After a grueling running career that was infinitely more successful than my trials with other sports, the inconvenient truth remains as clear as ever: soccer was my first love. Despite the fact that soccer also accounts for most of the worst sporting experiences of my life, I can't say I've ever toed a starting line on race day or dug into the batter's box with the same joy, enthusiasm, and anticipation with which I took the soccer field. Even today, in the odd 5-a-side pickup game, I still get that feeling that I used to get about 25 minutes into every game I played (until senior year of high school, at least): I wish this half would never end. For all of these reasons, each time I watch the steaming pile of mediocrity that is US soccer bump and grind its way through lesser opponents before getting tooled around by the class of the world, I see a good deal of my own experience as a soccer player in Pittsburgh.
With maybe the exception of Texas, Western Pennsylvania is football's most important region, the cradle of football civilization (note for international readers: when I refer to 'football' in this post I mean American football). This is the home of Joe Montana, Dan Marino, Jim Kelly, and too many more Hall of Fame football players to list. Not surprisingly, then, if you grow up in Pittsburgh and choose soccer over its entrenched Autumnal counterpart (or if your genetics effectively make this choice for you), you're automatically second place, second-rate, second-fiddle...you get the idea. Even today's economically reinvigorated Pittsburgh region maintains the sort of hard-nosed, working-class ethos of its steely past, an ethos that places high value on traditional modes of masculinity and the sporting cultures that go with them. Children are of course imbued with these values, a by-product of which is epithets like 'pussies' and 'soccer fags,' aimed commonly enough at non-football fall athletes.
If you flip through mainstream media coverage of US soccer for the past two or three decades, a period during which the US seems to have taken soccer fairly seriously, at least when it comes to international competitions, you're bound to find the national-scale, journalistic equivalent of 'soccer fags': sports writers have traditionally treated soccer like an entry-level children's game that boys who aspire to be men grow out of by puberty and 'only girls' stick with (you have to realize that here 'only girls' is sex-neutral: a young male soccer player is a 'girl,' too). Though soccer has certainly suffered its mini-epidemics of Swan-Lake syndrome, you'd think from reading US sports journalism that a soccer game is fundamentally nothing more than a bunch of poncy little elves flopping effetely to the ground without being touched while European aristocrats of questionable socio-sexual integrity applaud timorously in their glass boxes. A few meters below them the soused hooligan groundlings pour lager over each other's heads and neck tattoos. In the warped view of USonian sports journalists and their readers, in other words, soccer is neither manly nor 'American' nor class-blind enough to be taken seriously.
Most sports journalists will tell you that the main reason the US hasn't fielded an elite international soccer team, concomitant with the resources at our disposal and the exceedingly high social value we as a nation place on sports, is that these cultural factors that make the game less appealing to the 'average American'—the factors that make soccer incapable of competing with football on American soil—have the effect of reducing the prospective talent pool, then the resources and attention we expend on soccer. The best USonian athletes, they say, go into other sports (football, baseball, basketball) that offer them both more cash and more cachet. But this argument misses the point. The real problem is not that our soccer athletes are not good enough athletes, or that they don't have the resources they need to be among the world's best; it's not that Tom Brady and Hakeem Nicks decided on professional football careers instead of soccer careers (I can't see either being a very effective soccer player). The problem is that the general USonian sporting mentality, and its attendant coaching strategies, takes soccer players with potential and turns them into middling, unconfident, uncreative players who get more respect for bouncing around the field like pinballs, running into stuff, than for playing with creativity and tactical sophistication.
This is where my old shipwreck of a soccer career comes in. Permit me, first, some gross self-indulgence:
I got into sports later than most of my peers, largely because (thankfully) I wasn't pressured by asshole parents of the sort that were common in my community. There were lots of dads who coached soccer and little league baseball because they genuinely enjoyed it, enjoyed participating in the community, enjoyed bonding with their children and supporting other children in learning some of the greatest games on Earth. Then there were clichéd asshole dads who coached, pathetically, to feed their own egos. They were usually the ones who forced their obviously uncomfortable and untalented children into every spotlight situation imaginable; the worst kind of nepotism. My dad would have been in the category of the former, though because he didn't coach he was neither, and I'm very grateful for that. He was a good athlete in his youth (it's clear from just watching either of my parents move, throw, or do physical work that I owe my athletic success in large part to the genes I got from them), and surely wanted his first son to be an athlete; but he let me choose sports for myself, when I was ready. Prior to that I spent most of my physical energy chasing bugs and climbing things. I picked soccer first because it was weird and involved a lot of running, then baseball shortly after, though only after developing an obsession with baseball cards, games, and statistics.
On account of my late entry into soccer, there were no expectations. The coaches already had a sense of who the best players were when they put the whole lot of us through a kind of mini-combine, a skills and drills test designed to rank our abilities. The idea behind this was not merely (at least ostensibly) to separate the talented from the rest so they could pick the 'traveling' teams that would compete against other communities, but to divide the entire pool of 10-11-year-old kids fairly into teams for intramural competition. To put it simply (and self-indulgently), I came into the skills and drills test with no reputation, a complete x-factor, and scored the highest in the age group. Accordingly I made the first team in my age-group on my first try, and was for several years thereafter generally regarded as one of the better players.
