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Hawaiian Natasha Kai is part of a new youth explosion

Maybe the American public should start paying more attention to soccer… women’s soccer. The US WNT beat Chinese Taipei 10-0 this weekend; how’s that for scoring. Good god, ten goals, and a shut out. While Mia Hamm may be just a memory, players like Abby Womach – 3 goals and 3 assists this weekend – are beginning to fill that gap. Now, will fans fill the seats as they did in 1998-9 in 2006-7?

It was a full weekend for the US women’s soccer. Silal et al. took a break from their manager search to check in on the development of the women’s game by inviting 30 teams to the inaugural female edition of the Nike Friendlies in California. The US WNT capped off the weekend with their ‘friendly’ shellacking. At 10-0, can we still use the term ‘friendly’?

A view (maybe two) from the frontlines of the competition will drop later in the week from our correspondents who attended the West Coast festivities, but before we tune in for that, I thought it would be a good time to check in with US Soccer to learn why they’ve waited three years since the introduction of the men’s tournament to introduce the women into the mix. I caught up with Jim Moorehouse, US Soccer’s Director of Communications, last Thursday to get up to speed on youth development. And of course I had to squeeze in a question about The Search. Our discussion follows after the jump.

Hi Jim, thanks for taking the time. How are things?

We’ve been running around like mad. Really been creating a lot of content for our website.

Yeah, the big media outlets could take a lesson from all the mechanisms you are working into the site.

We just said ‘lets see what we can do’ total shoe string. And luckily it isn’t that hard to find people who want to hang out with the National Team all day – shooting behind the scenes videos and stuff. We actually just started this new thing where we’re doing live games and it’s a whole new challenge, but good stuff.

So, the Friendlies this weekend? Why is this the first year for women?

The timing has been tougher. The friendlies started out as a residency program for the men – the U17 residency program – and we have that event in Bradenton where we do our full-time residency program, and it was kind of born out giving that team better competition and we realizes we had this platform to give the best club teams in the US the chance to come play competitive games in an environment where college coaches can see players just playing and not worry about results and standings and things like that – because sometimes that skews things in youth soccer – here they just play. So that’s how the friendlies were created 3 to 4 years ago.

Do you find a difference in attracting women to the youth programs than the men?

On the women’s side, we’ve never been able to do the fulltime residency program. It’s a little different, a little more difficult in terms of the women’s team side of getting a commitment for living and moving and relocating for 6 months or a year or two years in one place. And another thing is the u17 men have always had a world championship to shoot for and for the women the world championship was always for the u20 or 19 and 20 and now there is going to be u17 women’s world championship in 2008. But my point is that is why the women’s friendlies hadn’t happened yet. And we’ve been watching and molding the men’s residency program and always had on the backburner the thought of – OK when is the best time to bring this into the women’s program as well. At a youth residency level, trying to get 15, 16-year-old girls to give up their friends and lifestyle and family and their club team , which is maybe a little different make-up than it is for boys, and commit to a full-time residency program is just not something we have been able to establish yet.

Is there less interest because of the lack of a domestic professional league? Men have the motivation of a pro career and the dream of financial windfalls. The women don’t have that, or if they do, it is to a much less degree. Do you see this in the girls and their families when pondering the decisions of highly competitive sport programs?

Well, That’s an interesting question. I don’t think I have an answer. I don’t know. That is an interesting thought. I wonder if that is a factor. I’d say just from my understanding and my experience, that would be NO, because it is more about the high school girls – that environment is different than a boys environment. But don’t take that last quote out of context. There is no difference in the competition. When you’re talking about these clubs and the way they’re run and the way the coaches scout and coach players and then the way the players compete, there really is no difference in that from the men’s game. They are both very very competitive and there are different goals for different players, whether that is college scholarships or some type of community environment or just the competition. From a pure residency program, just to get that point more succinct, I think in terms of just giving up your whole lifestyle to commit to a club or team is just different for girls and boys.

Is there a fixed criteria on which clubs get invitations?

No, US Soccer really looks at the clubs with the high level of reputation and experience of competition. Those teams we feel are at that level get the invites. The women’s friendlies will begin at the same size as when the men started – there’ll be about 30+ teams here, which is where the men started and has since grown to 60+ teams. 60 to 70+ teams, the men’s are getting scaled back a bit to keep it under control. And all the reaction we get is that this is something they are interested in attending and excited to compete against the very best. It’s a unique structure. Most youth tournaments are about who’s going to win the trophy at the end in that age brackets. And this is all about competition. Its not about wins and losses, its about getting good games. Coaches can let players play and we think that is where the development is, not in wins and losses, but just go out and play.

