Soccer Poet

Do you find it strange that as the US Women’s National Team has advanced to the World Cup quarter-final, that I actually feel sorta bad for them. Gone are the days when that team could do no wrong… or could be both sensational and anonymous. For the better part of two decades they performed in a sort of vacuum. The only people who cared, loved them unconditionally. It’s been well documented, but this institution we know as the USWNT once won a World Cup in China and was greeted by two people when they arrived back in the US. That’s right…. TWO! Back then, few people even knew we had a women’s national team; fewer cared; and those who did care were 100% behind them. Now this team that has done nothing except get the results it needed, winning its group along the way… nothing but position itself for a strong run at a third World Cup title, is being pummeled by every columnist and blogger with a passing interest in women’s soccer. The coach, Jill Ellis, is being ridiculed. Abby Wambach, a hero so many times to this team – a player who delivered one of the very best moments in the history of American sports – has been abandoned. Carli Lloyd, who has an incredible knack for scoring goals that win Olympic Gold medals, is being cast off as liability in midfield. Keyboards have become hammers and our national team has become the nail. Why is that?

Well for starters, there’s this thing called the internet and it magnifies everything. Instead of moaning to a friend about our team’s uninspired performance, now you can moan to all your friends and followers who can pass along your moan to their friends and followers and give it real legs. But isn’t this what this team has always been working toward… to grow the game? To get people to care? And haven’t they succeeded in remarkable fashion! Hasn’t women’s soccer exploded since the ‘91ers returned from China! Didn’t another World Cup championship in ’99 have all of us saying that we will have two fillings? With one shining moment after another, the USWNT has accomplished everything its pioneers had hoped. Most importantly, it got us to care. And now that’s coming back to bite them.

This entity that is the USWNT has outgrown its bubble and become a victim of its own wonderful creation, inciting an interest that has vanquished the vacuum. They hoped we’d care. And now we do. The team has evolved. Now, players get paid and the team plays to packed stadiums. That’s a good thing. But when people care, the microscope zooms in for a closer look. When people care, people expect. And from everything I’ve been reading about this World Cup, people expect more. So what exactly is it about this team that has seen them succeed while simultaneously seen them butchered in the media/social media? Why does it feel like so many opinion-makers are abandoning a perfectly good ship? Has the ghost of USWNT's past set the bar unreasonably high?

I confess, I’m no different; I’m just quieter. I’ve watched our games and each win has felt a little hollow.  The important point we gained in drawing Sweden did nothing to boost my morale or optimism. Our performances haven’t excited me. Okay, that’s hardly the objective for this team. It’s just that I’m hardly alone. It seems everyone is waiting for that dazzling breakout performance where the US carves up an (11-player) opponent with a relentless commitment to attack. (You know... the way we used to.)

By and large the critics fall into one of two camps: There are those who fault Jill Ellis and her 4-4-2 system, and those who fault Jill Ellis and her personnel selections. Both camps have made some valid points. As for me, I’m more interested in trying to decipher what our style is. We’re clearly not a possession team. We’re not a transition/counter attack team. We’re not a wing play team (although we tend to do our best work when we get the ball wide down the left). We’re not a direct team. We just seem to play some hybrid, hodgepodge style that can’t be classified, and that’s what puzzles me. How can we have this amazing collection of talent and send them to the World Cup with no definable style of play? I think that therein lies the foundation of the criticism: It just hasn’t been much fun to watch us play soccer. Complicating matters is the fact that it has been fun to watch the soccer that our opponents have played against us, and that may be the real elephant in the room.

Australia and Sweden strung together some wonderful attacking combinations and runs of possession. The Nigerians had their moments too. Even Columbia, the so called David to our Goliath, was a delight to watch in the latter part of the first half. As a matter of fact, one of the best pieces of soccer in that match came from the Columbians in the second half when they were playing a man down. Surely I wasn’t the only one watching those bits of brilliance and thinking, ‘Why can’t we do that?’ Well, we can. It’s not like we don’t have the talent. It’s just that we don’t have any discernible style that seems to value one thing over another. A team’s style tells you who they are. Without the blueprint, there’s no identity. And as best I can tell right now, this team’s identity is a photo of Alex Morgan.

I think a lot of fans were angered when the Australian soccer website said, ‘The USA, well, they just aren’t that good.” But there is a big group of soccer people, myself included, who thought, ‘Oh Crap! They're onto us!" You can't rightly blame the folks Down Under. All they did was pull back the Wizard’s curtain. If you haven’t read that post, check it out here. Believe me, it’s not just sour Aussie grapes.

