PSW Corner Kicks

OK, so I had no idea I could get ESPN360.com free because I'm a Verizon subscriber, but turns out I can - and so can you. In fact, while investigating today's announcement by ESPN that they will carry the Italian Seria A and Coppa Italia tournament live on their broadband network, I was pleasantly surprised. The web site automatically recognized I was a Verizon (FiOS in my case, but I think even DSL will work for others) AND that I was using a Mac (Firefox browser for those who care). After about 25 seconds of download and clicking, BAM, I'm watching Atalanta v AC Milan live (oh, Milan just scored off a corner, nice!).

Don't have Verizon? Try AT&T, but word on chat boards is that Comcast doesn't offer this service.

Post a comment if you have any more information for others about requirements. I'd also like to get an idea of how many of our Potomac Soccer Wire readers watch this "channel", so we know if we should start including their broadcasts in the "Soccer on TV" sections of our web site and Newsletter.

Some of you may have heard about MyFootballClub, a 100% web-based consortium of football (soccer) fans that have joined together, paid $70 each and now voted to buy a real honest to goodness football team in the UK. All major decisions at the club will be decided by online voting of the members. Obviously this includes player signings and the like, but even more intriguing (and scary) is we'll actually vote each week on the starting 11 and what positions they'll play... Yes, really.

You can still sign up too. If you do, perhaps we should start a stateside fan club and have regular live meetings about club business! Sign up to be an owner here - http://www.myfootballclub.co.uk/

For those of you who would rather practice voyeurism living this adventure through others, I'll do my best to keep you updated here. If you do sign up, comment here or email me at Potomac Soccer Wire so we can form a D.C. ownership committee :-)

Here's today's announcement about the overwhelming vote approving the takeover:

Labels: ebbsfleet, My Football Club

And with the final pick of the 2008 MLS Superdraft, the Houston Dynamo just selected former Reston FC player and four year Midfielder for UVA Jeremy Barlow. I wasn't focused on the last pick, but was sitting here in the media room and all the sudden heard "Reston FC" over the sound system. Cool.

Naming the youth club from which player came from may have been new this year. I don't remember hearing that as part of player pick announcements from the podium before, but a year is a long time and I have a short memory for those sorts of details.

Anyway, let's hope it continues. I think recognizing the youth clubs where these new professional players learned the ropes is a great thing. A whole lot of people spend a whole lot of time and money on managing our youth clubs, and having that work be recognized and recorded in the league archives is a nice way to give credit where credit is due.

Here's a list of all players either from our area originally, or that played here:

Patrick Nyarko - Kumasi, Ghana - Virginia Tech - Chicago
David Horst - Pine Grove, PA - Old Dominion University - Real Salt Lake
Yomby William - Bafoussam, Cameroon - Old Domion University - Kansas City
Stephen King - Medford, NJ - University of Maryland - Chicago
Ben Nason - Stafford, VA - Virginia Tech - Dallas
Jeremy Barlow - Herndon, VA - University of Virginia - Houston Dynamo

Labels: Houston Dynamo, Jeremy Barlow, Reston FC

So did you hear the U.S. Women won again in China? With one game left, they only need a draw agains host China to take home the Four Nations Cup yet again. Our new best friend Ali Krieger went 90 minutes again, playing central defense. Things are looking great on that front - even though she expected to play right back mostly going in.

Labels: Ali Krieger, U.S. Women

So, the first player EVER selected in the MLS Superdraft from Virginia Tech is headed to Chicago - a team already fat on young, promising forwards and a lot colder than the California or Texas locals most expected him to end up.
Patrick Nyarko left school early - even after saying he wouldn't - presumably assuming to be chosen at least one or two in the draft. He looked nervous as pick after pick went before him, and during his off camera interviews had trouble breaking a genuine smile for the first few minutes.
I wonder how much he was looking forward to playing for San Jose when he first decided to enter the draft, and although Chicago has a good team, a beautiful stadium, and great players, I can see how the cold weather and number of existing forwards on the roster might not be what Patrick was thinking.

