it also strikes me as interestingly contradictory to be pimping "change" while looking within for choices. but then we're pimping attacking/possession soccer while running out hard hat mids. we talk like we want to change our approach but the recent generations, while perhaps more technical in general, are actually turning out no reynas and mathises. the average is up. the special is down. we seem on a heterodox political mission as opposed to some consistent strategy from age 5 to retirement. politics you are concerned with how things poll to the constituents and whether the interest groups are happy. you can be saying things to different groups that work out contradictory but keep both sets of voters happy on paper, if you don't actually care about practical results. if you care about practical results you need your ducks in a row and not to be doing different things at the same time that contradict each other or undermine the overall mission.
Seeing this tweet quote, my God, perhaps I was a bit hyperbolic in my response, but good lord, they're not even hiding their prejudiced, old white guy attitudes when they say this sorta thing, they don't even realize that they're argument against Hugo is essentially racist: USSF spokesman denied that Pérez’s use of Spanish contributed to his firing: "'There were other factors...' He stated that there is no policy against speaking Spanish or any other language...'the key is making sure that coaches are getting messages across to all their players.'"— scuffed (@scuffedpod) October 21, 2019
I need to note, I work as a teacher, in California this past decade you needed to complete ELL training, or a series of exams to gain licensure as a new teacher, in Nevada where I teach now, I have multiple classes loaded with ELL's (about 1/3 of my student roster), it's simply understood that this is a long term process. The kids themselves, see this as essentially normative, it's not unusual at all, and that Hugo used Spanish and English to communicate with players, well hell, one elementary I taught at as a sub required teachers to be bilingual due to the student body at the particular school. Not only is what they're doing self-defeating, and to some degree, racist, but it's also not in line w/anything we do with children in this country who are ELL's and/or grow up where English isn't the language spoken at home. These guys are 1000% divorced from reality. We need to eject literally ALL OF THEM. Just for this alone they should all be kicked out on their own comfy arses, and removed from the fed period. It's beyond asinine.
i don't buy for a second that anglo coaches are more concerned with "strength." i feel like that connects up with snob propaganda. in my era it was make your passes and then organized defense and everyone gets stuck in. i feel like the "everyone gets stuck in" part is more of an england/germany vs. holland/spain divide, one where we are trending towards the passive side over time. i don't feel like that is progress. or if it is seen as such, it is only down a specific vision. there are competing versions from better national teams where you are organized and fighting or not on the field, AND you exhibit technique and speed going forward. when i hear that my ears perk up and i think i'm being sold something. i listened to martino's podcast appearance, and while i agree with this concern about the fullness of the pool and getting poached, i can also see where it would ironically be fodder for pro-berhalter folks tossing the pool under the bus for their selection and system failures. after all, martino links the two when he defends berhalter somewhat by saying we would need time for his vision. the two should be part of an overall effort but the two do not have to coincide in a mission to change the Fed. the NT either needs to go much more offensive, or team defense. that reflects the current pool. the YNT pool issues are a separate thing to work on. you want better technicians start now with 5 year olds. you want broader participation and less poaching work on that. but they may not come out the other end of the machine for a decade or more. also, as i spelled out before, there are different "animals" here. there are the kids in ODP/YNT and their coach wanting to speak spanish to them. there are the kids not even in the pipeline. it can bleed together but one is how you run the pipeline. the other is scouting players outside the pipeline. there may be some sort of overall "emotional" state here where we generally need to make minority players feel more welcome. but the solutions are situation specific. a solution that gets the off-brand league kids scouted doesn't fix issues inside the YNT of the identified kids. you are not losing gonzalez or potentially dest or alvarez because they were overlooked. they got seen. they are known. the mechanism intended precisely to bring them to the NT broke down.
calling real so cal a "development academy" doesn't change reality. it's a traditional select club. they set up a "development academy" set of leagues with the pro age group teams plus some of the clubs, all of which apparently could call themselves "development academies." i bring this up because we seem obsessed with organizational and nomenclature solutions. when i back off and look at this, the organization and name obsessions might actually get in the way of better scouting of even the select kids. only so many teams would be DA. so participation grows but i would bet the college coaches and pro scouts focus on this small set of teams. the pie grows but everyone drools over one small slice. matters because i knew a hermann award winner, and i know for a fact until his senior year of HS he was on some second rate team. he was in ODP on a YNT but he would not have been within DA until his last select year. so the issues i am seeing are still not in the hispanic areas perhaps laser focused on DA leagues got rid of bradenton and then on the pro side MLS has loosened DP and international slot rules which shrink the room on the lineup and roster for the domestic player at least one thing worth throwing out there is it would make more sense as a protectionist device than as a development device to have a set list of elite gateway teams. if you had $, you would know where to send your ambitious kid. but if the league paid no attention to whether that club had a good crop of '01s or a junk team, then as much as the MLS academies might broaden participation, the select teams might narrow it back down and/or not be judged by performance. it would make more sense to me to have DA league be an earned right as opposed to someone decides that FCD, the Dynamo, Solar Chelsea, Texans, etc. will each always have a team every year. it would also be a foolish funneling if the scouts watched DA. if anything, that should be a waste of time. DA should already be scouted to the Nth. i would assume any YNT types would be identified and doing double duty. the scouts should be watching for players we don't know....
