This Is American Soccer, US Soccer, MNT, WNT, and MLS - Tackling the subject of Soccer in the US, and worldwide.

Buzz Carrick’s first job in soccer was an unpaid position with NESN, the New England Sports Network. Foreshadowing? He’s barely earned a dime off soccer since. There is a behind-the-camera broadcasting career in there somewhere that pays the bills, but 3rd Degree, the decade-old website founded and produced by Carrick and focused on FC Dallas, runs on volunteers for a financial loss.

But you wouldn’t know it from looking at the site. With practice reports, overseas pre-season training, reserve game features, and an open mind to new opinions, 3rd Degree has been filling one-by-one the voids left by the mainstream soccer media, creating a blueprint for the what the future of soccer journalism may look like. If hyper-local journalism is the future as some say it is, well, 3rd Degree is soccer’s explorer in residence. And if there really is such a thing as citizen journalism, this is an example of that as well, because Carrick doesn’t consider himself a journalist even though he holds himself and 3rd Degree to industry standards.

But before I could say any of this for sure, I needed Carrick to touch a few more voids. The story of 3rd Degree’s methodical rise out of the darkness is after the jump.

Let’s begin with some of the basic bio facts.

I was born in Houston in 1970. I lived in the Bay Area in California from 1973-80. In Texas I played basic club soccer, but was no prospect by any stretch of the imagination. I refereed some and coached some youth soccer.

I went to Texas A&M where I was a business major and received two degrees. I worked at the PBS station in College Station. I studied broadcasting in Grad School at Boston U, where it is very very different from Texas. I had an internship at NESN, the New England Sports Network when I was in my mid-twenties. I was actually a Red Hat – or time out coordinator – for the first Revolution broadcast. It was a volunteer position. They needed someone who had both soccer and broadcasting knowledge, which was a pretty rare commodity. The second season I was promoted to associate director. They wanted someone in the production truck who knew soccer. That was my first big break actually in broadcasting. I did a bunch of work from there, which branched out into the freelance career I have now.

Did you want to work in soccer?

I actually did my thesis in grad school on Major League Soccer. I did a production model for a “game of the week” because there wasn’t one. So I did it completely from scratch and will admit now that it probably wasn’t very good. I look back on it now and wonder what was I thinking.

What were your initial impressions of the Revolution and the league as a whole working those first few seasons?

I think they started out really strong. Boston has maybe surprisingly a lot of new immigrant ethnicity with strong connections to the old country as it were, so I think it was received quite well actually. And they had some good people in the front office there that were relatively intelligent people who knew how to connect themselves to the sport. Where they dropped the ball is that the people they brought on board to handle the soccer side of things right out of the gate just didn’t do well in squad-building. Its only in hindsight that I can say that, because I don’t think any of us knew how teams were going to do terms of building teams from nothing. They failed to build a core base of American talent that you had to have to be competitive, and then you bring in the foreign talent on top of that. Frank Stapleton is a coach who didn’t have any understanding of the league and I think you learn very quickly as a foreign coach that you have to know the system here, know this country. Nicol who has been very successful has been here for a while. He wasn’t fresh off the boat as they would say. I think when they brought Thomas Rongen in groundwork began to be put in place.

The concept of “understanding the American player” is always tossed around but it’s hard to nail down.

It’s more about the system. In other leagues around the world you could sell every player at the end of the year and buy all new ones. There are severe restrictions in what and how you can acquire and sell players in MLS. The majority of your roster has to be made up of Americans and they only way to get those guys is to trade for them inside the league, which is hard to do because it is a single entity and no one is going to want to give anyone up who is good. Or your build through the draft. So if you don’t know how the draft works or how the college system works and what makes the American player tick you won’t be able to get that core group to bulk up your roster.

Would the Galaxy be an example of a team that has that problem?

You could argue that probably. Dallas as an example had Dave Dir who had done the scouting for the league did a very good job in that initial expansion draft of building a core American base. Now they never got the talent they needed to win anything, but that’s a different story. Look at Houston, the American base of that team is solid and it almost never changes. They’ve had a bunch of the same guys dating back to San Jose.

What were the beginnings of 3rd Degree?