What is the end game of the friendlies in the big picture of US Soccer?

It’s player development, and it’s a cliché, but casting that net wider to increase not only the numbers and opportunities for players, but raising the level of play at the highest level is what we want. So it creates a platform where these kids can grow. We used to be talking about 20, 30, 40 high level players getting the chance to go on the next level; now you’re talking about 60, 80. That’s something that has been slowly happening over the years and this event helps that.

Pulling back a bit to the whole women’s game. There’s obviously been a drop in popularity of women’s soccer when talking about WNT attendence. I just published a story from one of our contributors about the lack of buzz this team is getting?

Yeah, I think the whole thing is context. I’ve had this conversation a million times and people present it differently. When you talk about the highest high of the women’s national team you are talking about a peak that is really unfathomable. When you’re talking about 1999, the stories from that year are really mind-boggling. Because really every goal we set every 6 weeks, 6 months, from a PR or publicity standpoint, every goal after six weeks, was ‘Look, we’re waaaay past that, we need to set new goals.”

It kept growing and growing. And the joke was at the end. It wasn’t that amazing that Tom Brokaw was calling us and saying he wanted to tape the nightly news from one of our practices before the final, but that we were actually considering saying no. we literally we’re going to say no and we finally said “Wait, what are we doing, this is Tom Brokaw.” So there are so many stories like that, and I think that kind of skewed things out of whack. This is not a soccer issue. Women’s sports are still from a professional and attendance standpoint a unique entity. It’s not tried and tested or sustained long term. So anytime there is a Women’s National Team game and there are 10,000 fans there, that’s outstanding. That’s a women’s sporting event. To think ten years ago a women’s sporting event or a women’s pro league sustaining itself was not something people were thinking about. I try not to let people raise the bar on us.

And of course the other side of this is the Mia factor. When you talk about a Mia Hamm, you’re talking about an athlete on the level of Michael Jordan. And some people might laugh, but I’m sorry, it is a Michael Jordan level. End of Story. And there are maybe 4 or 5 athletes you can say that about, and one of them is a women’s soccer players – that’s unbelievable. So again we always knew when she retired there would be a Mia factor where a generation – I don’t know how long its gonna be – where you have to try and fill that gap and get people excited about other players.

So who are you looking towards now to fill that gap?

The thing for us that is amazing, and I think is great, and I think we have potential to expose again, is that going into the 04 Olympics that had been around forever, Mia, Brandi, Julie – and we were thinking, “Man, it would be great if we had some young players come up and make a mark along side these players that you can kind of promote and hang your hat on.” You don’t want to do that on a player that hasn’t done anything. If you start doing that on a player who hasn’t done anything, it’s a little dicey, because they may not, and then your kind of stuck. So what happened at the Olympics? Heather O’Reilly scores the overtime goal in the semi-finals, and the first goal in the finals is by Lindsay Tarpley on a 25-yard bomb and then Abby Wambach wins a gold medal with a header. I’m sitting there going “Man, here’s three of the players we’ve been wanting to promote and here they all kind of made a great statement on an international level.” And you still go to these games and there’s thousands of little girls and fans who know all the names, so it’s no different from 96, 97, 98. The opportunity is there to take these players and go to the next level with this team, and of course results will be a big part of that too.

Tarpley, O’Reilly, Lloyd, and Wambach

I think of running a national team to be like The Florida Marlins, the way they have been built and brokedown over and over again. In baseball, it’s the Marlins choice of strategy, but in a national team setting, its just the hand you’re dealt. I don’t think most fans appreciate that, or at least they don’t accept it as a reason for the ups and downs. Is there a disconnect on the reality of building a national team?

That is part of the ebb and flow. The average American sports fan doesn’t understand that as much. And let’s say the average American sports fan on the women’s side doesn’t understand how you build a national team and how the team is selected. For the women’s team in the 90’s, you had a core of 12-to-15 players who were going to be there pretty much no matter what, and I think that’s not going to be the case anymore, because now you have so many more players to choose from. And the competition for spots is another challenge for this team because the roster is always going to be changing. But yeah, it is like the Marlins.

So if we reflect that idea over to the men’s side, we see players come and go, but what really amazes me is how a player is seen in the press. They can go from hero to goat so quickly. The easiest example is the after effect of the men’s World Cup. Like Eddie Johnson.