We’ve won and we’ve advanced. We’ve done that in large part through sheer athleticism and depth. We are bigger, stronger and faster and we grind teams down. When we bring on a sub, we don’t get worse; we get different. Not many other teams can say that. And it hasn’t hurt that two of our opponents whittled themselves down to ten players. Here’s to hoping that trend continues! Our defense has been stellar and Julie Johnston’s star is rising at breakneck speed. Hope Solo, when called upon, has cemented her status as the world’s best between the pipes. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s enough to grind out three more wins and another world championship and send the bartenders home happy.

So, in an effort to assuage my guilt, I’ll take the ‘I support the troops but not the war’ stance. I believe in our team. I believe that there is still a heroic moment or two left in the tanks of Wambach and Lloyd. I believe that Megan Rapinoe is among the world’s very best. I believe that Alex Morgan can turn a game on its ear as she did against Columbia. I believe that with or without a discernible style, we might still have enough weapons to win this thing.

We are who we are: a team that scratches out a way to score more goals than the opponent. Even if I’m not head over heels for the way we’ve been playing soccer, I’m committed to supporting these players because I owe them that much. Haven’t they taught us, time and again, that betting against them is a really bad idea? I have no intention of abandoning ship. I owe this team and these players for all the times they’ve stood strong, done the heroic and raised my patriotic spirit to a better place. If we go on to win a World Cup, who am I to say we should have won it differently? At that point, all I’ll be saying is, “U-S-A!”

Poetheads, are you ready to get your World Cup on? Is your red, white and blue ready to be gloriously glorious? Are you fired up to watch Alex Morgan, Abby Wambach, Megan Rapinoe, Carli Lloyd, Hope Solo and friends kick some global backside at the 2015 Women’s World Cup? Oh hell yes! I don’t know why, but I just have a feeling that this is our year. Believe me; as a Philly fan, I've learned to set my hope meter at something just above abject despair, so this is way out of my comfort zone. I honestly haven’t felt this optimistic since ’99, and I can’t explain it, but I just have this undeniable feeling that this is the year that we recoup the cup.

To celebrate the 2015 Women’s World Cup and a fervent patriotism for the Stars and Stripes, I’m going to be giving away copies of my new book (that hasn’t even been released yet!), and there’s no reason you shouldn’t win one of them. Keep on reading I’ll tell you how in just a moment.

In other news… Since the launch of Soccer iQ, many readers have suggested how awesome it would be if there were videos to go along with the book. And because I’m a big fan of awesome, I couldn’t agree more! So as another arm of my WWC celebration, I am happy to announce the release of the first Soccer iQ video. It’s a companion to Chapter 36, Turning the Corner, and it features a few of my all-time favorite people/players. Check it out and let me know what you think. If you like it, please share the link because Lord knows how many players will benefit from watching it. Incidentally, I apologize in advance for my comically bad narration. Clearly I’m no Kevin Copp.

Okay, let’s get back to that contest. This is how it’s gonna work…

The prerequisites:

First off, you need to have read Soccer iQ, either Vol. 1, Vol. 2 or (preferably) both. It’s not that I’m trying to strong-arm you into buying a book; it’s just that if you haven’t read either of these suckers, you won’t know what to look for.

Secondly, you have to be a Twitter follower of mine - @SoccerPoet.

With that out of the way, here’s how it works… Spot a Soccer iQ moment from any match and tweet it to me with the hashtag #SocceriQ. The ‘moment’ must be referenced in either Vol. 1 or Vol. 2. Describe the moment, include the teams, the running time of the match and stick the hashtag #SocceriQ on there. For example…

@SoccerPoet USvAUS 62:15 AUS forward Worlds Dumbest Foul #SocceriQ

@SoccerPoet JAPvSUI 24:40 JAP fwd tries Impossible Pass #SocceriQ

As Soccer iQ is about the most common mistakes, that’s mainly what we’re looking for – mistakes – not examples of players getting it right… although there certainly are some exceptions. For example… someone hunting a rebound on a penalty kick, or a toe poke for a goal. That kinda stuff will work too.

The tweeter of the best Soccer iQ moment of each match (as selected by our blue ribbon panel of judge) wins. If multiple followers tweet about the same moment, the one who tweets first will win.

At that point I’ll need to get your shipping address (no P.O. boxes) and soon I’ll be sending you a free copy my upcoming release Shutout Pizza – Smarter Soccer Defending for Players and Coaches. Then we will all celebrate our shared good fortune as Team USA emerges victorious as world champion!

So you see, it’s really quite simple, yes?

Oh yeah, one more thing… you can win up to three times.

Remember, the tournament starts this Saturday, June 6, and the US opens its play on Monday, June 8 against those Matildas from Down Under. My prediction? PAAAAIN.

“The problem with instant gratification is that it takes too long.”

