details. That said, I urge you to pick up the November 29, 2010 issue, the one with Michael Vick on the cover. The story, The Courage of Jill Costello, begins on page 65. I highly suggest that you get your hands on the magazine version if at all possible. In your hands, without the clutter of a commercial website, it will make for a more intimate reading experience and you’ll be thankful. (If you insist on clinging to the computer age at all costs, you can read the story here.)

Get that magazine. Go to a place where you can remain undisturbed for twenty minutes. And bring a box of tissues.

Jill’s story evoked such a cluster of thoughts and emotions that I still can’t decide where to begin. So I’ll just begin here.

Sometimes when I feel jaded I’ll begin to doubt the value of sports. Even after 20 years of paying my bills, sport still leaves me wondering if we don’t pay too much attention to a group of people chasing down a ball or a puck. Sometimes I get worn out by all the attention paid to absurd salaries and professional athletes who get to live above the law and I ask myself how important can it really be. And I think about all those people, those non-athletes, who are convinced that sport is a childish triviality that we’ve chosen to magnify beyond any reasonable degree of practicality. And I’ll wonder if maybe they’re more right than wrong.

And then I’ll read a story like the one about Jill Costello.

And then I feel sorry for them.

I feel sorry for them because they’ll never truly know the power of team. They’ve never experienced the struggle, the gestures both real and symbolic, the ultimate satisfaction of giving one’s total self to something much bigger than the individual, the moments of agonizing surrender that can be erased by a moment of magnificent inspiration that will make excruciating pain instantaneously bearable and make the impossible materialize right in front of our eyes. Because those are the moments that give monumental value to sport.

Too often those stories never see the light of day. They aren’t shuffled to the bottom of the pile – They never even reach the pile. Instead we are inundated with stories of millionaire criminals and egomaniacs who chase the spotlight for doing nothing more than the job that is expected of them. And most of the time there just aren’t enough column inches left over for a story like Jill’s. Then again, once in a while, as readers, we just get lucky.

I am worn out with Tiger and Brett and Michael and LeBron. I really don’t care if Kobe wins another ring. Those stories will never inspire me. But the story of a 110 pound girl sitting at the front of a boat, in a sport that I haven’t the slightest interest in, reminds me what is truly great about sport.

Each year I debate renewing my subscription to SI. I’m always four or five issues behind and nagged by a sense of obligation to make up ground. Sometimes it seems like a minor aggravation that I can easily do without. Then I read a story like the one about Jill Costello and her teammates and I realize that the magazine has just paid for itself.

Do yourself a favor. Read that story. And when you’re done, you’ll probably feel an overwhelming need to start googling to learn more about this amazing, heroic person. I suggest you just start here.

A year ago I was living in Oxford, MS and one of our graduating Ole Miss seniors, Danielle Johnson (Dee), was a candidate to continue her playing career as a professional in the WPS. We had talked about her post-college career only once while she was still playing. It was early in her senior season and the conversation was brief. I told her that if she wanted to make a run at the pros, I would be happy to help her train. She said she’d like that. And then we agreed we wouldn’t talk about it again until after the season had ended.

When the time came, we sat down and addressed her strengths and weaknesses, not just as a player, but as a professional prospect. And trust me, there is a difference. Dee was plenty talented enough to play professionally. I never doubted that for a moment. But college women’s soccer isn’t like NCAA football or basketball where the players are constantly on television for professional coaches to evaluate. And teams in the WPS don’t have the budgets for scouts to scour the country looking at players. So a lot of their draft decisions are done blindly and depend heavily on consultations with college coaches who know the players they are considering.

Naturally, the big hope was that Dee would get drafted. That was the first hurdle and would save her from the grind of travelling from city to city to attend player combines and open tryouts. But even if the draft dream came to fruition, there was no guarantee that Dee would be on a WPS roster. She would still have to try out for whichever team had selected her.

We couldn’t control whether or not a franchise would use a draft pick on her. But we could at least be prepared if that moment came along. So in January we went to work preparing for the best. Dee was a sensational center back and that was her preferred position, but as a pro, her size would likely dictate a move to outside back. So that’s what we focused on in training.

In mid December Coach Holeman and I started taking calls from a couple of WPS coaches asking for evaluations on Dee. This was how I summed her up:

For starters, Dee’s one of the best all-around people you will ever meet. She’s a fantastic person and teammate. She’s always cheerful and she’s got a fantastic sense of humor. Her teammates will love her. She’ll never give you any problems. She’ll work her tail off every single day and you won’t have to chase her out of the clubs. She’s serious about soccer and she’s dedicated to improving.

