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SOUNDERS LOOK TO THE FUTURE IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE WITH RECENT HIRE

Once the next generation comes along, the argument goes, American soccer will finally succeed—on the field and in the national consciousness. People been saying that for more than a few decades. But with each new crop of players and coaches and players who become coaches there is new hope created. If for no other reason everyone feels at some point that their generation is the next generation, and dammit it’d be different if we were in charge (because they made it that way).

My first coach was a teammate’s dad, not a soccer coach. My first school coach was a Deadhead, and while the tour anecdotes were priceless, the soccer experience wasn’t there. My varsity coach played at Notre Dame but his practices weren’t much different from that first father. But now, as the global stars of soccer are increasingly younger than me, I’m wondering if it was merely wishful thinking when my adolescent angst promised it would be different—“just wait till guys like me are coaching.”

Minus the coaching experience at every amateur level and the NCAA national championship, and well, in fact, the entire college career, Kurt Schmid is a guy like me. And at 27, he’s younger than me–the first MLS coach that I can say that about. Just 26 when we has hired, Schmid has to be one of the youngest MLS coaches ever when he joined the Seattle Sounders as assistant coach and scout (MLS hasn’t kept track of every assistant coach).

So I guess there’s a few things that separate us after our teenage years. Oh, and that little thing about his dad. After the jump, TIAS steals time with the younger coach Schmid to get his story and figure out how we avoid making liars out of another soccer generation.

TIAS: So I figured we would start with a bit of your soccer playing background to get us started and bring us up to your coaching career. Where did you grow up and what’s your soccer history?

KS: I grew up in Torrance, California, just outside of LA, towards the beach areas. Most people know Manhattan Beach and Hermosa, but Torrance is there too. I grew up playing AYSO (American Youth Soccer Organization) since I was four. I was obviously around soccer a lot as a kid and it was something that I’ve always enjoyed. I had to switch districts to play at higher age groups because I didn’t feel challenged. That was in the fall season and in the spring I played in a rec league because AYSO wasn’t year round. I also played some basketball and baseball, though I stopped baseball at T-ball because I didn’t like it. Soccer was the one though that really stuck. I went through the club system like most kids starting around 9 years old, U10 being the youngest age group. I played for club called Fram until I was 16, after which I could drive to a club further from our home. Before I had to stay closer so my parents could take me more easily. Once I could drive I joined Irvine Strikers and NHB the last two years of high school. I played high school ball too. Now with the Developmental Academy high school seems to be fazing out a bit, but back then for us it was a way to play with your buddies and a team that people actually cared about. Your club team was always better than your high school team but nobody really cared if you won anything besides your parents. In high school you had an audience.

And then you first went to Wake Forest to play?

Yeah. It was a huge change of scenery for me. I spent a year and a half there before transferring back to UCLA, where I graduated.

Why the transfer?

You know, I can’t really say there was one reason for it. It wasn’t bad, but it was definitely different. It was the first time I had ever been snowed on. I like a lot of things about it to be honest—the size of the school, the coaching staff.

Were you getting playing time?

I wasn’t playing that much. I played a few minutes my freshman year and had to agree with the coach that in my freshman year I wasn’t playing well. In my sophomore year, as college kids do, I thought I was playing well, but looking back I understand why he never made his changes. I was a defender, and I think it is always tougher to break in as a defender. If you are an attacker you can get 15 minutes at the end of a game and make an impact. As a defender it is hard to throw someone in with those kind of minutes. You don’t want to disrupt your backline and you can’t really ask a defender to prove his worth in just a few minutes. Maybe he doesn’t see any action. I spoke to the coaching staff and my parents, and at the end of the day just decided to transfer back to UCLA.

How did the soccer change for you there?

At UCLA I knew it would be tough to get playing time, and that I wouldn’t be transferring to become a star. People tend to transfer somewhere they know they will get playing time, but I didn’t go that route. I went somewhere I was familiar with; I knew I would be happy there; I knew the degree would be valuable. Even soccer-wise, I knew these were the kinds of guys I wanted to be around in terms of competitiveness. Whether I was able to get a lot of minutes or not, UCLA was just the environment I wanted to be in.