He's still swamped by the media here in the press lounge, much longer than other picks before or after, so this is definitely a story line likely to be followed by many news outlets. Let's see if the questions I raised above are answered in the coming days. For now however, congratulations to the first Hokie ever selected in the MLS draft, and let's hope many more follow in this dynamic player's footsteps.

Labels: Chicago Fire, MLS, MLS Draft, Patrick Nyarko, Virginia Tech

I just published this story on our full web site, but wanted to put a copy here so you could ask Ali questions - and read her responses in a public forum. Don't have any questions? Just wish her and her teammates good luck!

--
Ali Krieger earned her way to the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team

By Chris Hummer - Potomac Soccer Wire Editor
January 15, 2008

Newest Women’s National team member and former Prince William youth player Ali Krieger considers herself very lucky. Not that luck is the reason she has been chosen for her first full women’s national team roster, but lucky that she had such a great experience as a youth player for the Prince William Soccer Incorporated Sparklers.

“I was always happy on that team,” Ali repeated several times during our phone conversation Tuesday night as she prepared to leave for China to prepare for her first full national team competition. “I was so, so lucky to have had such a great experience and to have the team stick together so well for so long.”

Soccer has always been Ali’s first choice of sport. She played volleyball in high school, basketball in junior high, and even did a little cheerleading. Her father, former Sparklers coach Ken Krieger, said, “We did everything, let her try everything, but soccer was always number one.”

It was not unusual in the 1990s for a youth team coach like Ken Kreiger to also be a parent of one of the players. That was before the youth soccer landscape became dominated by hired professional coaches and “training companies.” But what WAS unusual was that by the time his daughter - a future national teamer, professional player in Germany, and Penn State All-American - was born, the elder Krieger had played and already coached more soccer at a high level than most parent coaches.

When Ali was seven, PWSI officials asked Ken to head up their next girls “travel” team. With his eye for talent, and a robust recreational program already under way, it was an easy task to find the players he wanted to invite to join.

With the newly minted team assembled, Coach Kreiger set the tone for the future with parents, stating, “Let me do my job.” As an experienced coach and player, as well as career educator, he was in a position to be very blunt.

“If I needed my teeth fixed or my taxes done, and one of the parents was a dentist or accountant, then I’d go to them,” explained Krieger. “But I am a teacher and a soccer coach, so I asked them to trust me and let me do my job in helping their daughters become the best players they could.”

He wanted to build the team through player development, rather than taking the path of constant recruiting and restructuring followed by many other teams. His mission was simple: “To maximize the potential of every player.” By and large, the parents agreed and a dynasty was born.

Retaining eight original players the whole way through U19, the Prince William Sparklers won six out of eight possible Virginia Youth Soccer Association State Cup championships, advanced to the Region I tournament six times, winning the Region once at U16. That win sent them to Florida for the National Championships, where they lost on triple overtime on a last-minute goal in the finals, the only goal they conceded at Nationals. Victories in other tournaments led to the reward of playing in RFK Stadium and the biggest prize of all, an invitation to train with Chelsea FC in London for two weeks.

It is hard for Ali to admit that she herself has been a big reason for the success of every team she’s played with, though it most certainly was a major factor. When describing her youth experiences, she doesn’t say “we won this” or “I did that.” All she talks about is how lucky she was to have had such a great soccer experience and how the whole purpose was to have fun.

Her advice to today’s young players is to “have fun playing soccer for your own reasons. Set goals, and never give up. But if you don’t enjoy, then don’t do it.”

It’s a mantra that has been the key to her success.

She also credits her family for “always being there to support me. Not just my dad as a coach, but also my mom and my brother on the sidelines as much as possible, just supporting me. They always let me make my own decisions about soccer.”

That enabled Kreiger to make the hard choice to quit ODP during her U15 year, after five years with the program. “It just wasn’t as fun as playing for my club team, and the quality wasn’t any better because [the Sparklers] were so good.”