• Anonymous

Suddenly awash in a new wave of free time, I’ve been doing a lot more reading about the culture of youth soccer and athletics in general. The blogosphere is heavy with articles of this genre, and as a newly minted man of leisure, I’ve indulged in many of them. As one might expect when exploring this particular brand of material, you don’t have to read very far before crossing paths with that most sinister E-word – Entitlement. And the carnival that is college athletics gifted us another shining example this past week when a strength coach at Tulane was fired for making a bowler run as punishment for being an hour late to a session. Yeah, feel free to re-read that last sentence. Surely there is more to this story so I’m not choosing sides, but the early reports suggest that the bowler’s parents got upset with the strength coach, called the AD, and the coach was terminated. Voila! Instant viral story.

So much has been written in the coaching world about the epidemic of entitlement – of how we are raising a generation of kids allergic to accepting responsibility for their own lot in life, swept away by the notion that the universe is perpetually in their debt and thus obligated to vaporize each and every obstacle to their immediate happiness, on and off the field. I’ve coached college soccer for 24 years and I can tell you, it’s not like the problem has never been there. Spoiled kids aren’t unique to soccer and they weren’t invented in the new millennium. But I can assure you that in my experience, their numbers have grown with each passing year.

It’s sad to imagine our Rudys being overrun by a generation of Veruca Salts, and that’s what drives bloggers to their keyboards. Most of the articles I’ve come across were written by coaches – frustrated coaches – throwing a Hail Mary on the interthingy, hoping desperately to spread awareness, influence parents, and score a victory for the greater good. I’d imagine plenty of other coaches, myself included, are wishing them the very best of luck.

But I’m here to tell ya that the news isn’t all bad. The Rudys may be getting overrun in the blogosphere, but they’re still out there if you know where to look. Yesterday, Glenn Crooks – former Rutgers coach and now broadcaster for NYFC of the MLS – pointed out an uplifting article about Caley Chelios, the daughter of NHL star Chris Celios. Caley barely played on the Northwestern lacrosse team for her first three seasons but her sticktuitiveness has paid off in this her senior year.

Bloggers spend so much time writing in gross generalities about the players who get it wrong, maybe it would be more effective (and enjoyable) to write about a player who got it right. Maybe turning this issue inside-out will bring it closer to home.

I actually wrote my own dispatch on this topic, but it wasn’t intended for public consumption. It was a letter I wrote to a player I was coaching at Georgia. Due to ummm – recent developments – that letter has been declassified. I’ll share it with you here. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll find it just a little bit uplifting. If you do, I hope you’ll share it with your little athlete.

This one is coming from the heart. I hope you enjoy it.

First, let me give you some background on a center back we had at UGA.

Jenna Buckley was a five-star recruit in high school – an amazing talent with top tier speed. By all accounts, she was an absolute flier! Then, in April of 2008, her senior year, she blew out her knee… on Senior Night no less. It was a harbinger of Jenna’s soccer fortunes for the next few years and it forced her to red-shirt her freshman season at Georgia.

Jenna dutifully tended to her rehab. Her knee recovered and eventually she returned to the field, but she never regained her track star speed. As a matter of fact, she became rather… slow. Not exactly the signature quality one looks for in a defender.

Jenna didn’t get much playing time when she returned to action in 2009, but she saw a chance for a new beginning with the arrival of a new coaching staff for the 2010 season. She won a starting position for our opening game that season, but she was eventually beaten out by a freshman named Torri Allen. It was horribly frustrating for Jenna. Even with the new staff, she was right back to Square One. More frustrating still, her ability wasn’t the culprit – she was every bit talented enough to be in the starting line-up, and her soccer IQ was off the charts – it was that darn knee; it had just made her too slow. Had she maintained her speed, Jenna’s playing prospects would have been virtually guaranteed.

Imagine knowing that if your body hadn’t betrayed you, you’d be playing college soccer instead of watching it. Imagine the maddening existence of knowing that an injury, something you didn’t deserve and couldn’t control, has shattered your dream into a million little pieces. Imagine living with that… every. damn. day.

But here’s the thing – Jenna is smart. I don’t mean like typical smart; I mean like out-of- this-world smart. She’s got book-smarts and soccer-smarts and common sense and she’s got a lot of all three. Facing a situation that would lead many other players to check out and blame their predicament on everyone but themselves, Jenna did nothing of the sort. She realized that feeling sorry for herself wasn’t going to fix the problem, so she just put her head down and kept doing the one thing she knew how to do – her best.

On Wednesday nights I’d meet with the defenders to review video of our most recent games. At certain points I’d freeze the video and ask the players, “Okay, what should happen next?” Or, “Where should this player be moving to?” I wanted each player to understand not only her position, but also the positions of all the other defenders. So I’d show them these situations and ask them to give me the answers.