I came back to Dallas in late 1997 with no job prospects. I just wanted to come back to where I felt I belonged after spending three fun but financially poor years in Boston. While I was looking for broadcast work I thought that I would try do something constructive. So what can I do? What is the future? Ok, internet. Ok how can you learn how to do HTML coding? I could make a website? Ok what kind of website? What kind of topics do you like and would have something to say about? Ok I like soccer. There is a soccer here called the Dallas Burn. Lets come up with a name and make a website. I threw it together in the first incarnation as an exercise to learn how to do coding. I wrote a few articles. One was about television coverage of MLS games. Maybe there were ten pages in the first site. Just thin pieces, maybe just stats. I had no idea what I was doing.

Somewhere in the middle of doing that I had connected with some people who were around on those early days of the internet and interested in what people now think of as maybe THE geek sport of the internet. Places like Big Soccer sprang up. In the middle of 1998 I had somebody come to me and say, “hey if I write something will you put it up on your site?” Yeah, sure absolutely. Viking, an FC Dallas fan, Matt is his real name, and from there it kind of snowballed. He and I would write something every couple of weeks. It wasn’t a news site. It was just an egotistical throw it at the wall and see if anything sticks. Over the course of the next couple of years, learning more about it and enjoying it, I recruited a few more people. I’d just write them and be like, “hey I saw you threw out this big longwinded piece on Big Soccer that I thought was kind of interesting. I don’t agree with anything you said, but what’s wrong with having a contrary opinion?” So I went after people who had something to say I though but maybe weren’t on the same page I was. I think it is important to cover all the views. Soccer is a game that unlike others. In American football you can measure a guy’s speed or how high he jumps and kind of know whether he is going to be good. In soccer its much more abstract. Everybody could have a different opinion on a certain player and how he may or not pan out. So anytime I saw something on the internet about FC Dallas, or the Burn at the time, that was good I would say “why not join us?” That’s all I’ve ever really done. Here is a niche that people are interested in that nobody does. So we will take that void and pick up a bunch of pieces that fill that gap. Even if the mainstream media is paying attention they write for an audience of 800,000 people in the paper. We are writing for a much smaller audience that is much more educated. So we could write at a much higher technical level.

Carrick and Simo Valakari in Spain

So you don’t remind your readers in every article that there was once a professional soccer league here that failed?

They know about the NASL, they know who these players are. They understand strategy. You don’t have to explain what a 4-4-2 is. In a national paper you can’t just write down the nuances of tactics. People aren’t going to get it.

What was one of the first voids you began going after?

Probably in 1998 when I started going to practices. That was one of the firs things that really took off. I had a broadcasting job at the time where I had a bunch of down time while we waited to do a product launch. We were finished and just waiting for the launch date. I was like, “I’m bored, do you mind if I go over to training?” I was on staff, but they were really good about. So I started going to practice once a week and it really changes how the team looks at you. The difference between a blogger and someone like me is that I actually go to practice. If you go to practice at least once a week, then the coaches and players know who you are. You can stand behind your work, like if you say some player sucks. If he knows you and you come to practice you will hear feedback. And you are there, week in week out. You know what is going on at the training pitch so when something happens in the game you have more context to relate it to. Then after the game you are back at practice seeing the growth and changes. You know the health of the players much more acutely. It makes a huge difference in quality, in-depth coverage.

Did you have to originally ask for access or were practices open to the public?

I just went. No MLS practice is routinely closed as far as I know. Back then Dallas was practicing at a school called The Green Hill School. It was right near where I was working, so I just showed up one day and sat on some bleachers next to the field.

How many press people were there?

I was the only one. I was the only one for the first four or five times I went. I was there three or four times before anyone walked over to ask me who I was. It wasn’t until I took a pad of paper and started writing stuff down. Then one of the assistant coaches came over and asked who I was because they had never seen anybody there before.

And their reaction to your presence?