Going back through your playing career, how much influence did your father have on you?

I think the year I was born was when he became the head coach at UCLA. But if he had been a plumber my passion for the game would have been the same. He was who he was, loving soccer whether he coached or was an accountant, which is what he was right after college. Soccer would have made the impression on me and my brothers either way. I don’t think his job played as big of a part as just simply who he is—his playing history, our German family history. Obviously him being the coach brought me around the game a lot more than otherwise, so maybe that added to my understanding, but the passion was there no matter.

In terms of soccer pressures, did you find it hard being his son, whether that came from him or outsiders?

There were definitely times when things seemed like that, but he was never really my coach. There was a half a season or something where he kind of helped out my club team’s coach, and some kids and parents took it like they were already in the pros or something—I remember there were a couple of games when he was there and you could feel that the opposing coaches thought they were playing UCLA, or players as I got older thought they were trying out for UCLA whenever he was around. It was more something in their heads than anything else. Most of the kids I was playing with, though, were my friends, so I didn’t feel any extra pressure and I don’t think they did. I was a good and maybe influential player on the teams I played for, but I wasn’t the big star.

A centerback mostly?

Yeah, and defensive midfielder. In high school I played inside the sweeper/stopper shenanigans, but I was always looking to push up a little bit.

So you say you weren’t the big star. Take me through your transition from player to coach.

During my last year at UCLA I began coaching at my high school, called South high school. before that my coaching experience was mostly soccer camps and that sort of thing, private lessons here and there. So I coached South’s JV team for two years and enjoyed it. Its funny, high school–not on the technical level but I equate it to almost being like a national team coach. You don’t really have the kids long enough to make a massive impact on their development. You only get them for a couple of months really. You just try to put the pieces together as best you can and hope for the best. But I enjoyed getting a group of kids and being able to mold them into a team and create that more-finished puzzle. The team had a pretty successful season my first year, so I did it again while also coaching club soccer. It just sort of took off from there. Once I realized that this is what I wanted to do I got on the road and started getting my coaching licenses. I went on to be the assistant at St. Mary’s college and then to UC Irvine. I also did a bit of ODP work for the last two years, helping the other region staff of coaches select the pool of players from that region.

Bringing us up to present day, how did the opportunity with Seattle come about?

I don’t know. After this last year at UC Irvine I spoke with the head coach and we agreed it was probably time for me to take the next step in my coaching career, so I had been looking for jobs and talking to different people in college ranks about it to see what might be available. At the same time my father was going through his much publicized transition from Columbus to Seattle. He was up here in Seattle and couldn’t say enough good things about the situation—how much he loved the organization and the people involved; how it was refreshing to be with a group of people who were like, “Hey, if this is going to help us, let’s do it.” That kind of mentality. When they went into preseason in Southern California, I went out and spent time with them and spoke to Chris Henderson and Adrian Hanauer a little bit. They felt there was something I could do for them and obviously I jumped at it. I wasn’t about to turn that down.

So break down your job for me – assistant coach and scout.

One of things I really wanted was to have a position where I would obviously do what they needed, but be around the first team just in terms of my own development as a coach. I didn’t want to be in a position where I would have to put that on hold. So the fact that I can be involved with the first team played a big role on me wanting to take this job. Day to day though, honest, I haven’t had much of a chance to get in the flow of it. I was probably more involved in the day-to-day during preseason when I wasn’t even employed. I’ve been out of town more than I have been in town. But I go to the office and sift through players—that’s kind of what it is. There’s a lot of players out there and it’s a big adjustment going from college to the pros, because in college there is a kind of finite pool you are looking at. Kids are in high school, under a certain age, amateur, they have to have good grades. The pool gets narrowed down really quickly. In the pros, it’s wide open. If the guy is good enough, ok, let’s go get him. Keeping tabs on those players is a big part of my day-to-day. Keeping track of people, speaking with agents, trying to be on top of guys who might be able to help us, either immediately or a couple years down the road. If we find a good 17, 18, 19 year old, just being sure we are keeping track of him. I’ll also help with the match analysis. And on the field I just have to do what I can. I am the low man on the totem pole in terms of the coaching staff, but I try to help out and contribute where I can. I’ll do some more one-on-one training than sort of the broad team concepts. So just helping guys getting some extra work in is a big part of that—just making sure everyone is getting the attention on the roster to develop and reach their full potential. Which is another way of saying we don’t want to waste any resources.