During one of these meetings, I noticed that Jenna was answering the majority of the questions, and she wasn’t exactly knocking people out of the way to do it. She would sit there and wait until it was obvious that no one else knew the answer, and then she would, almost regretfully, answer the question with absolute precision.

The starters could answer most of the questions, but never all of them. Jenna, on the other hand, could spit out the answer to each and every question I asked. This became a bit of a trend. Each week there was at least one question that no one could answer except Jenna. I was stunned that a player who rarely got on the field understood the material better than any of the starters. ‘How is that possible,’ I wondered.

If you’ve never spent much time doing what I do, it’s hard to explain the remoteness of this as a possibility and how impressive a feat this really was. Almost without exception, when it comes to video sessions, a player’s level of interest – and thus her comprehension – is directly proportional to her playing time. Let’s face it; no one gets too excited about dissecting video from a game where she didn’t even get on the field. And to be honest, sometimes playing time isn’t even enough to capture their focus. Jenna’s comprehension was a total anomaly. She was an outlier, and an impressive one at that. One night I pulled Jenna aside and quietly asked how she always knew the answers. “I just pay attention,” she said. Naturally.

Jenna easily could’ve checked out. I’ve seen plenty of players who lost hope and checked out after just a game or two of sitting the bench. And Jenna had a really wonderful excuse to fall back on – that stupid knee. I mean, this situation was genuinely beyond her control. She was a legitimate victim of circumstance, and nothing was ever going to make her fast again. Jenna was a very talented player, but her chances of playing were slimmer because we almost never substituted our defenders. At the start of 2011, her fourth season of college soccer, Jenna still wasn’t playing!

But Jenna never did check out. She never sat around feeling sorry for herself and blaming her coaches or her teammates or her knee. She never once mailed in her effort at practice. Her training habits never dipped. She focused on the things she could control and did her best to own every single one of those things. And she was smart enough to realize that one day her chance might come again, and if it did, she was damn sure gonna be prepared. So she paid attention.

Early in 2011, our starting center back got injured very late in a game. Jenna got to start the next match and, wouldn’t you know, she was absolutely sensational! She ran the defense like she’d been doing it all along. She never put a foot wrong and helped us lock down a difficult shutout. Her understanding of the position was so remarkable that by the end of the game, Jenna Buckley was anointed as our new starting center back. It was a position she held onto for the rest of the year.

We made it to the second round of the NCAA tournament that year. In our first-round game against Kansas, Jenna assisted the game-winning goal. Our season ended six days later at Duke. Jenna would graduate a month after that and everyone figured she was done with college soccer.

I didn’t recruit Jenna Buckley to Georgia when she was coming out of high school. She was already a Bulldog when I arrived. But now I found myself recruiting her to stay at Georgia. Having red-shirted as a freshman, Jenna had the option of playing out her eligibility or accepting any one of the myriad of seriously high-paying job offers that a brain like hers commands.

I didn’t want Jenna to leave and she knew that. Not only was she a fantastic player, she was also one of my favorite people. Seeing all that she had overcome to earn her spot on the field, well, how could you not root for a kid like that? But it looked fairly certain that Jenna was going to finish out the fall semester then be whisked away to a high-powered Wall Street investment firm. I never asked her directly. I didn’t want to add a distraction to our season and, if I’m being completely honest, I wasn’t prepared to hear her rejection. I chose to bury my head in the sand and hope for the best and imagine the day when Jenna would walk into my office, smile brightly and announce she was staying. So I waited. And waited. And I waited until I couldn’t afford to wait any more. Our season had ended. Time had grown short and I had to make a move. UGA Soccer needed to recruit Jenna Buckley. Again.

I didn’t want to just have a talk with Jenna. I wanted something more permanent, something she could hold in her hands and look at over and over. So I decided to write her a letter.

I found that letter in my computer files the other day, and that’s really the whole point of this entry. It was a nice reminder that there are still plenty of good kids who take responsibility for their own lot in life and who don’t crumble when things turn against them. If you are the parent of a soccer player – or just a parent at all – I’ll leave it to you to figure out on which side of the fence you and your child will choose to fall. Just remember, it really is a choice that you get to make.

Hey Jenna-

You obviously know where I stand. You know I want you to come back and play out your eligibility and lead our defense to new heights. But I don’t think I’ve ever really explained why. And when I do explain why, I’m almost positive there’s no way for you to fully comprehend and internalize what I mean. But I’m gonna try.