They were like, OK, great! They were very accepting. It wasn’t like I was a journalist from my education. I never worked nor would I ever want to work for a newspaper. From the get-go I was making it up as I was doing it. And the team didn’t know what they were doing. There was no PR guy at practice. I just showed up and before too long, after practice was over, after they knew who I was, the coach would wander over and we’d have some short conversations. It wasn’t anything I set up with the PR guys. After 7 or 8 repeated appearances they would just come over to talk to me. It wasn’t until they moved to Blue Sky (a youth soccer complex), in about 2000 maybe, that they finally started sending a PR guy to practice.

Eventually other media types began to show up?

A few guys from the morning news would show up who didn’t know anything about soccer. Steve Davis at the time wasn’t the beat writer there. I’d see the guy from the Star-Telegram, who was a woman that came out periodically until she moved to Spain. So it was me and a few people who didn’t know the game very well originally. It was no more than 3 people there for a long time. It has of course evolved and now at training there are at least 3 or 4 and maybe 6 or 7 reporters out there. Yet still, none of them or anybody else does the practice coverage I do. Its unique I guess and has been the core backbone of what we do for years and years.

“Years and years” is what is so impressive to me about 3rd Degree. You’ve been around almost as long as the league. Soccer may be the sport of the internet, but few sites, much less highly specific or niche-based sites like yours have been around that long. Now they are much more plentiful. Take me through your growth.

We started in October of 1997, and through 1998 we might have had 10,000 hits. It wasn’t that long ago but the internet was kind of nothing back then. Over the years we’ve essentially doubled our traffic every year. In the last two seasons we’ve had over 800,000 page hits a year. And I think that is sort of the plateau. Its flattened out. There is no advertising budget. The ad budget is I post Big Soccer and tell as many people as I can about it. Pure word of mouth. There is no budget. Zero. I call it a plateau because without an advertising budget or the game growing, we’re probably at our peak. It’s a micro-niche product. Not only do they have to be Dallas fans, but they have to be fans that want the minutia. I think we have a good reputation around the league, but without covering the entire league like Ives does or Goff, we’re never going to get close to their kind of traffic.

You mention Ives and Goff. Two true beat reporters, of former beat reporter in Ives’ case. Was your focus on the minutia in any way driven by the fact that the mainstream writers weren’t or as you previously said maybe can’t focus on that?

Well, my career is in something else. It’s in television. My career is one where I don’t go to an office everyday. I go to an event a couple times a week. So I have downtime. This endeavor never would have worked if I had a 9-5 job. The only reason it works is because I have what I would call a weird job. So the translation of I’m a professional media member in a different vehicle allows me to see things a bit differently. I mean, I run 3rd Degree as if I’m a professional journalist. I don’t happen to get paid for it, but I have a dream some day that this thing will make money. But I act in a professional manner and FC Dallas treats me like I’m a beat writer. Which makes me not just a blogger. That separates me. Now what separates me from Ives or Goff is the mentality that yes they are fulltime guys – that’s all they do – so they are working every angle, the entire country, the national team, even overseas, whatever. Our angle has always been what can we do that no one else is doing? We don’t need another game story. Go to the game, get some quotes, write a summary. That would be in a way a waste of resources for us. We don’t have a budget; we don’t have money to pay a writer or photographer. Our resources come down to time. So how can we get the maximum use out of that resource and get the most traffic and make the most interesting content? Doing a game story is not it, because how many game stories are out there about any given game? 20? If you are in New York maybe 50? So seriously, what I our one game story going to add? For the longest time we didn’t even bother. There was no point.

We concentrated on things nobody was doing. We had the first power rankings in MLS, starting in 1998. We had practice stuff. We did analysis of fan issues—that is what Viking was originally doing for us. We brought in a guy who spoke Spanish to monitor Spanish language media and write or translate some Spanish content. We got a player, Ryan Suarez, to write for us. It was always a case of what are the beat writers not doing? Ok, lets do that.

Maybe more impressive than the age of 3rd Degree is your apparent talent for pulling in people to produce content for free. I’m sure it helps that you don’t even make any money, but its still impressive salesmanship if nothing else. How have you been able to do that?