How do you begin to get a handle on the global nature of professional scouting?

It’s obviously as daunting as it sounds. It’s a big task—a combination between making sure you are using the right sort of technology to track players and getting out to see games, watching DVDs, and being a bit of a soccer junkie. Working in MLS though you can’t just watch the Arsenal-Liverpool game every day and say, ‘I like that guy.’ I have to follow all the leagues in CONCACAF and South America because that is where the MLS tends to draw the majority of its players.

What are your sources down there in general–mostly agents?

I talk to more agents than clubs, as clubs aren’t there to move their players on, so the agents are often a point of contact. They will send in video but between GOL TV and Setanta and Fox Soccer Channel, we get a fair amount of the soccer we need to see, but we store a lot as well, anything pertaining to specific players we are watching to build out a database.

Opening up the conversation beyond your life and job—but drawing on that experience as a player and coach, what is your idea about what American soccer is? Be that the type of players, the style of play, or whatever.

It’s tough in the US, because we have such a big country. Say you live in England, you have probably 50 clubs not far from home that you could play for. In the U.S., you’re lucky if you have one pro club within driving distance. A lot of the country on one level has no awareness of MLS soccer. That’s a problem. The kids need something more local and tangible  to aspire to. inside the youth level, I think the developmental academy is a good first step—I don’t think anyone would try to convince you that it is perfect or a finished product, but the fact that U.S. Soccer and MLS teams are getting involved in something is a good first step. Maybe every year they work out a couple of kinks, and eventually are able to extend something to younger age groups. Once you get kids at 16 or 18 it is hard to change who they are as players. Those are places where the Developmental Academy needs to go in the future definitely.

What are a few things you would change not in the Academy, but overall?

The landscape is vastly different than when I grew up. When I was a kid the age groups were every two years, so you had like U14 and U16 but no U15. I think that is something that will never change, but it needs to happen. The Developmental Academy is not U17 and U18, it’s 16 and 18. That is something that will help kids develop. One of the biggest hindrances to development in the U.S. is that kids that are good are too often the best kid. It’s too often big fish in little ponds. We have too many small ponds and too many big fishes that when those kids are really challenged they kind of don’t know how to deal with it. Say a kid is the best kid at U13, nobody is really going to try and see if that kid can play at U14 or U15. Right now, and this is based on my experiences in California, you get rewarded for winning games. You don’t get rewarded for developing players. That’s a big issue. Our system is a bottom up system where youth dominates. In Europe for instance, it is top-down. Arsenal’s youth academy is not there to win games, its there to develop players for the first team. I played for the Strikers and their goal was to be the best U15 team they can be not create great players for down the road. It doesn’t really motivate the club or coach of that team to continue to challenge kids. So good U15 players are hanging out and playing with other U15 kids, not maybe getting exposed and inspired and educated by older players. There are some great coaches who will do that without the motivation, but I’m an economics guy, that was my degree in college, and if we are all selfish and leave people to their own devices they will do what benefits them most. So we need to make it so that developing players are rewarded, not those winning games.

Which fits your example with your team, but it also works for any team. A coach presently has few if any reasons to give players to older teams—that just makes his clubs worse, make him win less games, make his club less attractive to prospective players, on down the line until it effects his bottom line through salary or player fees or whatever.