First of all, (and I want to be perfectly clear about this) yes, my motives are completely selfish. I want you to stay because I think you’re great for the team and that you will help us win. I think we are better with you than without you and that’s reason enough for me to want you here. But that’s just scratching the surface as I am way more selfish than that.

Jenna, I love being your coach more than you can possibly imagine and I’m going to tell you why. I’ve been coaching college soccer for 21 years. And for 21 years I’ve dealt with every possible category of underachiever. I’ve dealt with every conceivable variety of victim. I’ve dealt with an assembly line of players who held everyone and everything except themselves responsible for their lot in (soccer) life. For 21 years I’ve told these players that the best they can do is to choose how to respond in a way that will change their soccer lives for the better. And I have told them exactly how they should respond. Year after year I’ve given them road maps. I’ve told them exactly what they needed to do and how to get there. And almost without exception, what they said they wanted did not match up with their physical and emotional response. Their effort was not proportionate to their goals. In a sense, they quit. They gave up hope when things didn’t immediately turn in their favor. They phoned in their effort at practice. They tuned out at meetings. As you might expect, they spent their careers mired in mediocrity, mining up one excuse after another, blaming their coaches every step of the way.

Jenna, I rooted so hard for so many of those kids. I really believed in so many of them… that if they just kept the faith and genuinely did their very best each and every day, that they could change their own destinies. I knew in my heart that they had it within them. But they just couldn’t find the resolve to keep grinding when they weren’t reaping immediate rewards. They could never get their head around the idea of a long-term investment. I’ve had my heart broken by more of those players than you’ll ever know. The frustration of seeing one player after another, year after year after year, not digging in and putting up a stinkin’ fight is so damn demoralizing, Jenna. And then you know that they’ll be back again the following fall and their situation won’t be any different and they’ll just point the finger at their coach and say, “His fault.”

This, I’ve learned, is the life of a coach.

And then you came along.

You came into my life and made me remember that this is what I originally thought coaching would be like… players digging in and doing their best and fighting the good fight day after day after day, supporting their teammates regardless of their individual desires while continuing to hold themselves to the highest possible standards. Jenna, you are not a once-in-a-lifetime talent, but you are a once-in-a-lifetime spirit. You’re the spirit that a coach is just happy to see every day. You’re the spirit that a coach watches and then wonders why so and so can’t be more like you. You’re the one we thought we’d be surrounded by.

You know Jenna, I don’t think it’s too difficult to know what the right thing is. As a matter of fact, I think most players know the right thing to do to improve their soccer life. I think that knowing is the easy part. But actually acting on that knowledge… actually making that conscious choice day after day after day and having faith that eventually it will work out… well, I think that’s just too much to ask of most people. And that, my friend, is the defining quality that will forever separate you from the legions of soccer players I have ever and will ever coach. I will be forever thankful for that. I will be forever thankful for that one kid who didn’t assign her lot in life to outside forces; who instead took responsibility for her own fate and chose the best possible response each and every day even when it would have been so much easier to lay down. So many players have been in your exact situation. So many had the opportunity to respond with their very best and to really make a case for themselves. But I only know of one who genuinely did. I waited twenty stinkin’ years to find you. Two decades! And Jenna, when I speak to the soccer gods about you, all I can really tell them is, It’s about damn time.

But you know what the best part of it is, Jenna? It’s seeing the player I root for finally break through and get rewarded. It’s seeing the kid who never gave up finally get her time in the spotlight… and seeing her make the most of it. If you only knew how much it made my heart swell when you took the field against Duke last week. I was so very proud of you because there was only one reason you were on that field – you freaking earned it.

You’re going to make your mark on this world, Jenna Buckley. You’re going to go on to do great things and you’re going to be the envy of countless people and touch countless lives. And I will remember you for a lot of wonderful reasons that have nothing to do with kicking a ball. But make no mistake… I will also remember you for being one helluva soccer player.

You know, when I was a player, I knew that my coaches had a huge influence on my life. They affected me greatly with their decisions. That was so easy to see. But I never stopped to consider that I was also having an effect on their lives. I think you should know that you have had an effect on my life, and in the best possible way.

Jenna, I hope you stay with us. I hope you come back and lead our defense for one more season. But if you don’t, I want you to know that coaching you has been one of the most inspirational experiences of my career, and for many years to come I will be telling unhappy players about this girl I used to coach and how she responded to her situation and how in her senior year she was a starting center back at the University of Georgia.

And oh yeah… by the way… you will never, ever regret playing one more season of college soccer. That’s the only promise I’ll ever make to you.

Sincerely,

Dan

Jenna stayed. Two months after I sent her this letter, Jenna’s teammates elected her captain. On the night our season ended that year, no one cried harder than she did.

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Paul ‘Ace’ Hayward died today.

