People bashed Schellas for keeping Brek in his doghouse when he was a young player, and not playing him as much as people thought he should. I think we're just now finally realizing that Brek is the opposite of a player SH wanted in his team. He lacks "emotional maturity" as SH would put it. And frankly, this whole discussion is nonsensical. Schellas Hyndman wasn't the general manager of this team. It wasn't his responsibility to spend the "Brek Shea money." People find all sorts of ways to bash Hyndman, who is a man who gave his heart and soul to FCD. Let's have a wee bit of respect instead of calling him a "cancer." I may not have liked him as a coach, but the man doesn't deserve that. At all.
I believe the term was "emotional intelligence", and you have to give Jackson at least co/authorship for the term as Jackson was with out a doubt the inspiration for the opposite of SH's term. I am going to agree whole heartedly w/ CE. We have a bunch of ungrateful rear end orifices on this board that try to vilify a man who has earned and deserves respect. No one is saying you don't have a right to your opinions, but to bring back this negativity and attribute anything that goes wrong to SH is silly. Did he cut one of your boyfriends from the team? Why harbor this bitterness? All the old man ever did was work is @SS of and get us to an MLS final. How many other FCD coaches have done that? Maybe SH can share a laugh with his SMU neighbor George Bush. 10 years later, and people are still blaming Bush for the weather, earthquakes, the economy.... blah, blah, blah.
The history student in me can't let this pass, though I hate to derail a thread with anything remotely political. There are still things that are Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's fault, and that will always be their fault. That doesn't mean their successors can't or didn't or won't fix them, but historical actions have long-lasting repercussions. It's nothing partisan on my part, but 10 years is nothing, and Bush, like any other prez, is still and will always be to blame for a number of things. He may also deserve lasting credit for certain things, as his predecessors do. Same with SH.
. That's why I love this board. You can only rival this kind of crazy with the family Thanksgiving reunion dinner after too much coffee.
That and then run the team into the ground for three consecutive seasons. The injuries to DF sucked, but if you don't have someone who can fill that role, you have to adjust - and just trying to get everyone in the starting XI to work harder all the time, game after game, with no balancing of playing time ain't the way to go. Personally, I am not bitter, but I am disappointed, and I can see how others would be bitter. Was it better than the mid-2000 teams that had gobs of talent but no cohesion? Yes. SH improved things from Clarke and Morrow. But you still had that bad taste in your mouth knowing that you had better talent on the roster than the results on the field.
I think this point is relatively debatable. From everything I read, he was very much in charge of buying the groceries if you will. Clavijo and Barry Gorman may have had titles, but SH had the power, and influence. There was also the whole "competition committee" thing, which apparently every decision went through, that magically vanished when he left.
I have been told on more than one occasion that no trade/buy/sell deal was every completed without SH's stamp of approval. Including the Alexander for Hall trade that still haunts me to this day.
London Woodberry waived. http://www.bigdsoccer.com/2014/3/20/5529484/fc-dallas-waives-london-woodberry
worst kept secret since Oscar. Team had to sit on him till he left the injured list. But this has started an interesting conversation on Twitter about FCD's HGP plan/strategy or lack thereof.
What is the expected ratio HGP signings to contributing first teams players and/or lucrative transfers? There are kinks in the system, but even in an ideal system this ratio is probably lower than most people around here seem to be expecting. Out of 10 or so HGP signings we have by my count 3 on the roster who have decent to good chances of being sold players and making a career of it. (Acosta, Hernandez, Sanchez) There's certainly some learning overhead here, but I don't really feel compelled to criticize the program just yet. It's not like those "failures", the HGP that we promoted and later cut, really cost us all that much.