The problem you’ll have with Dee is that her two best soccer qualities are probably the two most difficult things for a coach to notice in a short period of time: Her 1v1 defending and her consistency.

Dee is the best 1v1 defender I’ve ever seen. She never gets beat. I mean NEVER. Sometimes I’ll see an opponent in a 1v1 situation against her and I can see the wheels turning in that forward’s head and I’ll think, ‘Aw, that girl thinks she can beat Dee. Isn’t that cute?’ Three seconds later Dee will have the ball and be dribbling up the field. I’ve seen that movie a hundred times over.

Technically she doesn’t have any notable weakness. She’s just plain very good at everything. She’s got very good speed. She’s very sound technically. She’s very good in the air. She can play with any surface of either foot. It doesn’t matter what exercise you do, Dee may not be the best in any one of them, but she’ll be in your top five in all of them. And she almost never loses the ball.

In Mid-January the WPS held its draft. I was in Birmingham that morning, glued to a computer watching the WPS Twitter feed. The conversations Coach Holeman and I had with WPS coaches had us feeling fairly confident that Dee would get selected, by either New Jersey or Boston. When Boston passed on her in the fourth round of a six-round draft, I was a little on edge. But a few picks later, still in the fourth round, the defending WPS champion, NJ Sky Blue, selected Danielle Johnson from Ole Miss. I couldn’t have been any happier if I had been drafted by the Phillies. Step #1 was accomplished. Believe it or not, that was the easy part. The real challenge for Dee would be making the roster.

We did the math. There were a limited number of roster spots – 22 to be exact. We figured that no established professional player was leaving the Sky Blue roster voluntarily, so to be a pro, Dee would have to beat out some pros – not to mention three girls who had been drafted ahead of her and whoever else might magically appear as players are wont to do. Dee was a dark horse at best.

Complicating matters was Dee herself. As I said in her evaluation, she’s tough to notice in just a few days. She’s a phenomenal player, but she’s got no ‘POP.’ She’s sound and dependable and unlikely to make a mistake. What she won’t do is make your head spin by weaving through 3 players on the dribble. Defensively, she’s a pickpocket. She’s not going to turn heads with thundering tackles. At the professional level, it would take a while for a coach to notice how much Dee had to offer. But Dee didn’t have a while.

Once Dee was drafted we shifted into a higher gear with her training. Dee continued to train with the Ole Miss team, we arranged some small-sided games with some of the Ole Miss men’s club players, and we added a few sessions each week where it was just she and I. One of Dee’s goals was to be at peak fitness when she reported to camp. I didn’t worry much about that. Dee is one of those people who is naturally blessed with a deep fitness tank. She can run forever.

It’s funny how many players make fitness their #1 priority, as if they are joining a track team. But it makes sense. Ultimately it’s about confidence and fitness is the one thing a player can take absolute control over. For Dee, because she is so competent technically, fitness is something she’ll gravitate toward because it can never be mastered. You can’t always measure whether or not you’re getting better technically. But you can measure fitness, and you can always see some improvement from week to week.

My goals were a little bit different. Technically I wanted her to get a little bit better with long balls, particularly low, driven balls that would serve as 30-40 yard passes that got from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible. This is an important quality in defenders that a lot of players lack. I figured it might be one technical thing that would catch the attention of her new coaches. If she switched fields with a 40 yard waist-high laser, even once, someone would notice.

Beyond that, I wanted Dee to report to that camp with a surplus of confidence, which is easier said than done. In two months Dee would be on the field with legitimate international superstars and I didn’t want her feeling star-struck and overwhelmed. I wanted Dee to be so comfortable with the ball that it would seem an extension of herself. So each day I would try to create technically challenging exercises that were more difficult than anything she had seen. I tried to design exercises where she would fail initially but would master over a few sessions. Each time she took one of my mountains and ground it into a molehill her confidence would grow.

Let me tell you something about Dee. When you’re trying to design a technical exercise to make her fail, you better bring out the heavy artillery because that girl adapts quicker than a cockroach. After our first two sessions I had to step back and reevaluate my strategy because she wasn’t just turning my mountains into molehills – she was vaporizing them into dust. So I went back to the drawing board and started designing exercises that were one click below impossible, exercises that no one in the world could master on the first go-‘round. And that’s where we found some chinks in her armor.

Nothing determines a player’s level of confidence more than her first touch. When Dee got to NJ I didn’t want her to see a single ball that she hadn’t already seen and mastered in Oxford, MS, so we began doing some drills that can only be described as absurd. In one of these drills Dee stood facing me from three yards away. I would gently punt a ball that would land 8-10 yards past where she stood. When the punt came off my foot, Dee would have to spin, chase the ball down at full sprint and before it hit the ground, cradle it on her instep and turn the ball back toward me, then return it with a pass. Dee struggled for the first few reps but after that, it was a sight to behold. She was chasing those balls down like Willie Mays and executing that turn effortlessly with either foot. First with the right foot, then with the left. One after another – flawlessly.