The first signs of characteristically USonian tactical shallowness in the soccer department came early, still when I was about 11-12 years old. When we played against teams with one particularly outstanding player who could change games singlehandedly, my coaches assigned me to that player. I wasn't merely positioned on the field opposite that player; I was explicitly tasked to shadow that player everywhere he went on the field, to mark him out of the game. As a child this was a great honor and made me feel special. In retrospect it was only the beginning of a long trend of shortsighted, ultra-conservative coaching tactics that crushed whatever of my career I didn't screw up personally, and continue to crush US hopes at fielding a globally elite national team. I was being told quite literally to react to the play of my strongest opponents, rather than to force them to react to me.
In Western Pennsylvania soccer, size matters. When you watch team USA play against smaller and less-physical rivals like Mexico, you'll always hear commentators talk circularly about how the USonian side uses its size, speed, and power to outpace, outjump, and overpower their opponents whenever possible. Being broad and tall is almost a non-negotiable attribute for big-time college soccer recruiters; and big-time college soccer is still a significant feeder system for the US national team. In the Pittsburgh soccer scene, coaches are especially compelled to compare the athletic prowess of their players (measured in height, weight, and body appearance) to the formidable football and basketball bodies they see all around them. This is a microcosm of the national-level argument that US soccer could be more globally competitive if only the 'better athletes' chose soccer; and in this case 'better athletes' means bigger, stronger athletes with athletic-looking bodies—people you could see playing basketball or football. Think Ronaldo (either one, really), not Messi (merely the best player in the world).
By the time I got to junior high school (7th -8th grade) I was already being screened out for size. Apart from being a year younger than the average student in my grade, I was skinny and barely average height. Despite that coaches in the high-school system had already seen me hold my own against bigger players (this was the case almost by definition, since I was still regarded as one of the best players in my age group, and was nonetheless one of the smallest on the field every time), they wouldn't consider me for the freshman team until I was actually a freshman, hoping I would have my growth spurt then. On the other hand, they bumped some of the bigger but less skilled eighth-graders up that year (ironically, it wasn't long after that that I grew taller and faster than those guys; and by college my strength and speed were regularly enough to outsprint sprinters who made even the biggest soccer players look frail by comparison). By high school, even when I consciously played aggressively—even when I played flagrantly and recklessly out of frustration and anger, committing fouls and forcing collisions—I carried a reputation for being 'soft' and weak. My coaches and teammates envisioned me as someone who was too small and not aggressive enough to play effectively. For them, my value as a player was measured by how physical I could prove I could be; how much testosterone I could expend on the field; how hard I could 'get stuck-in.'
It wouldn't be too hyperbolic to say that getting 'stuck-in' was the general aim of Western Pennsylvania soccer, directly correlated with winning games. A player's physicality was valued above his other attributes. Physicality made people on the sidelines cheer as though they were watching football games. It made coaches pump their fists and grit their teeth and beam with pride at the toughness and tenacity of their squad. The cheerleaders even recycled at the soccer games some of the bang-'em-up chants they used for football. To be clear, we're not necessarily talking about dirty play, but simply the idea that physicality, above all else, wins soccer games. On top of the fact that physicality was itself more prized than, for example, poise on the ball, touch, long-range passing, vision, creativity, playmaking ability, tactical discipline, and all the other things that make for the world's best teams and the world's best players, my size, and the coaching staff's obsession with size, meant that by default I always had something to prove in the physicality department. I was actively discouraged from playing to my strengths and benched when I wasn't ostensibly physical enough, and benched again when, predictably, the forced emphasis I placed on being physical minimized my abilities and caused my overall game to suffer. We had one or two guys roughly my size who eventually got more playing time than I did by the end of my career largely because they found a way to be effective in the eyes of our coaches and teammates by flailing around on the field like hell-crazed hummingbirds, getting 'stuck-in' at every opportunity. I was never a delicate flower, but neither was I ever anywhere near as effective a player flailing around and getting 'stuck-in' as I was when I played a skill game, took people on in the corners, and made the dangerous pass. This never meant I didn't chase hard; I never shied away from tackles; I ended up on the ground a lot, and consequently drew a lot of fouls from my opponents (this is a good thing for a reasonable coach). In the myopic views of coaches and teammates, however, my size meant I had to sacrifice my strengths as a player for no other reason than to prove that I could meet some abstract standard of physicality. This only got worse in my senior year, when my coaches found out that the previous spring I had taken up track and field as a hobby and ended up All-State: it was as if this not-so-subtle reminder that I could (always) run suddenly bound me to an even more specialist role, being put in and pulled out and put in and pulled out after being screamed at to chase everything like it was a track meet and get 'stuck-in.' I was substituted (with loose substitution rules) more like an outside linebacker than a midfielder, used ridiculously in spurts.
My experience embodies the failure of US soccer. Even given all the slack in the world (I was given none), left to run free and play however I wanted, I wouldn't have been good enough to go anywhere with soccer. In Pittsburgh, however, I had what it took to be a lot better than I ended up being, and was stifled by what I can only put candidly as bad and at times plainly idiotic coaching and team management, combined with a heavy dose of this tendency to tragically misunderstand soccer as a game of thoroughbreds and blunt instruments rather than a game of creativity and tactical dexterity. How many US soccer players who actually have what it takes to be great (unlike me) get told to spend a whole game following around the other team's best player, or to expend all their energy 'getting stuck-in' to the detriment of the counter-attack? How many players who can wheel and deal are made to pound and grind? How many players of small stature are screened out of the process before they can showcase their talents? And how many coaches will we go through before these players, who are surely out there, are given a chance to emerge? Every elite soccer nation cultivates its talent; in the US we malign ours only to destroy it.