The time spent and the expense to her family just didn’t seem worth it. “ODP is a great opportunity for a lot of players to find their way to the national team, but I found another way,” Krieger said diplomatically.

Free to focus on her club soccer, the big colleges came calling. She chose Penn State, where she was a four-year starter and won four straight Big Ten championships. Personal accolades piled up, too: She was a two-time All-American, a first team NSCAA All-American, defensive co-player of the year, and a semifinalist for the M.A.C. Hermann trophy, among other accomplishments.

In her junior year, she led the team to the NCAA tournament, where they were widely thought to have their best chance at winning a first national championship. However, on the eve of the first round, Ali broke her leg in training and missed her team's run to a semifinal PK shootout, which they lost to eventual winner Portland.

“’Kreiger’ means ‘warrior’ in German, and that’s what Ali is,” said her father. “She never quits. We used to call her the furnace, or engine. She just keeps coming at you and never gives up.”

Ali doesn’t describe it quite that way. But she does use the setback at Penn State as an example of how “things can derail your plans, but you can never give up on your dreams if you have any hope of obtaining them.”

As much as she’s accomplished so far in her soccer career, she still has big dreams. She just started a new life in Germany playing for FFC Frankfurt of the Women’s Bundesliga, quite possibly one of the best women’s teams in the world. She chose Frankfurt despite offers from Chelsea, because she wanted to play with the best players and Frankfurt is the top team in a country that has won the last two World Cups.

Playing alongside big names like Brigit Prinz and Steffi Jones, Krieger says that the process of acquainting herself with a new team in Germany has helped her with adjustment to the full Women’s National Team.

Ali's invitation to attend training camp came by email from the US Soccer Federation, saying that Head Coach Pia Sundhage would like to invite her to attend training camp in preparation for the team’s first official competition since the World Cup. Her acceptance was instant and now she begins another new chapter in her life.

Krieger is indeed a warrior, one who was lucky enough to have known from a very early age what she really wanted, and lucky enough to have been given the opportunity to achieve her dreams. The rest is all hard work, but it’s hard work that just happens to be a lot of fun.


Editor’s Note: Ali hopes to check in with us from China by email. If she does, we’ll post her updates in this blog. Please comment, send good luck wishes, or ask Ali your own questions using the comments link here.

You have to be a subscriber to the Baltimore Business Journal to read the whole thing, but they just updated their web site with the opening of an article about the study.

It says the Maryland Stadium Authorty will oversee the study in order to access the potential economic impact of a new soccer stadium for D.C. United in Prince George's County, Maryland. Supposidly, in a letter written by Senate Budget Committee Chair Ulysses Currie, the stadium authority will use as much as $75K in non-budgeted funds for the study.

Labels: d.c. united

It was a bright, sunny, warm afternoon today. A great day to play some outdoor footy. But who knew? The annual pre-draft player combine hosted by D.C. United for a select group of about 37 players was planned to far in advance to have known the weather would be perfect.

Instead, 37 young hopefuls gathered in suburban D.C. at an indoor soccer facility to show their stuff. Some came from far away (California and Minnesota), but most were locals. Their opportunity? To be drafted by D.C. United in two weeks at the MLS Super Draft in Baltimore, MD. Or at least get invited to training camp in a few weeks. Each year the team tries very hard to draft at least one player from their combine.

Two years ago, none other than Devon McTavish solidified his place in United's plans at this same event. The comments from the coaches today as to what stood out about him? One word - S-I-M-P-L-E.

To paraphrase since none of this is on the record - Devon was the obvious class in 2006 because even in the tight, high-pace environment of 20x40 yard indoor field, every one of his touches and every decision was simple - in a very good way.

Other players that have at least used this combine as a stepping stone to the team roster: Kiki Willis, Guy-Roland Kpene, Shawn Crowe, and Mira Mupier. Most players are already on a first name basis with the coaching staff. The combine is just a chance to see them compete close up.

It was obvious watching today that very few players are close to that level, but that is expected. Devon was a gem in the rough, and was a starting player for United less than half way into his second season as a pro. But were there players that might have a shot? Maybe.

