short version, any idiot can roll out the ball and tell his players to compete and judge them for it. actually coach them. if you emphasized their skills for 4 years you might catch up to better schools by being the one school in the area who bothers to have everyone do footwork or work on shooting correctly. while everyone else just free rides off select or has them running windsprints. in terms of the dynamo and how this relates back, we work hard. so what. we are sloppy and we cannot finish. and most other professional teams, including more technical ones, also show up ready to run. it isn't a competitive advantage, or at least not much of one outside of the first few weeks out of camp. after that everyone has run and run and is in game shape. ever noticed we're always good for about a month? if the astros can't hit they don't just say aww shucks, they fire the hitting coach. dynamo have their players for most of the year, for 3-4 year deals, and they still can't shoot. hire a coach. work on shooting drills. especially if we are going non-kinnear and not just cutting people for deficiencies.
that and i might see it as mattering more for my career what my HD2 tape looks like than what the HD staff thinks of my practice effort. i might work hard if i thought HD1 would reward it -- hence my comments about the bridge has to actually open up and let players across. plural. they will then maintain the effort. if they only see beto cross, and see no hope, maybe they downshift into lower energy mode and weigh their next step. play my butt off in games that teams can see streaming. but not kill myself in 100F training. this hard work crap is overrated. i felt like my college coach overtrained us badly. we had massive injury attrition. so i loafed through some practices or running. i emphasized technique the last practice before a game. i turned the switch on for game day. the games are what matter. for a professional, the games are what other teams can see and evaluate. and some players may have an iverson attitude to practice, or at least its overemphasis. i think when i watch someone suck in the games i don't care how you thought he looked in practice, how hard he works. i think bad teams tend to either hype hype hype their system and the drilling of same, or talk up how hard they work. good players and teams tend to work on their skills game. they take for granted hard work as mere professionalism. you did not see my select team field unless you played hard. yawn. actual selection was down to quality and not mere effort. the dynamo would catch up to the league faster if they could shoot than if they work hard every night. every team plays pretty hard every game. so what. it's a marginal strategy. either replacing players or improving their skills is how you move up the table. i'd be curious how much time we spend on deadballs in practice for it to then not work in games either direction.
Obviously, coaching at the pro level is less basic. You aren't teaching a player how to shoot, dribble or control the ball at that level. As for High School coaching. I would listen and have taken advice from Celt who is very experienced in this regard.
this overemphasizes "competition." SAF wouldn't have someone on his bench he had no idea how to use. surely your bench has some tactical use? a fast guy against a slow opponent? a tall guy for headers? some technical guys when hard work meets resistance? surely you have some blowouts either way where players can see the field and advertize? to me a bench should be people there for specific tactical purposes. my story where my HS coach never seemed to get that a particular back highly esteemed in the area couldn't mark as well as other choices, and could not stop a particular forward from a good HS who won regional over us, and should have given way to a defensive specialist to get past that round. my personal experience most HS coaches tend to pigeonhole, and have blindspots for reputations and for seniority. do not evaluate everyone correctly. i would want to get my players on the field in scrimmages and non district to make sure i saw things right. there is a huge ego problem in HS ball of mediocre coaches assuming they saw things right when my sense is they are conservative, follow reputations, and make plentiful mistakes. among them being that sometimes a player with speed or unusual skill is more productive and useful, even if sloppy or not perfectly fit, than an average speed hustle player, who doesn't tend to score anything or add much. so i want for you to go through the motions of giving them 20' once in a while when it's harmless. and then my broader point is that not investing in trying to make that player more technical, better, smarter, is a waste of your time. if they are going to make your team, invest in them as players. try to get the slow technical players fitter. try to get the athletes sharper. see if you can make some players out of them. i'd take it personally if i couldn't make someone less of a donkey in 4 years. jesus.
example: best scorer on my senior year varsity team was a JV-promotion soph who the coach kvetched constantly and unnecessarily about bringing up, and didn't play until a mediocre senior hurt his knee. "seniority." best keeper on my varsity team never saw goal because he was an emergency backup in club and wasn't known to the coach as a keeper -- and thus instead used as a back or mid sub. the coach instead used a crappy keeper who started for his select team and was thus known to him as such. "pigeonholing." "reputation." we had a glorious speedy winger who was a grass smoking flake. he would always sit behind the work ethic players who weren't known as party animals. that did not strike me as a soccer decision. etc. etc. to me the work ethic thing was often play very hard in practice in the cubbyhole i have assigned you based on reputation or the one club game i watched. they were ill informed who had played what other positions in club. it got political and seniority driven on who compared how to whom. i would prefer such things settled on the field and i think HS coaches should look more at skill sets and do some homework on where all their players can be alternatively used. but then the dynamo can't seem to see their best wing forward might be their LB or that pasher might be better at back if he can't finish to save his life but will track back.
short short version, treating the coach as absolute authority or rah rahing work ethic in practice, when your team is sitting 11th, is asinine. is that better? people were discussing it in their HS terms. my HS experience hahaha the highly lauded coach was fairly clueless and just gifted whole chunks of 2 of the better select teams in the state at that time. and work ethic would often have picked the wrong people. average try hards. the people who scored goals were artists and speedsters, not hustlers.