That’s an interesting question. When we affiliated with MatchNight for a while, which is a cooperative or sorts to share resources, all the other partner sites had a lot of problems getting other people to help them. I don’t know what I am doing differently. It may be that from the beginning I was willing to let people who had a different opinion than me write for the site. I didn’t say, “you’re an idiot, I’m not going to use you.” I tried to say, “You don’t agree with me, but that doesn’t make you wrong.” Or “Ok, you are wrong, because that is my opinion, right, but I’m gonna let you come on board and let you express your opinion because it adds something new.” We’ve done a good job at finding people who will do one little thing. What I mean is, we find a small niche or angle that has yet to be done by other outlets and we get a person to do that one little thing, and hopefully do it well. And now people come to me. I don’t have to recruit anymore. Every few months I have someone come to me and ask to contribute. I usually then tell them that we have our bases covered, but what maybe new base could they bring to the table? What’s your “one little thing.” That is how we started doing game previews. And then we finally started doing game stories. I guy came to me and asked and I said, well, we have 15 people doing stuff, but if you want to be 16 and just write game stories than OK. Now I have a few people who photograph games here and there. and occasionally you find someone out there doing something small, maybe very new, and you say, “hey, I like this, why not come to us and I’ll get you 800,000 hits instead of 800.” People will jump on that. It’s just sort of always been like that. Maybe I’m just a nice guy. I really don’t know why we find these people and others can’t. It just seems to work. We don’t care about who scored a goal really. That is the tip-top surface level. We want to know everything that made that goal happen…

…not to segue, but that is a problem with the TV broadcasts. They don’t understand, they never have understood that we care about the goal, its important, but its not the most important thing. Soccer is all about what happens that made that goal. So they replay a goal and you see Jason Kreis kick the ball into the net. Great. Thanks. That’s not a story. The story is how did he get there, how did the ball end up at his feet. That’s the beautiful part of the game.

in Spain at the Port of Cartagena

That was actually one of my next questions, given your broadcast experience, what you thought of the American telecasts.

That’s the problem. Starting from the beginning the people directing and producing the games knew nothing about soccer. The camera guys, everyone. They know TV so it looks OK, and believe me it has gotten better as it has gone on, but its still not good enough. I can watch a European game and tell the difference. Those production teams obviously understand the nature of the game. Its from simple stuff like when they put in a promo or when they do a replay. The most glaring example is the goal-scoring thing. They show me five angles of the guy kicking the ball and not one angle of the 20-seconds prior where my right winger shredded three guys before setting up the goal.

It always make me think of how you will see a 10 minutes highlight package about a baseball game, with all the lead up context to maybe a game winning homerun, but they you see two quick goals from a soccer game and that’s it. It really makes you appreciate a show like the EPL Review Show where you basically get condensed games.

Yeah, that will change as the ratings change. Since the beginning, to me, this league has been about, ‘lets have the proper business plan because its going to take 20, 30, 40 years for this game to evolve.’ It’s going to take a cultural evolution of people growing up with the game. No major sport now was successful overnight. They all grew over time. And that’s true for broadcasting, for SportsCenter highlights, for everything else. People in the television business are very analytic and cut and dry about numbers and money. Look at ESPN dropping hockey and going with soccer. They knew the ratings pretty much equal and soccer is easier and cheaper. It’s a no-brainer for them to make that decision and those things will continue to happen.

Going back to 3rd Degree, I’m curious to know how successful the Paypal donation button has been. You have google ads as well, but it seems widely held that that mechanism is pretty minimal unless you are an enormous website. But then I see this donation button. Made we think about how Radio Head and Saul Williams, for two examples in the music industry, offered their albums for free, but took donations. Radio Head did well, it seems, Saul, not so much.

It works OK. I tend to think about it like PBS television.

“and viewers like you”