After leading the players through a warm-up, they were split into three teams with seven players and two teams with eight. Each team had a Goalkeeper (a position United needs to backfill for sure with only one Keeper on the roster as of today). The five teams spent the next 90 minutes playing four games, always with one team resting. The boards were out of bounds, and the subs were on the fly. Coaches and team executives surrounded the fields with clipboards in hand. No coaching was done, they were just there to observe and keep time. It was totally up to the players to solve their problems, organize, call fouls, and impress.

The first five minutes of the first games saw every player at almost a full sprint, and heard almost every player chirping directions and information. It was too fast and too loud, but served a good purpose of getting the nerves out of the way.

In all, the first two rounds of games were the most spirited and at the highest pace. It also quickly became obvious which handful of players didn't belong, as well as which handful had the supple touch and comfort on the ball in a fast-paced environment.

As time went on, the players lacking good team defending skills, fitness, and vocal leadership became more evident, while some of the cream started to rise to the top. In all however, there was some major things missing in my opinion - Defensive aggression and flair.

Aggression first - or lack there of. Despite no artificial limits having been placed on the players, there were very few strong tackles. Some brain scientists didn't even wear shin guards! The fast pace made the opportunity for tackles much lower I guess, but I still expected to see more fire and fight from guys who might only ever have this one shot at impressing an MLS coach.

As for flair, Jennifer Aniston had more in Office Space, with the exception of a very small handful. Several players displayed strong ball handling skills in slaloming defenders, but few really used creativity to take people on. Maybe they were told that simplicity was the order of the day, but it is possible to be simple, and creative isn't it?

This is day one however, and tomorrow is indeed another opportunity - that is unless your name is already crossed off - which some no doubt have been. Everyone will have had 22 hours to reflect and self-evaluate. If they asked me, I'd say they need to do three things better. Defend, Create, and Simplify. But that shouldn't be much news to anyone.

So that's my review. But who cares what I think? The big question is how and who the coaches choose? Simple again enters the conversation.

Paraphrasing again - If someone does something bad, it's mentally noted. If they do the same thing bad again, it's jotted down, and if they do the same thing bad three time, their name is crossed off the list. On the other end, if they do something good a few times while avoiding the cross-off, their name is circled. Then the coaches convene to compare notes, and a list of potential draft candidates is produced.

What happens from there is anyone's guess. With any luck, another Devon McTavish will materialize, under the radar of other MLS teams, and the entire combine will be deemed a success.

I may attend again tomorrow. We'll see how things go with the newsletter production.

A few side notes of interest. On the way out, one player was walking back to his hotel to loosen his legs and get a proper cool down, which I discovered when offering a lift. That's pretty smart. Now for the dumb... Another player went to a Chick-fil-a for lunch, which I discovered when doing the same. Not a good decision for an athlete in the middle of one of the most important 26 hours of his soccer career to date. Also, I have names and other stuff of interest, but obviously cannot disclose them here due to sensitivity of the information. It will be interesting to compare those notes after the draft however...

If I've missed something you're interested in, comment below and I'll try and answer.

Ever have a conversation with someone new to soccer about offside? Not too clear yourself?

I stumbled across on this link to a detailed on the New River United Soccer Association web site while compiling a recent newsletter.

Long explanation, but fantastic for parents who really want to understand it better but just have trouble. Pass it on...

Thanks to a fantastic flight deal from United Airlines, Potomac Soccer Wire is headed to Houston in early February for the USA v Mexico clash at Reliant Stadium. If you're planning on attending the game, let me know. If you're not sure, maybe this flight deal will change your mind.

United, Flight 7683. Departs Dulles at 5:30 PM, Tuesday, Feb 5.
United, Flight 7682. Departs Houston at 11:50 AM, Thursday, Feb 7.

Round trip - $199.51

The sale United is running expires soon. Hope you can join us, and if you're on either of these flights, be sure to shoot me an email so we can hang out and talk soccer!