I think any criticism is based in why FCD would sign so many HG's without a real plan in place to grow them into the senior squad. My personal opinion, supposition if you will, is that Dan Hunt loves the Academy and wants to sign players to prove the value of it. And while that is commendable for the last several years he's had a coach that privately (I believe) wasn't really on board with signing all/most of them. But Dan was the boss and he played along. But once those guys were signed and in the system he didn't pay a lot of proper attention to them.. Some of them frankly will never be full time, 1st league players.. Some of the may have been.. I do think much of that changes with Oscar. We've already seen it with the two he took to Florida and how's he's included them in Senior training. I believe that FCD's Academy setup is 2nd to none in MLS, but that doesn't mean it couldn't get better.
this is my main issue and why i was so disappointed we didnt get the usl (or whatever lower league) affiliate team set up during the offseason. to me, that should be our highest priority this season even above making the playoffs. otherwise i think our competitive advantage with the academy will quickly be surpassed by other clubs whose young players are getting regular, competitive game time. as for the hit rate, i wouldnt expect it to be very high as our pipeline is still very small in relation to other clubs in more established leagues. the key for us now is building that pipeline to give us more chances to hit on a player and i think we are moving in that direction with the partnerships with regional texas clubs (read something about east texas agreement recently). think about all the players in minor league baseball...how many minor leaguers ever make it to the show? we just need to keep 'colonizing' before others try and plant their flag in our fertile texas soccer soil.
Part of the frustration for me personally was that Hyndman would sign these guys to the senior squad and leave them on the bench, while playing experienced guys who had very predictable but limited ceilings but also very predictable but limited floors. I don't blame Hyndman for making the choices that he did in the starting XI and subs' bench. Some coaches don't want to deal with a lineup with young players that are like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates, but he was the wrong coach to have if your organization is making a commitment to growing itself through an academy setup. (And personally, I always noted the irony of Hyndman's greater unwillingness to playing young players, given what his previous occupation was.)
Yeah we have talked here about it, but one of SH biggest failings was also one of the things they tried to sell when he was hired re:youth development. When you look back it is funny, he was terrible with kids and he was poor with aging vets...that leaves very small group haha. I also think too many signings were made, and too many were done under the veiled guise of international interest.
I would still love to know what his track record was like playing underclassmen at SMU. The clues may have been there but we overlooked them.
Ditto cowtown. As someone said jokingly not long ago, while coach of FCD he played the seniors and sat the underclassmen. From that perspective his management style was consistent with his previous career, unless someone knows that he did in fact play underclassmen at SMU, in which case we're back to scratching our heads.
If the released HGP's are so good, which club is scarfing up all of this unused talent? I won't disagree that MLS, not FCD is failing these guys by not having a reserve league system. If keeping costs low and organizing a regional league is needed, then someone should look into it. But in his short time, OP too is releasing quite a few kids already. Why?
There is a jump between academy and senior (MLS) levels that is wider than the Grand Canyon. If FCD can sign all the HGPs they want, if they find ONE every 2-3 years that ends up a starter, they're winning. But everyone needs to stop assuming that a USLPro, FCD2, reserve system is somehow miraculously going to turn Luna, Leyva or Woodberry into MLS starters. Certainly, having a USLPro team will help simply to get these players time so the bulk of them can be used for what they were really signed for - profit. And the truth is the bulk won't even turn out to be worth selling.. But a single Sanchez selling for $1Million+ make up for a lot of the names listed above...
That's all well and good, but I assume most of us have been going on the assumption that if a HGP gets signed to the senior squad, he's capable of making that jump.
And that isn't really accurate. "Has the potential to" is probably more like it. Unfortunately, without games in the right environment, that potential is rarely going to be realized. Look at the Generation adidas players - basically the same thing but with a higher level of potential. For every Dax or Brek there was how many Blake Wagners - 3 to 1? And don't assume that loaning out players is the simple solution. You would be trusting your asset to a coaching and training staff that may or may not treat your player the way you would want him to be treated - whether that is in playing time, formation/structure, or injury risk (playing him too much, or playing him when he is hurt). The MLS reserve games are usually not challenging enough - especially when you have starting quality players who are either in the doghouse or otherwise not motivated to play hard (each team has one or two, if not more), or the bench isn't deep enough (by design or by injury or suspension) to make it a competitive match. Hopefully the USL Pro is competitive enough to have it be local and run by coaches and training staff that FC Dallas trusts.
Didn't see a loanees thread, so I'll post this here: Span hits a brace. http://orlandocitysc.com/news/?article_id=1893
Something we might all want to consider is that two new teams are starting next year and the last time that happened the team lost some good players. Hopefully that is mitigated this time and the correct players are protected. Seems like FCD has a lot of future players and I hope they get to hang on to them and not watch them excel elsewhere for years.