I am not sure I really trust the source considering he works for the enemy now. Mexico wants to poach our players... especially because our YNT program is playing better than theirs... it makes sense to sow seeds of discontent.
Didn't Perez go to El Salvador after the US? Why did he leave them and switch to Mexico? I don't automatically believe every employ let go nor do I automatically dismiss what they say. I do know that most employers are not able to comment specifically on those matters or they may be sued. So is Perez is great guy that is now at his third country federation or is there maybe a reason he's now with his third country federation? I know we're supposed to hate our Fed and they surely make it easy at times but I don't think that every single thing they do is wrong or bad and this may or may not be a bad one.
All top club team have players and coaches speaking a variety of languages on the field and in the locker room. Most players around the world grow up playing with people who speak multiple languages.Sure, there's generally a dominant language, but guys use the languages they are comfortable with when possible and figure it out when not. Soccer is an international sport and that's one of its hallmarks and one of its strengths. This crap particularly offends me because one of the biggest reasons I fell in love with the game growing up was meeting and learning from people from all over the world, many of whom did not share my language.Personally, I find even trying to remove this aspect of the game wrong-headed and deeply offensive
Look at the quote, "There were other factors...." That's implicitly owning that a factor in his firing was his use of bilingual skills, something that's basically automatic everywhere in terms of transitioning kids from Spanish Speaking only, to ELL's, to fully fluent English speakers. The source you're not trusting is actually the fed itself. They accidentally indicted themselves. Now sure, they may, or may not be telling the truth that he was engaging in other shenanigans, or perhaps there were just areas they weren't happy with in addition to that, but from the statement alone, that was a factor, and that ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN A FACTOR. If it was, it's an s canning justification for everyone that cosigned on the firing, period.
USSF spokesman denied that Pérez’s use of Spanish contributed to his firing: 'There were other factors...' That's some quality spin!
You're right, but when you get in the circle and see its that way, you can always say Im not really interested and decide to back out. He took a promotion to another job where he is doing less. Cant blame him for making money for his family but at the same time he has eyes and can clearly see the issues. He is just choosing to ignore them, or can't change them. Either way he is ineffective.
If you've studied history, it's pretty standard practice for monarchists / conservatives / nationalists / fascists to suspect that people who are in some way different from the majority are part of some "fifth column" that could undermine the larger unit and its best interests from the inside... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_column
I do hope coach for youth National teams improve not only with Latino players family but also African American families. Can tell you personally.....there were A LOT of assumptions made because my U17 player at the time would NOT commit to moving to Bradenton when he was at a camp. His non-committal was taken as disinterest. When he returned home and talked to him home club they said they got word that the youth National team coach at the time thought that he was not interested in moving to Bradenton. He wanted very much to go and wondered how they got that impression. These are cultural miscues. The same coach had many issues with Weston as well...I am not saying they are racist. Perhaps some understanding of cultures other than your own would correct these issues. He saw how Weston was treated first hand. He did not care for it at all but he very much wanted to go.....This was not a conversation he was going to have with a single coach at Bradenton. THis as interpreted at ‘disinterest”.
You are going overboard here... the initial optic raises questions ( that he was let go regarding speaking Spanish) but how many of those kids don’t speak English? And how many in the pool don’t speak Spanish? My point is you want English spoken across the board because the player pool all understands it. Spanish is uneccessary when addressing the group... if he wants to have a side chat with a player then have at it. Otherwise you are just complicating the lines of communication for the sake of political correctness, which in a results oriented business, is just plain stupid.