Yeah, I tend to get donations when I have something very specific that I ask people to donate for. That’s usually when I go on a trip with the team, which we have done for a few years. We go with team to a foreign country for their preseason. They’ve been going to Brazil recently, which for a few reasons doesn’t work for us, but I went to Chile, Spain, England, Trinidad last winter. For me those events are fun, and I would go anyway, but if I’m going to write about it and cover it I say to people, “Listen, we’re going. I’m using my airline miles from my real job, I’m paying for all this stuff. So, if you want to support what we are doing it would be great if you would donate in something. If you like what we do.” Don’t feel obligated, but if you like it, donate something. And so far people have been very generous on those occasions. When you go to a foreign country you’re talking about a significant amount of money. It’s not like going to Houston. We’re talking about a couple of grand. So people have been giving even just a dollar or two from kids or $5 or $20. Out of the goodness of their hearts they send me a couple of bucks. It never covers the cost of the trip completely, but it surely makes it a lot easier for me to digest those trips, and in the end because of the support, because of their willingness to donate even pennies, 3rd Degree can cover another thing that few if any people do. Beat writers don’t go on those trips. They are too expensive. Frank Dell’Apa has gone with the Revs a couple of times and this past preseason Ives (and Michael Lewis) went to Austria with the Red Bulls. The draft and the combine are easy because they are here—I’ve gone to those for about six years now—but the other trips wouldn’t happen without reader support.

Carrick, a local guide, Mike Jeffries, and Colin Clarke at a U de Catolica game in Chile

What’s a day look like for you in terms of balancing your broadcasting work with 3rd Degree?

So I do freelance sports production. So I basically work on events that people call me for, that I get booked for. 90-95 percent of my work is on NASCAR these days. I’m on a show called NASCAR Hot Pass, which is a pay per view show on Direct TV. Its basically the NASCAR equivalent to NFL Sunday Ticket. You would sign up for the package and you get these shows. I direct one of those shows essentially every week. I travel out to the race, direct a show, and come home. So I am home for the weekdays.

Meaning you miss a lot of FC Dallas games, live at least?

Yeah, most of them. I watch them on TV or on the internet. I catch all the midweek games. Part of that is why we don’t really do game stories, or now why I haven’t done game stories for the last seven years, which is how long I’ve been at this NASCAR thing. But you can see all the games one way or another, and again, that is why I always go to training.

Anything you’ve learned from NASCAR that could relate or be beneficial to soccer here in the States? NASCAR until recently has been the wunderkind of successful marketing.

Well the guerilla marketing for sure. They are so good at it. Not necessarily NASCAR itself but the people who are involved with it on the periphery. The ways they make money, the way they generate attention. Its not something I do in terms of soccer of course, but there are a lot of lessons to be learned from NASCAR in terms of grassroots community interaction. I try to take that stuff and put it into the website. I have no budget so guerilla marketing is really all I have in terms of getting my name and the site’s name out there. Which is why we didn’t change the name of the website when the team was changed. We already had an established brand, if you will, so we kept 3rd Degree, which now has nothing to do with FC Dallas.

If nothing else, it kind of speaks to the longevity of the site, that it dates back that far. How much thought was given to changing it?

Honestly, I thought the Dallas Burn was a stupid name from the very beginning. It’s better than the Dallas Doom, which the team was going to be named. It’s the owners prerogative to change the name and change the colors. I liked the red and black. Red and blue is fine; the name is OK. They didn’t hit a ball out of the park, but who am I to complain. I’m just glad there is a team to cheer for, you know. Without the Hunts there would not be a team here. They got a stadium. Change the name. Fine with me. If you do it more than once you might have a problem; that’s not a good sign. But I pretty quickly knew I wouldn’t change the name of the site.

What’s the future hold for 3rd Degree?

Making some money would be nice. Now it loses money. The Google ads don’t do squat. They pay for maybe four months of server time a year. But it doesn’t come close to remotely pay for the time and travel expenses I use to make it happen. So it will continue to be what it is until that stops working. Most people give up on doing something like this after a season or two. The trick all along is that while I conduct it as if I was a professional, while I act as if it is this media empire that is just me, I don’t look at it as it has to make money. It has never been about the bottom line because I have a job, a job that I love. I’d love to make money on 3rd Degree, but I love my broadcast job, don’t get me wrong. It’s a heck of a way to make a living. It’s a much better living than being a writer, I’ll tell you that. Being a writer is a horrible living. And I happen to make a fairly good living doing TV, and it provides me the luxury to do this other thing.

And I’m confident that the merging of television and the internet is coming. Those will come together as we move forward. So the difference between the two is going to come less and less and less. For me it makes sense longterm for my career that the two things are bundled in a sense, even though one is a revenue-generating effort and one is not. Now will we ever have full screen video on our site? I don’t know about that, but hopefully we will do some stuff like that in the future.

