The Official Cade Cowell thread

Frankly, I’m a little worried that Cade is falling into TT territory. Maybe Cade is settling for the celebrity and a middling career.

 

Yep, washed up at 17.

 

Yup he's the next Freddy Adu

 

Cade needs to go to Europe to maybe a bottom level 1st , 2nd or even an aspiring 3rd division club so he can improve.

I doubt he will still be with the Quakes in 3-5 years and it’s almost inevitable that he will be going sooner or later so it may as well be now.

He won't get better hanging around playing mop up minutes with the Quakes.

 

I don’t think “celebrity” has prevented TT from having a better career. He trains hard and takes his career seriously - he’s won the beep test the last few years. I think the thing that would have made the most difference with him to this point is pace. He’s just not very fast. That’s one problem Cade doesn’t have. Now TT at Cade’s age was really good with his feet. But that’s something Cade can improve on. OTOH you can’t really become fast if you’re not.

I remember TT or one of his brothers talking about how their dad had really good wheels and they were all hoping they’d inherit it. Narrator: None of them did.

 

I'm not going to argue that Thompson has already reached his peak running abilities because he's been a professional for years now and given the amount of effort he's presumably put in, he's probably not going to get faster.

However, if Thompson were 17 again, I would argue that there was a very good chance he could get significantly faster. Learning proper running techniques, building muscle that facilitates explosive running speed, all those things can definitely happen and take you from a decent runner into a fast one.

Thing is, you have to make choices about what you're going to focus on as an athlete and soccer is an incredibly complex game from a mechanical standpoint. We know where Thompson spent most of his energy. Meanwhile, given what we know about Cade's desire to be in the weight room all the time, his speed is not a surprise.

 

I think we've had this conversation before. I don't think a player can go from average to good pace. Maybe with specific training, a very incremental improvement. But for the most part you get what you get, otherwise we'd be seeing players getting significantly faster all the time because it is very important and can make or break careers. Can you give an example of a soccer player who had say average pace, and worked on it, and became fast?

 

I'll look to see if I can find any. Kind of hard to do since we don't really get a whole lot of hard data on running speeds from players. That's a convenient excuse, I realize, so I will genuinely look to see if I can find some clear examples. However, I suspect that the reason you don't seem to see it very often is because of what I already stated. Soccer is a very complex game. Being able to run really fast is significantly less important than things like knowing when to run, knowing where to run, knowing what to do if the ball is played to you. So you likely aren't going to spend all that much time training specifically on how to run faster. The payoff is, I think, much smaller than you're suggesting.

But it's a very weird idea that you can't become a faster runner because if that were true, there would be no need for track coaches. In my own personal experience, weight training led to huge speed improvements and in a very short amount of time. We're talking dropping tens of seconds off of times in long sprints and middle distance runs over the course of a couple months with only part time weight training.

Professional soccer players are hopefully training significantly more than I was, and so they also hopefully would be naturally getting closer to their stop ability as runners. That's why I say I wouldn't expect Thompson to become a much faster runner at his age. His body is likely already in decline in terms of pure ability, he's had knee injuries now which could prevent significant improvement. And he's likely not going to suddenly change his training habits with the explicit goal of becoming a faster runner.

Cowell, on the other hand, clearly has spent time learning how to run. It helps that he's a giant for a 17 year old (and I suspect he won't physically mature all that much beyond where he's at now unless he goes into body building or something). He was probably always swift, but again, his talk about weight room training specifically makes me suspect that a lot of his speed is a result of that training. Most people don't naturally run the way he does. It looks very deliberately learned to me.

If I find some good evidence of my suspicions I'll bring them up.

 

Come on now, you're talking about elite runners training to get an extra 2% improvement, not soccer players going from average to good speed, and all of the range of motion that entails (not one specific track event)!

We're talking about professional athletes here, who already do lots of weight and other types of training, not a high school student getting into shape.

 

Cade ran track in school, I think I read the 220 was one of his disciplines. In your teen years you can obviously become faster if you work at it.

 

Yeah but it’s incremental I think. I think it’s 90% genetics. Cade didn’t run 220 starting out as an average speed guy in his grade who was mid-pack in his PE class, and then with training he became a guy competing for wins in the 220 at track meets. He was probably naturally very fast and trained and got faster. You couldn’t put TT on the track team and get the same result for the 220 no matter how hard he trained.

That said if I were TT, even at his age, I’d be looking at trying to do something to wring a little more pace out of my body, even if just 5%. It’s kind of a limiter for him. And for all we know he could be working on it in some way already or he could have tried various things in the past.

 

I find your use of percentages to be really misleading when all you are doing is speculating.