You shouldn't have to teach a professional player how to do the basic fundamental aspects of the game. They don't do this in literally any professional sport in the world. You can sharpen, or add to, but to teach basic fundamentals of the game to a 30-year-old like Fafa or Ceren is a ludicrous concept. Putting players in the right position, coming up with proper team concepts etc. is what professional coaches do. Developing team cohesion and things like that. But a lot of our guys are 27+ and at that point, they kind of are what they are. Part of why many of our guys need to go is that they are maxed out. Vera, Ceren, Memo, are already at their ceiling. Lundy, Zeca, Parker, and Fafa are the highest they will be. DQ is on the downslide. You can throw Clark in on that too.
He hasn't been good in July, that's for sure. At least he doesn't take up an international slot I guess lol.
in a league era where TAM and GAM seem to be the big deal on trades, like a "baby transfer" situation, how do we sit on those tools? like i was reading where the gressel trade isn't players or picks but instead $600k GAM with like another $300k in some sort of GAM contingency. the article references a lot of other MLS monopoly money trades, so do we have anything to play with.
i have noticed several times he is just flat footed and doesn't even bother to do the faux dive sideways. i think i have seen this most of the season though. he strikes me as an older keeper who tries to position well but for injuries or age isn't eager to go gymnastics. our GAA is down because he is more positionally sound but it's a marginal improvement because he's an old sneaky dog and not a young gymnast. if the season continues this way the ultimate numbers will only be slightly different. i keep raising the age issue on the players we sign and get swatted down every time i first mention it because it p*sses on people's happy time when people first arrive. i guess people have to figure it out for themselves at which point they can lay claim to the discovery. eg the "inexplicable" lineup decisions where quintero sits. darwin is 34 becoming 35 this september. he needs to be rotated and rested. the real issue is we have no clue on a replacement and refuse to try the younger players with an attacking toolkit eg castilla, palomino. they briefly tried pasher as a 10 which kind of worked but then dropped it. the problem there, to me, being that as with most of the rest of this offense, it is highly individualized/personalized. there is no system. there are players. the players have different ideas how to play. the team plays different depending who gets the ball or who starts or sits. there is no seeming overarching concept players are there to execute. if darwin doesn't play there is no one else who does darwin and i have to listen to idiots talk up ceren or something.
what DO you want them to spend time on? organization? scrimmaging? they play hard. they routinely are in the right spot. they then shank the shot. dozens of them. if a fraction of those go in this is a different season. we are only 5 points back. i am not saying run this bunch though quick feet drills like JV players. i was specifically suggesting a shooting coach and working on the team weakness. i would understand your position on this if we in fact ran off a bunch of shankerifics and replaced them, which would be my primary wish. now, personally, i wouldn't mind if they just "went" but recent history suggests we are glacial to do so. if this team intends to carry so many players to contract termination, then your argument makes less sense. the premise behind the standard, "pro teams aren't going to work on basics" argument is that you will get the dom oduro heave ho treatment promptly for such mistakes. if they instead carry you for years, like a HS team, sorry, no, you're wrong. invest. spend the time trying to fix that player. an incremental improvement in pasher or fafa or memo or coco shooting would do this some good. i am not saying every minute of every practice all year. practice is always an allocation of time and tasks. but if my select team went shank we practiced shooting for a few practices, instead of something else. if you have a team that is often in the right spot but misses, i would take the time. that and deadballs, both ways. all due respect but part of the problem with this team is we make the same f*cking mistakes all season which makes me wonder how much they are coached and what it is they do spend their time on. it's not shooting. it's not fixing the defense. what is it? i simply don't buy players are completely maxed out on something like shooting. foot skills i might buy. some of that is physical makeup, quickness, stuff you can't teach. but to me shooting is something that can be taught. there is no such thing as being built wrong to be a good shooter. it's technique. you do the technique and the shot becomes more accurate, faster, harder to stop. it's akin to a basketball shot. a player who is 5' tall may never be able to dunk, but he can be taught to do a proper shot. anyone without a physical infirmity can be drilled in the mechanics. if they get the mechanics, they will start swishing, at least with no one in their face. you are wrong wrong wrong. side point my experience was working on instep drive shooting increased my driven distance passing accuracy, on stuff like switches or balls forward, which is a very similar skill just not aimed for the net. i went from someone with an accurate long lofted chip to someone who could drive that same pass or cross in and take some free kicks. there are side benefits to your overall game from a shooting focus.