Labels: USMNT

Any baseball fans out there? How about business executives? One or both types have likely read a book called Moneyball. In short - it's a book that explains how the Oakland A's used statistics to build competitive playoff teams on a fraction of the salary expense of the "Big" teams. It's a fascinating read for anyone who loves sports and/or statistics. The only down side? It's SO hard to read a book about a sport other than soccer. If not for the business angle, I never would have picked it up.

Well, the guy in charge of the A's then - and today - is a newly minted soccer fan, as well as indirect employee of the MLS expansion side San Jose Earthquakes (the A's owners own part of the Earthquakes). Billy Bean plans to consult with the Earthquakes GM and coaches on applying principles of Moneyball to Soccer.

Jeff Carlise of ESPNSoccer.com explains further.

In all, I'm not too excited about the ability to do such a thing, but personally more excited that someone so respected in the old sport of baseball can actually find a way to be a soccer fan! We've all known for a long time the soccer has the participants to support being a major sport in the USA, but until we can cross over to major stakeholders from other professional sports (and entertainment al a Drew Carey), we'll never "make it" in the main stream. Billy Bean being a soccer fan, is just plain music to my ears.

Labels: billy bean, jeff carlise, moneyball, san jose earthquakes

At least not this week. I hope you're not trying to contact anyone with an @dcunited.com email address. It will bounce back. Not clear as to why, but have confirmed many there are without email access. Why they don't use a third party with a guaranteed mail uptime in this day and age is puzzling. In any case, all systems are predicted to be up and running next week. If you've sent any emails this week, it's probably a good idea to re-send again next week just in case. We don't want them to miss any big ticket orders!

Labels: d.c. united

The best soccer blog in the country (according to US Soccer 2007 fan voting) linked to Potomac Soccer Wire today thanks to our piece on Real Maryland's and Barbados' Daryl Ferguson. If you haven't read the article, check it out. Then be sure to visit Steven Goff's Soccer Insider on Washington Post (daily!).

Labels: daryl ferguson, real maryland, soccer insider, steven goff

So, if you're like me, our weekend (or holiday in this case) soccer viewing schedule consists of watching any team with Americans in the line up. It's taken a year, but finally, Fox Soccer Channel is carrying Fulham and Reading games on a regular basis.

Yesterday's Reading v Portsmouth match was just such an occasion, but most of my motivation for watching was basically over in the first 10 minutes however. Thank whoever for DVRs and their fast forward feature.

Bobby Convey got another start on the left wing, but in the 3rd minute a defender with Reading (Sonko) clipped the heals of the Portsmouth forward in the box, and not only conceded a penalty, but was red carded. Fortunately the PK struck the post, although GK Marcus Hahnemann (the other American international with Reading) dove the right way, he didn't have the kick covered. The rebound was cleared for a throw in, providing a great example to the youth players out there as to why you never give up, and always be first to the spot when a PK is struck.

The problem is, what do you do when you lose your central defender in the 3rd minute? Apparently you sub the American. Bobby was sacrificed to allow a 4th defender back on the field for Reading, while Steven Hunt moved to left and they went with a single forward. This despite Bobby nearly scoring his first EPL goal in the play immediately before his sub. The telling part about this move, was that the TV cameras caught Bobby's reaction when he realized he was the one being subbed. His reaction was more than that of surprise, followed by understanding. It was more like "sonnofa b****, the **** Manager is an idiot".

A teammate smartly grabbed him by the shoulders and shook the look off his face, as he accepted his role and jogged off. But the look was unmistakable. Convey clearly wants out of Reading.

All was not lost, the match was still 0-0 - at least for a little while. Portsmouth scored on what should have been a routine set play when Hahnemann let a basic cross slip through his fingers, where Sol Cambel bundled it home for the 1-0 Portsmouth lead.

Drama, yes. Reason for watching the rest, not much. Gotta love the FF button on the DVR!

Labels: Bobby Convey, EPL, Marcus Hahnemann, Reading FC