I’ve been sitting at this keyboard for ten minutes, and for the life of me I can’t figure out what the second sentence of this entry is supposed to be.

If you’ve been here before, you’ve met Ace. I only hope that you also had the chance to meet the man himself. If you did, you already consider yourself lucky. If you didn’t, I’m sorry you were cheated.

I count five heroes in my life. Only three of them ever knew my name. Ace was among them. I chose my college because of him, and because of that choice, my world is what it is. Many of the very best friends I have, I have because of Ace. The greatest experience of my life – college soccer – I had because of Ace. I owe so much to this guy that I can’t even begin to explain it.

A few of us visited him in the hospital on Monday. He was heavily sedated. He never moved; never spoke. We celebrated when he opened one eye for half a beat, and that one time when his right arm flinched. But they swore he could hear every word we said. I’m glad I told him he was my hero. I’m glad I said goodbye.

Seeing him in that bed, it was tough to imagine Ace pulling one last rabbit out of his hat, but the doctor was cautiously optimistic. When he said Ace might walk out of there, I literally almost laughed. I almost laughed because I was thinking about how frustrating it must be for fate with this guy Ace continually screwing up its calendar. It must be like trying to grab the last minnow in the bucket. I smiled at the thought of Ace pulling off one more great escape with all of us cheering for him while simultaneously shaking our heads in disbelief.

The outpouring on Facebook was like nothing I’ve ever seen. Within an hour of his passing, his wall was buried in eulogies. Everyone had his or her own thing to say, but what they all had in common was a deep affection for a man who made their lives a little bit brighter. Just take one look at that smile and you know all you need to know about the man. What you see is what you got.

I was sad. I cried. Again. But to be honest, the sadness has sorta gone away, at least for the time being. I’ll be sad again tomorrow. Maybe even later tonight. But right now, more than anything, I’m pissed. I want answers and I want them now. I want an audience with God. I want to tell him that he got this one wrong, that he owes us one, and that the player-to-be-named-later had better be something pretty damn special.

And then I think about what Ace would’ve said to that nonsense. It’s the same thing he said to me back in August. “You can’t worry about it, Danny. Just let it go. Life’s too short.” Ace never let himself get bogged down with the hassles that consume so much energy from the rest of us. His willingness to ignore the trivialities was his great paradox. For a man who fought so hard for so long, he was also so very willing to concede the little battles in order to keep the spirits high.

Sometime in the early 1990s, Ace had a bumper sticker. I’ve seen it on numerous bumpers in the years since, but that was the first time I’d ever seen it. Three little words so perfectly portrayed the core of this big man’s soul. It’s funny because over these past two decades, whenever I think about Ace, that bumper sticker is always the first thing that pops into my mind because it summed him up so very well. All it said was: ‘Mean People Suck.’

In the end, I think cancer was Ace’s second-greatest fight. I believe his greatest one was to cure the human condition. He wanted everyone to live, love and enjoy our time together, the way he enjoyed his. It’s like he discovered the secret to happiness and wished everyone else would just believe him and follow his lead. He must’ve picked up some knowledge during all those hospital stays, because in the end, he gave us the only prescription we’d ever need: smiledeep.

I’ve written a fair share about Ace, but there was only one time when he felt I got it exactly right. He asked me to send him this quote several times. Each time I did, he managed to misplace it, so I’d have to send it again. He told me he wanted it on his headstone, so I figured he’d be okay if I posted it here one more time.

Thank you for the friendship and the inspiration, Acer. You were a great player, coach, father and friend. You have always been loved and you will forever be missed. Smiledeep.

pe.Ace

I’m going to begin with a little shameless self-promotion as Soccer iQ was named as one of the Top 5 soccer books of the year by the NSCAA Soccer Journal (otherwise known as the Best Publication Ever!). It’s been quite a month for Soccer iQ. In addition to the laurels bestowed by the Soccer Journal, September was also a record sales month, more than doubling the amount of copies sold on Amazon during its previous best month, which incidentally, was August. I thought I might mention that as we approach the holiday season and you’re brainstorming for gift ideas for the soccer people in your life.

Now, about them Georgia Bulldogs… We all anticipated a very difficult away weekend against the likes of Missouri and Kentucky, and we were not disappointed. I’ll try to get to Kentucky in the next entry. For now I’m just going to focus on Missouri. I have my reasons. If you think it has anything to do with the result, well, just keep reading. We arrived in St. Louis on Thursday afternoon, grabbed lunch and headed straight to training where Georgia soccer legend Carrie Patterson was waiting to greet us. Carrie holds about 101 scoring records for the Bulldogs, and she’s followed soccer into an assistant coaching gig at Mizzou. We had a light walk-through session to show our players what we expected out of the Missouri team. Their style was going to be a lot different than the teams we’d recently played. Mizzou is very athletic, fast and physical; and they like to go forward at the speed of sound. It was going to be a game of opposing styles and whichever team could best impose its style was likely going home with the result.