Could you see yourself moving to soccer broadcasting?

I certainly think I have demonstrated my ability with the game, with soccer. I have a pretty good reputation nationwide for soccer, even in the TV business people know who I am. I don’t do a lot of it anymore because NASCAR is so big and so encompassing that it doesn’t leave me a lot of time to do soccer, but as the league grows and the sport grows, and 3rd Degree grows, maybe those things become big enough that I don’t have to have another career. Maybe soccer can be entire career. It’s possible. I don’t think I really want to be a regular journalist. The thing is we don’t have an editorial board. We don’t have a bandwidth problem. I’m not on someone’s budget trading eyeballs for dollars or something. I have 100 percent leeway to do what I want. Like the draft, for instance. With the number of people who are into that in regard to the expense it takes, its not worth it. But it is fun. We like doing it. It’s become another one of those niche things. I have complete freedom. If I was a journalist, I would have to justify all of these things.

Funny you mention the draft here, because it is where you have had the opportunity to be a professional writer, if not a journalist, with the columns you have put together for Soccernet.

ESPN for two seasons now has paid me to do some draft stuff. That was the first time as a journalist someone paid me to do some stuff, which is cool. I have to give credit to that stuff to Andy Swift who was the GM of FC Dallas back in the day. He invited me to come to Kansas City for a draft. He said “why don’t you come up and just hang out and see what we do and watch what we do and write about it.” So I started doing a draft day chat room. Andy was the first to invite me to the draft and to come overseas with the team. The weird thing about the draft is that you would look around and ask who is going to be good, and nobody knew. We had no idea. There wasn’t even a list of names. So I was like what the hell, I’ll start writing down all these names and instead of putting them in alphabetical order I put them in an arbitrary order about their position or just about anything I could find out about them, whether or not their was buzz around them or not. The first version of the list had maybe 50 names. It wasn’t comprehensive; if I saw a name I put it on there. I had no delusions of being Mel Kiper of something. There was nothing. It was the same old thing. There was nothing, so why not throw something together and put it out there. It started as a lark list of names and just got bigger and bigger. And nobody can afford to go see all of these college kids play. It’s impossible. In Texas, I maybe see a SMU game once or twice a year, so mainly I just talk to people. I research players, I watch games when they are on TV. I go to the combine which is pretty telling and use what I find there to tweak the info I’ve compiled from previous research. Strangely, it turned out I was kind of good at it. I don’t know what that is. I more or less watch them and say “Ok, that guy can play.”

We keep coming back to that niche—you’re filling this void that hasn’t been touched–and given the reality of the journalism and media worlds, it almost seems as if you couldn’t do this without the non-profit, volunteer model. By not making money you’re product is in fact better. Which I think is a strange relationship many people—often those writing the checks—can’t get their head around. As a utopian ideal, it is kind of wonderful.

Yeah, that’s the way we have operated from the get-go. We’re always looking for new niches and taking comments, and suggestions, and contributors who can help show us what we might want to do. The reserve games are another example. Who the heck is going to cover a reserve game? Nobody. OK, so lets cover the reserve games. People who care about the team care about how the reserve games go. They care about who plays in them. They may not watch it, but they would like some info. So why not give it to a student who wants to be a journalist? So for reserve games, lets get a reserve writer. You wont get paid, but you get some experience and 4000 people will read your story. And you are the only one doing it. So we pretty easily found someone who was excited to do that. I mean, nobody has reserve game stories. As far as I know we are the only ones who do that. And like I was saying, I don’t have to justify that story to anybody. It doesn’t have to make the site money or bring in a certain number of page views. It’s not Steve Goff, the story isn’t going to win an award, but its still about filling that niche, doing that little thing that nobody else does and doing it.

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banner photo taken from inside a glacier’s crevasse looking out, while the title comes from Joe Simpson, my favorite of the climbing writers. Krakauer is the best journalist, but Simpson, especially in This Game of Ghosts, brings the power of the mountains to the page like no other. Seems to me every writer could do well to spend some time, gather the introspection delivered by the call of an at once beautiful and daunting wilderness.

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