That is the perfect example – Eddie Johnson. And who knows? Who knows? It obviously didn’t happen for him, but it didn’t happen for anybody. You watch and wait. Eddie Johnson, who knows what he’s going to be. He is still so young. And this women’s team, Natasha Kai, she’s from Hawaii, she scored about 5 or 6 goals for us this year, and she has tattoos and this whole attitude thing. It’s great. It’s a totally different type of women’s athlete coming up. She’s made her mark this year and there are other players like that. Lori Chalupny is going to be a player the girls really latch onto because she is such a good soccer player. It’s just hard to convince people who have seen the highs of this team before to take a step back and realize this is all about grass roots and connecting with the young girls and when we go to these venues – in 98 it was 15,000 fans and now its 10 or 8000 fans, or whatever, the atmosphere in the stadiums is still high level, girls cheering on their players and connecting to them. I think we’ll see that in the opening ceremonies at the Friendlies when the World Cup players show up.

Tarpley focuses on the future

What’s the age breakdown for the Friendlies?

It’s under 18, 17, and under 16 age group and they compete within their groups. But our national teams compete in one age group up, so our U-15’s play in the U-16 bracket. and believe me, these players know what it means when they are going up against National Teams, and they know what it means when they are at an event like this and they see 25 college coaches lined up with notebooks, watching and trying to figure out if that is a player than can help them. And that’s the great thing about this event, how quickly the college coaches kind of realized that “Hey, that is an elite level and we need to be there to look at players.”

I find this is one place where soccer is very different from other team sports. You don’t really see Residency Programs in other team sports.

Right now, it’s the only way to do it for us. Other countries with soccer, all the club teams have their own residency program. You know, Liverpool has 100 kids integrated from U-12 and on up. The pros need to be the ones developing it. I think at some point we’ll get there, but it’s not something where you snap your fingers and the Columbus Crew have 100 players in an integrated youth system. Red Bull and I think the Fire and a few others have started to put that in and over time that will be a huge part of our youth development. Right now the Residency is what we need and it’s pretty cool. Those kids know what it means and it’s pretty cool to see them perform in that environment.

Where do the kids go after the Residency Program?

It’s pretty much split. I’d half to check that, but I think it’s about half and half. Half go pro and half go to into college. And right now the residency program is about 40 deep and there is usually two age groups in there of 20 each – 20 that are preparing for the immediate world championship and 20 that are lining up for the next one. There is a little crossover. So we’re preparing for the U17 World Championship, which is in Korea next August I think.

Ok, last question. And you know what it is. Who’s our US MNT Coach? And once you don’t answer that, I just want to know how often you’re hounded about it?

I’ve been hounded a lot… hahah – I don’t think I can quantify it, but it has been a lot of phone calls – “Hey what’s going on?” In terms of the time frame it is exactly what we kind of said it would be thought it would be and knew it would be.

What is the reaction from your end with the criticism over missing the recent friendly windows?

Listen, after 98 and 02 World Cups we played one game, in November, so the plan this year for us coming off a world cup is to maybe play one more team that year and then move on. That’s the way our region is. This is not Europe where you’re going right into European qualifying; it’s a little bit different. So the timing is not pressing at all and anyone who is educated on it knows that. All along Sunil said “We’re going to take our time, look at all our candidates, and probably two to three month process.” So, in October, November, maybe December and then a couple of weeks ago he said that November seems to be right about where it is. So that seems as if that will happen.

(rumors have it an announced could come with the MLS Cup on November 11)

Kind of exciting or kind of irritating?

I don’t know anything right now, but given the press coming out of this World Cup, going into this World Cup, and just the overall publicity we’ve got, I think this announcement is going to be major news. Which is pretty cool. I think when we hired Bruce it was not major news. So I think the way the American media has finally figured out what it is to compete in a World Cup and how cool that is.

That is a great point, That time span from where Bruce came on and left - to see where soccer has gone. It’s a great case study or a barometer for the changing perceptions of soccer in America.

It could be the best barometer. All the criticism we got at this World Cup – and I’m not making this up – I was literally inspired by it. We came back and to hear people talking about it – I was like, “I cant believe people are still talking about it.” This is unbelievable. It was on PTI almost every night! It was going off. I’ve been doing this for twenty years and remember what it was like trying to call Sportscenter and trying to get them to acknowledge what just the World Cup was. It’s pretty amazing.