If you’ve been a follower for any length of time you should know two things about me: I love the road trips and I love to eat. Typically these two things fit quite nicely together as our travel weekends are always highlighted by some quality dining experiences. Let’s just say the Dawgs don’t skimp when it comes to food stops. Many a fine cow has found its way onto my plate during the fall. I have absolutely no discipline when it comes to restaurant dining. Maybe it’s because we almost never ate out when I was growing up, but whenever we go out to dinner, I eat like it’s an Olympic event and I’m favored to take gold. I think that subconsciously there’s a part of my brain saying, “This may be the last time you ever eat out so you’d better make it count.” Regardless, that’s why I balloon up in the fall. (I can’t really say why I balloon up in winter, spring or summer.) My motto is No Food Left Behind. Anyhoo… Beth has our family on a gluten-free diet. In case you’re like I was a week ago, gluten basically means wheat. And any diet means a life-altering challenge for me. It’s not the taste of gluten things that it’s difficult for me to sidestep; it’s more a matter of convenience. Gluten is basically the plate of my existence. PB and Js go on bread. Cheese goes on crackers. Dip goes on pretzels. There’s gluten in everything that holds my foods together. I find it’s more a matter of utility than of taste. Regardless, this was going to be the first road weekend where I couldn’t gobble up dinner rolls like Pac Man or dive head first into one of our many pasta meals. The way I saw it, everyone else had two games this weekend; I had three.

On Friday mornings of our travel weekends, we find a room in the hotel and give a scouting report of our opponent. We’ll talk about the key points to the match and show our players some video of the team we’re about to face. This particular hotel didn’t have a meeting room available for us, but they offered us the breakfast area once the serving time had passed. This is no big deal, and it’s not the first time we’ve had to hook up a laptop to the lobby television. However, we’ve never actually had other hotel guests stay in the room once we gathered. But this time there was an elderly couple, probably in their mid-seventies, that quietly occupied a table in the back corner as we got down to work. So there I am at the front of the room, talking about the strengths of the Missouri team, when the man begins to amble around to exit the room. Then from out of nowhere, he stops, turns to me and asks, “Coach, do you choose your players on beauty?” And then he stood there waiting for an answer. Ummm… Yeah, there’s no right way to answer to that. Just think it over for a minute and you’ll understand where I’m coming from. Talk about your awkward pauses. Anyway, it was a funny distraction that left me looking like a deer in headlights, much to the delight of our players.

As for the game… Wow did we come out on fire! We started off as well as we have all season and had the run of the park for the first 25 minutes. But as you well know, all of that means nothing if you can’t stick the ball in the net, and that was the piece of the puzzle we just couldn’t seem to find. When you’re dominating a good team, you know that you’d better also produce some goals because the tide won’t forever stay in your favor. Eventually Mizzou was going to settle in and take back some of the game. We’d prefer if they had to do that with a goal or two already in our bank. The soccer gods don’t look kindly upon teams that refuse their charity. They have a habit of making you pay for leaving goals on the table. Thankfully, I think they were a little preoccupied with some other matters on Friday night.

As anticipated, Mizzou started taking back some of the momentum in the latter stages of the half. We didn’t break their spirit when we had the chance; now we were in for a battle. Despite our early monopoly of territory, the two best chances of the half fell to Mizzou. At this point I feel obliged to mention an interesting little sidebar to this match. On the night before the game, we received an email from Mizzou’s Event Management office informing us that it was their ROTC night, and as part of the promotion, they planned on firing off a cannon “after each Mizzou goal.” Huh? Well, apparently Woody doesn’t like the sound of cannon fire. Woody hadn’t been very busy this year, but on Friday night she made two spectacular first half saves from close range to get us into the intermission level at 0-0. One of those saves was absolutely absurd as I swear she materialized from thin air to protect a wide open goal.

Here’s the thing… every coach I know hates promotions like that if for no other reason than superstition. Coaches don’t create these promotions; we begrudgingly tolerate them. But there is nothing that will draw the ire of the soccer gods more than a dance-on-your-grave promotion and we all know that. We know that the gods demand quiet nobility and detest even a hint of strut. They exist to keep us humble. When we color too far outside of the lines, they make their presence known. The cannon idea didn’t come from the Mizzou soccer staff, but that wasn’t going to stop us from framing it a little differently when we mentioned it to our team. And in all fairness, Mizzou hadn’t been shutout in 20 games. Someone surely saw it as a pretty safe bet. After all, that’s quite an impressive streak. (At this point I highly recommend you read the blog entry from Sept. 17 called Elephants for further instruction on how to end a perfectly good streak.)