Exactly. That’s where the MLS teams that have those academy teams need to be different. I don’t know enough about how each MLS team is going about it to know if that is happening, but when we get into that in Seattle, development is going to be our primary objective. It has to be that way.

You mentioned scouting players for down-the-road. Are you looking that deep down into youth development? Or are you looking for more immediate first-team material?

I think I would be involved with Darren Sawatzky, our youth director, and be available to him, but right now our youth program is just getting off the ground, so there is not a whole lot for me to do with that, and MLS rules dictate regional coverage and certain rights regarding youth players, so its not like if I found a kid I loved in New York I could just go out and get him. Every team has their catchments area and you have to kind of stay within that. That’s just the way it is. That could be frustrating if it happens I find one of those kids.

How often have you been on the road at this early stage and what will that look like moving forward?

Well if you extrapolate what I have been doing to the whole year, I recently figured out, I would be in town for 30 days this year. But it will calm down. We haven’t set a schedule for me yet, that is one of things on our agenda to do. Its not going to be 12 out of 16 days on the road like I have been doing, but I’d expect a couple of days a month on the road at least to watch games.

I’m curious to pick your brain about your thoughts, especially now being a scout, on how college soccer and USL fit into the American developmental or professional landscape. First with school, where do college players fit into your scope of scouting?

I think college is entrenched in our system. And that is the way it is. I know a lot of people think it should be cut out completely; I don’t think it ever will. The problem is you have college football and basketball as the breeding grounds for the pro game, and because there is so much money involved in both the pro and college games they have more influence and are more focused on the sport than say academics. That’s the guy who goes to school for one year and then off to the NBA. In soccer, it is still very much an, “Oh this is a fun sport to play while kids go through school,” …for a lot of schools. As a soccer guy, I want the same thing for college soccer as college football. I want it to be the breeding ground for our sport. I know that sometimes coming out at 22, 23-years-old for a senior is later than a lot of other countries. If college wants to stay in the loop they need to make an adjustment so those players coming out at that age aren’t behind the eight ball. Or at least not by much. There are a couple of things they can do to do that. One, the huge thing, would be the substitution rule. I don’t think there is a lot of players in college—maybe defenders more so or keepers obviously—but attacking players? I don’t know many who play 90 minutes. That is an issue. You can still find a lot of success as a college soccer team by being very athletic, keeping your players on the field fresh, rotating guys in and just kind of hammering teams to death. So sometimes schools with more depth tend to stay on top more often. You can be a small school and have a solid first eleven, but as soon as the other school starts pulling out their starters and their back-ups are just about as good as your starters and yet now fresh—and the guys on your bench can’t keep up with the big team’s reserves. So you have a problem. But look, it will always be a good place for some kids to go. I have my college education which I think is important for anybody. The reality is a lot of kids play youth soccer but there are not many professional jobs. So a lot of kids won’t be playing professional soccer and need something to fall back on. You don’t want to see those kids’ opportunities limited because they signed a pro contract at 17 and then are done by 19. Then what are they going to do?

And then USL—what’s your impression there? Though not having seen you play, your resume strikes me as one that would have had USL opportunities as a player.

I couldn’t say either way about that—I never went on any sort of trials or anything, but yeah, we can just go with that, yeah (laughing). Say that. But again the U.S. is very unique in a lot of its soccer. The USL is supposed to be the second division, but we find like in the CONCACAF Champions League that maybe they aren’t so second tier at times. Again that because of the rules and the salary caps in MLS. Some guys can make very good livings in the USL, and so for them why should they go to MLS, get paid half as much and while the competition might be a little better, they can make more money in the USL. So that gives the opportunity to have some very good USL teams and players. So it can be a breeding ground for players, and sometimes it can be obviously less so.

If you can remove your hat as scout, do you see a real place for USL within the system given its sometimes radical differences between clubs? A few clubs are good, a few disappear and appear it seems every year. USL is a very curious league to me.