But my favorite confidence building game is Ping. In Ping, Dee would stand about two yards in front of the goal facing the field (the goal was only there to collect balls after bad reps). I stood at the penalty stripe with a bag of balls. Ping is a really simple game. I would blast a ball at Dee, aiming for knee-high or lower, and her job was to bring the ball down in front of her no more than a step away. Sometimes I would strike the ball off the ground. Sometimes I would half-volley it. Either way, that ball was movin’!

As you might imagine, when you’re the player in Dee’s spot, playing Ping takes a great deal of trust in your server. When someone inadvertently wallops a half-volley at your sternum from ten yards away, there isn’t a lot of time to get out of the way. And occasionally we had our mishaps (It really helps if your player is the forgiving sort). But by and large Ping was a great confidence builder. Dee got more comfortable each time we played to the point where I began to put restrictions on her. By the end of our time together I could dictate that Dee could only receive the ball with the outside of her foot. Then I would absolutely bomb half-volleys at her and watch her just clean them up, one after another, like she had been doing it her whole life. And it seemed like each day, after we had put the equipment away, I would walk into Coach Holeman’s office and say, “Man. Dee is so freaking good.”

Our fitness sessions were gruesome. Again I set out to create exercises designed to make her fail – no small feat, mind you. So I constructed these obstacle courses from hell that would leave one of the fittest people I’ve ever seen on wobbly legs, hunched over gasping for breath. And just in case you’re ever thinking about training a player with similar goals, I hope she is blessed with Dee’s work rate and determination which cannot possibly be overstated. Reading about these sessions does no justice at all to Dee’s intestinal fortitude.

Dee never, not once coasted through a single repetition of anything we did. If anything, there were times when I had to command her to slow down. She has high gear, exclusively. And she brought that high gear day after day after day. Most days it was just Dee and I and a couple bags of balls on a big empty field. There was no atmosphere. There were no teammates cheering her on. Some days it was rainy and below freezing. But Dee never shrank. Nothing muffled her work ethic. She trained with a frenetic urgency to arrive to New Jersey as prepared as humanly possible. It didn’t matter how grueling our session was on Monday, on Tuesday Dee was right back out there begging for more, like a prizefighter inviting another haymaker from his opponent. A coach would be lucky to experience even one player like that in a career. When you do, it changes your expectations of every other player you will ever coach.

When it was time for Dee to go I told her she was ready; that she belonged playing at that level – because she was. Then I gave her a Bruce Springsteen CD and wished her well.

Sky Blue held a preseason like every other team. But they also held a pre-preseason. They brought in some of the holdover bubble players from the 2009 roster, some other players they had identified but not drafted, and their 2010 draft picks. In total, about 25 players reported for Preseason 1.0. Of that group, a dozen or so would advance to Preseason 2.0 where they would meet up with the team’s regular starters and marquee players and the real fight for roster spots would begin. Dee needed to advance through both rounds to be legitimately considered a pro.

Dee survived that first cut and a series of others and was eventually included in Sky Blue’s 22-woman roster as a ‘developmental player’, a tag hung on players 18-22. And in their first game of the 2010 season, Dee came off the bench to help seal a victory. Dee, the dark horse with no POP, was officially a pro.

A month or so after the WPS season began I got to meet Sky Blue’s assistant coach, Rick Stainton. Rick was the guy I had been speaking with before the draft. He told me a great story about how Dee survived all the cuts. He said she was on the board as a potential cut every time. There was nothing about Dee’s play that warranted a cut. It wasn’t like she was playing poorly. But just as we suspected, Dee was hard to notice. She was flying under the radar – definitely not a good thing when you’re trying to get noticed. If Dee was going to be cut it wasn’t going to be because of her game. It was going to be because they had to cut someone. But then the coaches would go through the records they kept of their 1v1 battles and discover that Dee never got beat. Even the superstars couldn’t get past her. And they realized that there was something about this kid from Baton Rouge that was worth hanging onto.

So why am I driving this entry down Memory Lane? Because Dee has to go through it all over again in a few months. And her first move, literally, is to Athens, GA so we can reconvene her training. There are some logistical wrinkles we still need to iron out, but if all goes well, I’ll document our training sessions and all you soccer junkies out there can get your fix. And maybe one day you’ll have the chance to train a player and see her on national television, maybe playing against the world’s very best player.