I wasn’t in the Mizzou locker room at the half and I haven’t spoken to anybody who was, but my guess is that some paint came off the walls because they came out for the second half just absolutely possessed. It was nothing like the way they had started the match. Now they had some fire in their bellies. There would be no more run of the park for us. It was time to grind. In the 60^th minute, with Mizzou pressing, Summer hit a long clearance into Garcia. Garcia’s flick-on header was flawless and put the ball directly into the path of Marion Crowder who was already sprinting at full stride down the left wing. Crowder turned the corner behind the Tiger’s defense and slipped her shot past the charging goalkeeper to give us a 1-0 lead.

Honestly, I wasn’t so sure we were going to be able to make that goal stand up. The goal did nothing to temper Mizzou’s fevered pace and we were absorbing more pressure than we’d seen all year. They continued to charge at us in wave after wave after wave. Thankfully, our defense, which by the end included pretty much everyone, stood strong and limited the Tigers to one more chance… One more. EXCELLENT. Chance. A Mizzou attacker danced into the penalty box with the ball at her feet and a chance to equalize. When the ball came off her foot, I thought she’d done exactly that. But Woody charged out, dove and got big enough to deflect the shot away from danger. It was her third, highlight-reel save of the game, and each one of them was more difficult than any other save she’s had to make this season.

We held on for a 1-0 win. It wasn’t pretty, but we weren’t complaining. When you’re on the road, you take what you can get. We’d put three points in our account against a very good team and that was reason enough to celebrate. I believe that for a team to have a great season, the goalkeeper has to win one game for you. On Friday night, Woody did exactly that. It was a fitting way to punctuate the SEC Defensive Player of the Week award she’d claimed five days earlier. Woody had kept the cannons quiet as the soccer gods terminated another majestic streak. I’m tellin’ ya, you don’t want to mess with those suckers.

As we boarded our charter plane for Lexington on Saturday morning, I felt a little bit empty. Normally on the morning after a win I’m downright jolly, but not this time. There was something in Columbia I had anticipated doing as soon as Mizzou made its move to the SEC. Somewhere in Jefferson County, a man named Ryan Ferguson is in jail for the murder of the sports editor at the Columbia Tribune. It is a murder he did not commit. It is a murder he could not possibly have committed. If the case was tried again today, there would be literally no physical or forensic evidence to tie him to the crime (there wasn’t any the first time around either), and there would be no eyewitness testimony linking him to the crime. This is indisputable public knowledge. But to reverse Ryan’s conviction on appeal would be detrimental to the reputations of people who put him there. So in jail he sits, robbed of the single-greatest gift our society offers – his freedom.

I first saw Ryan’s story a few years back on Dateline. It angered me then as it still does today. I’m angry at the detective who took the ‘confession’ of Chuck Erickson (and by ‘took the confession’ I mean fed him the details of a crime that Erickson clearly had no idea about whatsoever). I’m angry at the prosecutor who, among other notable indiscretions, coerced two ‘witnesses’ into giving false testimony. But most of all, I find it absolutely maddening that there is a perfectly correctable situation that the powers-that-be are unwilling to correct despite an avalanche of evidence that says they got it wrong the first time around. And I’m disappointed in myself for not being able to do more to fix it. I’m disappointed in all of us who sit by idly when one of our citizens is detained by corruption inside the system because it is diametrically opposed to the very foundation of this country’s ideals. How did we let this happen? Many great men and women gave their lives specifically to create a place where things like this wouldn’t happen. How can we square with that? And how do we continue to let this type of injustice go unchallenged? Don’t we realize that if it can happen to one man, it can happen to any man? How close to home does it have to hit before we say it’s time to stand up? These are the things for which we should be firing cannons!

Ryan's story should scare the heck out of all of us! So for almost two years I’d been waiting for this trip to Columbia. I’d planned on swinging by the prison to say hi to this guy, just to let him know that there was one more person outside those walls who believed in his innocence. I never made it over there. There was too much film to watch and edit. There was a soccer game to prepare for. So I did nothing. Not one, single thing. We won the game 1-0. Ryan’s been in jail for ten years. Sometimes I just don’t get it. Thank you for reading. If you liked this entry, I hope you’ll visit www.freeryanferguson.com to learn Ryan's story and make a donation to his defense fund. You can see the media coverage of his story by CLICKING HERE.

UPDATE: Ryan Ferguson's conviction was overturned and he walked out of prison a free man on Nov. 12, 2013.