I’m a big fan of soccer and the European game. So promotion-relegation is something I would absolutely love to see here. But I’m not going to fool myself and think it will happen next year or even ten years from now, but I think it would be brilliant if you had multiple divisions in the U.S. and you could move from one to the other. I’m a big soccer dork when it comes to that, but I know there are a lot of restrictions in terms of finances and different reasons that aren’t going to allow that—but I hope it becomes reality at some point.

Speaking of reality – here you are a 27-year-old guy with quite the career after following and maybe rocketing through the various levels of the game. How are you dealing with that—how do you feel now breaking into the MLS?

I try not to think about it just because I don’t want to stop accomplishing things. I can’t start thinking I’ve made it now. What am I going to do when I’m 60 years old? I’ve got to keep plugging away. I think this job is an important step for me. Maybe being an American hurts me, because if I was in Europe I could have said I was a professional soccer player at some level because there are so many levels, but here it was a bit, “Oh he was just an amateur, not a professional.” So for myself it is a good step to get my foot in the door a little bit. To learn more about… everything—the professional game, MLS in particular. It does seem a little unreal, and I do feel young at times, but at the end of the day I have as much knowledge as someone perhaps a few years older than me because of my background and the places I’ve played and coached. I feel like I’ve been taking coaching courses since before I can remember, just from watching my dad run training. So just being around it so much has sped up my education maybe more than normal.

When you went from playing to coaching, did your relationship with your father change?

I don’t think it changed a whole lot. We always—even when I was playing—talked about the game. He does it with my younger brother as well. After I play a game he would never say, “Oh you did this; you did that.” He would say, “How’d you do?” So I had to breakdown my game and analyze my performance. I’d give an answer and maybe he would then come back with, “And maybe you could do this?” I never thought about it at the time but it was a lot like being in a classroom using the whole Socratic method.

I was just about to say that.

Yeah, but I don’t think he really thought about it like that either, because he was very attentive to not putting pressure on me. That was why he would sort of ask questions, but it made me really think through my game. And then as I got older, and he was at the Galaxy, we’d talk about players. I was in college and knew people, guys I had played with that I would tell him about, to keep an eye on. Will Hesmer was my college roommate. He played for my dad in Columbus. Brian Carroll, I played with him in college as well. It got more and more like that as we got older, just always sharing information and talking about players. And to the transition to now, I think he trusts my opinion. I hope he does. Maybe you need to ask him first though if that is true. But that is why I think we have a pretty good relationship; I don’t think it has changed a lot to be honest.

To hear you describe it, it sounds like you were basically doing this job before you even had it. You’ve been scouting for your dad for years now.

Ha. Yeah, a little bit definitely. Obviously I wasn’t going to keep that stuff to myself, and I definitely wanted him to win and be successful. He would often just ask me about guys. It’s not that different now; I just see him a lot more. One of things that I went through in my head before taking this job was whether I wanted to go work for my dad. People will probably think badly about it, but one day I thought that if any other MLS team offered me this job, I’m an idiot if I turn it down. So why would I turn this down? And our relationship is such that I think it works. I don’t get real emotional about it. I’m here to do a job.

Finally, what was it like for your MLS introduction to come at the jam-packed Qwest opener?

I actually just got there in time for the game, coming in from out of town. It was the first game for me in the pros, so it was cool for me in that respect. Just being involved in that level—that in and of itself was enough to make it special. But the fact that there were 32,000 people going nuts and everybody was wearing green and they’re chanting and singing—the atmosphere was incredible. All of that stuff was maybe more a bonus for me, but it was unreal. I don’t know that anyone in the U.S. and in MLS has had an atmosphere like that. Toronto does well, but in the U.S., I don’t know. The support that Seattle gives the team is overwhelming sometimes. Fans yell out to my dad when we walk around the streets—that doesn’t really happen if you are involved in soccer in the U.S.

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perfectly emerald banner photo of Mr. Lif found at Drink At Work.