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Brad Friedel talks to TIAS about his effort to develop American youth

Every professional soccer player who wants to be the best is going to Europe to play. In the past, for American kids who dream to be that player some day, there hasn’t been too many options to help the initial growth. Since 1999, 40-odd kids annually win the lottery if they are selected to USSF’s Bradenton Residency Program, located at IMG Academies, the private campus that charges upwards of $50,000 a year for non-scholarship club players to hone their skills on the fields next to those of USSF and the U17 US MNT. That’s it; that’s the list. You have summer camps and clubs innumerable, even ones under the muse of Beckham, but as for full time soccer instruction integrated into academic education, Bradenton was it.

Not anymore. We’re not building the world’s tallest skyscraper here, but former US and present Blackburn goal keeper Brad Friedel made a huge splash this fall when his Premier Soccer Academies in Cleveland, Ohio, welcomed their first full time residency student/players.

If competition breeds quality, this can only be good…

In the last year, even in the aftermath of a poor US MNT showing in the World Cup, the American soccer landscape is changing, indeed growing. It’s no post World Cup bubble. This time, it might be in spite of the World Cup. While the national teams still struggle to make the grade in elite international competitions, youth soccer has been re-invented with The U.S. Soccer Development Academy, which hopes to spread the Bradenton love beyond the boarders of the IMG compound. But how exactly the program will shake out in the politicized power struggle that is American youth soccer is a big unknown, though most agree this is a step in the right direction. Who the winners and losers are is still yet to be determined.

On the other hand, there is no question Friedel’s model is set up to win. That fact can be summed up with the academies initial claim, that of being the first full-scholarship youth soccer academy in the United States. Furthermore, like the USSF residency program, PSA’s players in residence will be there on full scholarship. Having just merged with local club side Cleveland United, PSA does offer fee-based club and summer programs, bringing more players under the direction of the top-flight staff, with the idea being those players will fight for positions in the residency program.

“We have a country that has over 300 million people,” Friedel told me over his cell phone while driving around England on a rare off-day before the Premiership season starts in earnest this weekend, “and realistically you could count on one hand, maybe two, the amount of players who have really gone on and made it on the world scene. It doesn’t add up. At first we were thinking about making an elite summer program to try to find talent and help them get to the next level without having to get agents and fees involved. And then it just sort of dawned on us: why not make the first youth academy in the United States?”

Offers came in from California, South Carolina, and Florida, Brad said, but for him there was no other location than Cleveland, his hometown. “I stepped in,” he said. “If I’m going to put my name to it and put my money to it, than I want it up in Cleveland. We started looking for land, and now 5, 6 years later, here we are. The first group of boys go in on August 20th.”

What’s it going to look like for the fresh-eyed freshman welcomed this fall? Well, it’s kind of hard to say, because, as Top Drawer Soccer’s editor and TIAS’ youth soccer swami Robert Ziegler wrote after his tour of the breathtaking grounds, “Simply put there is nothing like it in American soccer.”

Particulars that stuck out for Ziegler: a 5,000 square foot workout room, 60,000+ square-foot field house with 2 full locker rooms and a full-length indoor field, 3.5 full-sized outdoor fields (one synthetic and a half-field exclusively for goalkeeping training), a small stadium events and feature matches, classrooms wired for video evaluation, live-in dorms, coaching quarters, training rooms, a doctor’s office, and “probably some other stuff I’m forgetting,” Ziegler concluded.

Having visited the Bradenton facilities, I can agree with Ziegler. There is nothing like that for soccer. IMG is home to numerous athletic programs, the first of which was Nick Bollettieri’s Tennis Academy. At PSA, the term soccer-specific finally gets a full-fledged definition. That’s not to say, however, that PSA didn’t learn from its predecessors.

“We’ve been working on this for almost 6 years,” he said. “I’ve done my homework. We didn’t do this blindly. I knew what they were doing in Bradenton and at IMG. The U17 program they have there is very good, because its free of charge and they can get the best kids, put them in a structured environment, and have them training year round. The other portion, IMG, is a money-making activity. They charge a lot of money, and while I think its still a very good program for those who can afford it, you only touch a small percentage of the youth, again, those who can afford it.”

What quickly becomes clear when speaking to Friedel is his personal commitment to the project. This is not some soccer star dumping money into a program and forgetting about it. As if a personal phone call to a blogger isn’t enough to drive home that point, Friedel flew his staff around the world to tour the best youth academies. They visited Middlesbrough, Blackburn, Manchester City, Newcastle, PSV, Atlas, the training facilities outside of Guadalajara and those at Tahuichi in Bolivia to name just a few. “I wanted to get all the best things from all of those different youth academies,” Friedel insisted. “They are the best academies across the world. We learned from them, Americanized them a little bit, and implemented them in Cleveland.”

“You could pick up our academy and put it anywhere in the world and it would be up there with the best,” he continued. “And that includes your Manchester Uniteds and Barcelonas. They would love it. It’s that high a standard.”

The one glaring difference between PSA and its now rival (friendly competition?) factions stationed in Bradenton is the cultural diversity that will be present on the Cleveland campus from players to coaches to academy directors. For starters, three staff jobs were isolated by Friedel as needing to come from overseas.

“Given this is the first youth academy in the United States, and one with American and foreign players,” Friedel said, “my director of coaching needed to be someone who was the director of an academy before. That obviously has to be a foreigner. I chose Mark Hottiger (former Swiss International and veteran European coach). The same had to be said for the goal keeping coach, and I selected Roy Tunks, who I worked with at Blackburn. The third was our sports science and conditioning coach. Now I know that America has a lot of offer in the sports science industry, but little that is soccer specific. I brought in Chris Short, who was working at Sheffield United; he was with me at Blackburn and many other clubs as well.”

Domestic talent has not been forgotten. Former IMG executive Craig Umland will lead the business end of things, while one-time U.S. MNT defender Desmond Armstrong will be lead scouting as one of the camp directors. Englishmen Barry Venison and Scott Sellers round out the list of Directors.

For coaching, PSA kept its search global, without forgetting the importance of developing American coaching talent along with the players. “I think that bodes well for the kids,” Friedel said. “You meet people from different cultures as well as learn other styles of soccer. At the same time, we will be employing a lot of American coaches, and we will have a mandatory coaching decorum and coaching education process. We want to start educating American coaches from the grass roots all the way up to the professional ranks.”

What goes for coaches also goes for players. Several internationals, from countries such as Brazil, Trinidad, Chile, Bolivia, and Venezuela will be part of the inaugural class.

“Is our way the only way?” Friedel asked himself over the crackling trans-Atlantic phone signal. “Absolutely not. Is our way the correct way? We think it is, but there are also other correct ways. But this is another way. We want people to pick up the phone and stop a lot of the fighting that goes on in youth soccer where kids are commodities with price tags on them. We want to change the mindset of people whereby the individual development of the player is the most important thing. Now it’s no problem, ourselves included, to make money off of some programs, but you have to the interest of the player in mind first and foremost. If you don’t have that, your program will never work.”

Finally, in 2007, that idea is beginning to be accepted by powerful people who can do something about it. The fact that it is coming from players like Brad Friedel can not be discounted. Hopefully other players will see fit to invest in their sport in their country.

Update: PSA partnered with the Columbus Crew to become the MLS club’s youth development team