It's not uncommon for coaches of pro teams to work in multiple languages, even when coaching games. Most important thing is for players to understand what is being conveyed. I'm not sure how 'English across the board' accomplishes that. MLB teams don't work like that. I don't see what's politically correct about ensuring players understand instructions. The paranoia and nativism are real in some folks.
well, it gets dangerously close to "cant hire tata, hes not fluent (enough)" doesnt it? and replying to an earlier comment on my original post- thats the sort of accomodation im talking about. theres zero reason for communication/interaction language barriers with coaches, players, hell, even fans- just none. and we arent even talking about mandating that any of those be bilingual- the fed is actively discouraging that. no twitter/web page in spanish, reprimanding bilingual coaches (there are more instances of this), manager has to be a primarily english speaker. there are plenty of commentators who have gotten into our diversity issues- notably martino during his pres bid (though more class-based in his case), and i think herc is an important voice that should be heard in this conversation. however much malice you attribute to it our fed is not simply not as accomodating as it could be re latin/spanish (or, as very rightly pointed out, ANY minority) coaches or players. in fact it indicates very clearly a preference to white, middle-to-upper class academy kids. name as many youth national team captains as you can remember and tell me what the vast majority have in common.
i cant speak on perez' coaching career with authority but heres what i know: he played his national team career with the us. id say his being a native salvadoran explains working in that fed, and moving up (job-wise) to us soccer is pretty self-explanatory. i also know he is pretty universally regarded as a great soccer mind with an even greater eye for talent. factoring in the- again, pretty universally recognized- er, lack of ideal diversity in our fed, in a country with a makeup such as ours, coupled with the specifics of (to whatever degree) "talking too much spanish" is it that hard to see why he would move on? also consider his career progress (or lack thereof) in us soccer, which he represented internationally. we had 5 youth teams without a coach BEFORE tab moved on to houston, why was he never given a chance in a position even at that level? again, im no expert by means and youre right we dont know the full story (of any scenario like this). but i think its quite a stretch to find reason for suspicion in his motives of either leaving us soccer (a very understandable argument can be made of his being underappreciated/utilized) or that the move is to "our rival", rather than a fed that does see value in him and is (not very arguably) simply another step up for him. that feels a lot like hearing hoofprints and thinking zebra rather than horse.
pro teams with players from all over the world are different than national teams. Apples and oranges. Efficiency and the best communication possible are all that matters. And that is English. That is the objective solution, perhaps not the subjective feel good one. Again I have no problems having one on ones or the like in Spanish. And one issue is we really don’t know the context or full story on how this all went down. look, I despise the USSF for many reasons, but I am not ready to crucify them over this. This is a results oriented business and if I had an employee kicking ass and those working for him had no issues with issue XYZ, then I would probably let it slide...
In a results based business, and not sure I'd call US soccer results based, you use every advantage you can. Hugo has made clear why he used spanish and thought doing so improved his coaching/messenging to his players.
This is just another reason we need to embrace the #justletithappen movement. The faster it completely crashes, the faster we can fix it. There is no normal fix for US Soccer. It is corrupt to its core. Voting in the same type people makes no difference. With a shameful sjw soccer press, there is never going to be accountability. Hopefully missing 2 World Cups in a row is enough to reset it. #justletithappen
What is the difference that is relevant to effective communications? 'Objective' may not mean what you think it means.
Yup. No doubt. There are some issues that are going to be difficult to fix. Communication isn't one of them. That should be easy. If there's one thing I think USMNT/USYNT fans take too seriously its the U17 team and World Cup. An enormously long list of our best players didn't take part in the US U17 program. It's one youth coaching staff's selection of a small group of players from a large, diverse player pool. I believe that not a single defender on our recent USMNT squad for the League of Nations went to a U17 World Cup. Most of our elite U20 and U23 defenders didn't either. Chris Richards, for instance. Development and growth happens at clubs. I'm thrilled that the USSF decided to eliminate the Bradenton program. It wasn't having the intended effect. MLS (and USL, etc.) clubs are training players day-to-day in order to become adult professionals for their organization. Not to win U17 games....................... As far as Hugo Perez goes, a lot was going on behind the scenes with that one. The cult of Hugo Perez on these boards is a weird one for me. The guy was just at the Silicon Valley soccer association. Not Barcelona. Not Ajax. And of course he's not Mexican. These Mexican American prospects don't know Hugo Perez from Adam. Mexico is/was agressively recruiting in the United States with or without Hugo Perez. Ledezma recently talking about how Gerardo Torrado, Mexican legend, called him to ask how he was doing. That would be much more meaningful for a young Mexican-American player than frickin' Hugo Perez. Do I wish he wasn't recruiting for Mexico? Of course. But really, he's one of an army. I remember seeing Mexico scouts at a U14 girls ODP tryout in DFW. I repeat: A girls U14 ODP tryout.