 

Oh come on, bs, those percentages are just ballpark placeholders to represent scale. What I’m saying is that your speed is mostly genetic, but sure it can be tweaked and improved by a little especially for very specific events like “the 220”. And if TT did some kind of extra speed training on top of whatever training he already does, maybe he’d get a slight improvement (which may make it worthwhile in his case), but he’s not going to turn into Alphonso Davies.

Happy?

 

Wondo ran track in High School too.



So when are the comparisons going to start?

 

Just keeping you honest!

 

Middle distance. He can run all day - just not very fast in terms of sprinting speed.

 

This is a false equivalency. Nobody is arguing that Thompson could be as fast as Cowell, even if training regimens were equal. The goal was for Thompson to become a fast runner rather than an average one. Now, those are very poorly defined terms based on absolutely no data so I'm not even sure that Thompson qualifies as an average runner by MLS standards. He probably does, but unless we have some published data on this, there's really no way to know without doing some very detailed video studies. We're all just a bunch of blowhards on a forum so I don't expect anyone to go through the trouble.

If we accept that Thompson is an average MLS runner, I still contend that he could become a fast MLS runner, even with marginal improvements. The difference between average and fast at a professional level is slight. I found some interesting training videos specifically about increasing your speed for soccer and I can't vouch for these methods are backed by scientific analysis, they do at least make logical sense. I would guess that MLS does some of this kind of work, but I'd also venture to guess that most of it is front loaded in the beginning of the season rather than something they continue with thoroughly throughout.


And yet again, I will reiterate that I don't think Thompson will become significantly faster than he currently is for reasons previously stated, only that he could given it was something that was given priority in his training. Personally, I don't think Thompson's speed is that much of a limiting factor given his current role in the team (utility player). He is not really a difference maker at this stage and it's looking less and less likely that he will be.

Cowell, on the other hand, really could be a difference maker so long as the team doesn't waste his abilities, which they seem pretty darned determined to do. I'm not going to worry too much at this stage given that he's still a new professional and mentally, that's an awful lot to deal with at a pretty volatile age emotionally. But I'm still going to complain every time they put him out on the wing instead of as a center forward.

 

later...

OK, not such a "false equivalency" after all.

Haha, all depends on what your scale is. The difference between rec player and a reasonably fast college player's 40 time is probably less than a half second. We could say - it's only a half of a second - it's just a little bit! Or we could say it's a lot, it's 500,000 microseconds! It's just the nature of the beast - the difference in speed between professional athletes may be small but a little bit goes a long way, and it's not easy to make up those differences. If it was, everyone would be doing it.

In this video the guy didn't close the loop. He made the case that speed is important, and then, OK here some exercises to work on speed(!), but he showed no data to indicate the level to which one could improve their speed using their techniques! Very convenient.

Well, the point is that if he could improve his speed, even a little bit, he could possibly become more of a regular starter again, or get more starts anyway. Just saying that it doesn't matter because he's a utility player is a kind of defeatist outlook, or an "affirming the consequent" logical fallacy.

 

Yes, and I addressed this when I posted the video. It was an example that increasing speed is a point of focus for soccer players. If players didn't think they could improve their speed, these kinds of training exercises wouldn't exist.

That's exactly what I'm saying! What are we even arguing about? At the professional level it isn't easy to make those gains and there are very good reasons why players may not dedicate as much time as they could to it. I have said as much repeatedly.

 

All I will say is: "I sure wish that I had access to information like that in those videos 30 or 40 years ago!"

 

Of course, there's so much money involved in becoming the best, there's going to be training of all different types. My point is, how can anyone evaluate the effectiveness of these methods w/o data? Just saying it's good or it will help or it's for "this" or "that" does not cut it.

I think we just disagree on the level of gains that can be made. I think they are very incremental. You are saying that a guy with average speed, like TT, can become a "fast MLS runner". That's where we disagree.

 

Put Cade in the middle, don't waste him on the wings. We see it, why doesn't Almeyda?

 

I have a theory about this. I think the turning point in his season came in the first Seattle game. They came out with the intention of being very physical with him, which probably isn't too much fun with Nouhou. Cowell got hurt, came back as a winger and hasn't been quite the same. My hypothesis is that MA decided it too much to ask of a 17 year old to get beat on by physical CDs for the whole season. Let him be on a wing up against a fullback instead. Just a guess.

 

I don't think his skill set matches a #9 and the withdrawn forward is kinda taken by Chofis. He doesn't do the back to the goal target thing and don't think he's much of a header of the ball.

He's played some good games on the wing. He just needs more time there, and some starts so that he can settle in. Actually when we play a 4-3-3 type of setup he's perfect for "outside forward". Problem is that there's a lot of competition for those spots. If you put Benji or Jebo in the middle, then the competition for the other 2 spots is: Chofis, Espinoza, Salinas, and I guess, Fierro. And Haji too when he gets fit again.