i would generally agree that a player aged about 20-22 or so simply is what they are going to be. they aren't going to get taller, more athletic, quicker, smarter. however i think clint dempsey can become an excellent shooter and brad davis a more fit player, if they choose. i think technical skills and conditioning fall within what a player or team can control and improve, but they have to be prioritized. i just think most teams don't invest the time. but then a lot of teams are either good or willing to discard disappointments. team indulging in the sort of optimism brian offers the day before HH plays, and holding onto players for ages, should maybe invest effort in their weaknesses as opposed to just mope. i get clark isn't getting younger. i get parker isn't getting faster. i don't get that memo who is almost there on his shooting couldn't be coaxed across the line with more technical work. pasher can obviously hit that far post shot once in a while. that's an execution issue. that falls under practice can help. one issue i have with this team long term is i don't see a ton of individual growth over time. if anything we seem to have a fair amount of derics and memos who lose what they had. and, bluntly, the team right now looks like an improvised mess so i don't quite get where the positive expense of practice time is going. most of the improvement is simply personnel. slightly better keeper, RB, HH, striker. i wish practice time was sacred to this being a well oiled machine. what i see is we improve when the players change and the GM is inconsistent to get players that change it. i think you reflect the team's mentality fairly well, i expect for them to be fairly predictable in their efforts. i think unless pat trips over a miracle wing we are in serious trouble. and i don't see us having the brains that if we aren't making a bunch of player swaps and promotions and signings, that we need to solve the problem areas, and like teams for about half a decade we will drive off the cliff in our own stubbornness and mope-optimism. Mope-optimism in that your ilk seems to simultaneously ward off the critics by claiming a miracle while deriding the players on hand as having issues. I'm merely making the more rational, less manic depressive suggestion that if we have our hands on memo for years maybe we could coach him into some stuff. I wish we existed in Kinnear Land where if Oduro misses a goal game 1 that could be the end of tenure, Koke goes back home in 1-2 months, Akinbiyi, etc. I think that is the world most teams exist in. I think that's what I was brought up in and expected. But I think based on our roster decisions to maintain significant continuity we should be investing more in the players. If we aren't going to trade forwards who miss shots then heck yeah we should be fixing their shooting. If Fafa isn't getting sold or traded then you better be working on why you benched him.
I agree you can sharpen the blade, but you aren't making a Chef's knife out of a dinner fork at this point. Like I said, Fafa's 31, Pasher (28), Baird (26) Memo (26), and Vera (about to turn 27) aren't turning into sharpshooters or finishers at this point.
see this is where i start to say we simply went "all-in" on a rebuild that simply proved not good enough. all DP and buy one down. all slots and then some by trade. all GAM/TAM. 2/3 the U22. all the cap, all the budget. people are now still talking next year, etc. that tool situation plus the age of some of the players brought in says this was all-in and supposed to work in 2022. DP barring a shift is full next year. we get 1 U22 back next year. we will be even worse on slots as we had to trade to compose this many slots. i don't believe this was intended for further radical 2023 change. it's not structured for it. as pat is saying, people have to leave for new ones to come in, and no longer are we talking bajamich or hoffmann. people think i am beefing for the heck of it but i think this was supposed to compete now and isn't at which point you should in fact be criticizing the mis-steps, or the ones that can play but not in a way that improves results and table spots. for example i think they thought they fixed wing in the winter and with thiago hence based on the initial results "we're done." since they are tight on cap and tools they have to undo some of this to do anything more. hence me being upset with the other fans because i think this was their failed effort at a 2017. anything further on DPs is basically tearing back down what was built to try and win now. anything really at all will likely involve sending away people they optioned or extended recently. i do want them accountable and adjusting to reality but i think the fans are missing that when a team maxes out that's endstage. they f*cked up. they might have thought, we will re-evaluate quintero EOY, we will nibble around the edges on option decisions. but i think they saw that as tweaking. people are now telling me that's how we offload. they have with few exceptions (2017) never been a clear-out team. they thought incremental and a new coach would work. they briefly bought their own headlines that it did. they may even keep the scalpel out for next year because they never quite learn.
If we make good decisions this offseason, we'll have plenty of space and money to upgrade the team. If we can add a couple of impact players to what we have now, we can be a contender. We have almost $4mil coming off the books this winter. You can change your squad with that, but if we do like we did last summer and resign a bunch of these guys, we aren't going anywhere.
I’m shocked that people still read his posts. Y’all are dumb for falling for it. Example: every once in a while he will make a legit point (by mistake). Someone will agree with him, so 10 posts down he will contradict himself and make the opposite point so someone will give him (negative) attention. He’s not interested in discussion, he’s only interested in disruption. PS - I laugh when he posts about his HS and college career. He thinks he’s Roberto Carlos, I think “man, this guy must’ve been a pain in the ass to coach. poor high school coach making $40,000 a year AND poor NAIA Division 4 coach trying to get out of Iowa and land a better gig elsewhere having to put up with his bullsht”.
This cannot be emphasized enough. Just think what an improved Bigsoccer experience you can have if you put him on Mute.
I just cannot see how this can be considered an “All-in” season. At any point. All in for what, even with HH, 5th?
If he actually played in college it was most likely at a club level (and that's a BIG if) where it was player coaches or volunteers. He's a world class player in his mind.....reality is probably far different.