martino...he is the best 'change' candidate he has written policy changes that will work and is also an adult...two things that should disqualify wynalda I think Carter will win though in the first ballot tomorrow which will be amazing. sounds like the athlete council is going to back her.
I don't know enough about the candidates to make a good decision. Before Hope Solo joined the field, I said that any of the candidates would make a good president. I also said that Gulati has been a good president and I hope he continues to be deeply involved with US Soccer and FIFA. Solo is a bit rough around the edges, but who knows what she is like in person? From listening to them speak, I was leaning toward Paul Caligiuri. I don't think "who" is important. It is a part time unpaid position. Like a chairman of the board, not the CEO actually running things. USSF has done great on the business side, but improvement is needed on the soccer side. What we are doing now for player development is worse than what we did 30 years ago. Too much organization, too much emphasis on winning matches, and too many restrictions on youth playing soccer. Both formal and informal hurdles to meaningful play. When soccer boomed, there weren't enough coaches so parents were coaching teams, parents who never played the sport and even some parents who were not even athletes, much less coaches. So we had a generation of players taught a warped version of the game. We also had a trend where sports were moved out of the schools into private clubs. While schools used team sports to teach community values and good citizenship, things like how to compete within rules, some clubs taught players to value winning instead of playing and sowed disrespect for others and the game by teaching players how to win by cheating. Here is one example of how this has all come home to roost. We now call backs defenders. This is almost universal in the US now. USSF does it. NSCAA (USC) does it. Our top coaches do it. In soccer everyone should be both an attacker and defender. But now everyone talks and thinks about soccer sides being divided into 2 units--attackers and defenders. That is a horrible view of soccer tactics. You could call the Dutch Way defending from the front to go along with attacking from the back.. When I coached youth, we would dominate other teams because we had twice as many players, as the other teams, engaged all the time. Not because I coached my teams more on team tactics, but rather because I coached them less on team tactics and more on fundamentals. Trying to justify dividing the team as necessary to protect against a counterattack is wrong. It is not necessary to divide the team. Dutch Principles are about 50 year old and under them the team is compact from front to rear and the entire team protects against counterattack while they are attacking. That is an important part of positional play.
I've liked Kyle Martino from the minute he threw his hat in. That may be because I have way more data points for him, given his TV work. p.s. Good idea for a poll-thread. Just a little late, given that the vote happens 24hrs after the thread was created?