I have the perspective of being intimately involved in the creation and launch of WPS from 2007 through 2009 as founding President of WPS’ Chicago Red Stars.  I also have some strong opinions about the sport’s future direction.  Frankly, my own failure, along with that of my WPS colleagues, to rein in expenses is the reason WPS is on the verge of collapse.  While I was preaching fiscal responsibility from the beginning, it wasn’t enough.   I took a sizable pay cut to join the Chicago Red Stars, but I was still paid too much (as was just about everyone else associated with the League) relative to where the revenues ended up.

Current WPS players, supporters and administrators are now begging US Soccer and anyone else who will listen for another chance, an extension, another year to get on its feet.  Specifically WPS is asking US Soccer to extend its waiver of an eight team minimum standard for classification as a first division professional league even though the League has shrunk from six teams to five since the end of its third and perhaps final season.  Most, if not all people commenting or considering this issue believe that there are no alternative ways to save professional women’s soccer in the U.S. other than having US Soccer grant WPS its waiver.

I disagree.

It may sound cruel, but I believe the best thing for the future of women’s professional soccer (lower case) in the U.S. is pulling the plug on Women’s Professional Soccer (upper case) as we know it and replacing it with an improved streamlined model that would entice more investors throughout the U.S. and Canada.

Here is why WPS is failing:

• Spent too much money on players
• Spent too much money on coaches
• Spent too much money on front office personnel
• Spent too much money on advertising
• Spent too much money on League operations and promotion

OK, so I could have saved some space there and simply written “Spent too much money”.  WPS didn’t spend too much money as in “WUSA has American cable TV’s checkbook” too much money, but WPS expected that it could maintain revenue levels from WUSA while reducing overhead.  It couldn’t.  The spending did many good things – necessary things.  It lured Marta and a host of other top international players, it kept the US Women’s National Team players in the League and it attracted a few major sponsors and a national broadcast deal.  But in the end, it wasn’t enough.

It’s ironic that WPS’ cause of death will be the same as its predecessor WUSA.  WPS thought it learned lessons from WUSA and spent much less than WUSA.  WPS indeed did spend less than WUSA, but was dealt fatal blows on two accounts: 1) revenues fell in proportion to expenses and 2) ownership wealth had been replaced by passion.  Passion can’t pay the bills.

Bay Area CyberRays' Sissi, left, of Brazil, and Thori Staples Bryan, right, carry the Founders Cup around the field after they defeated the Atlanta Beat at the inaugural WUSA Championship at Foxboro Stadium in Foxboro, Mass. Saturday, Aug. 25, 2001. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

The League successfully sold 11 franchises, but six folded, left or were kicked out of the League.  I made the prediction before WPS kicked its first ball that it would add teams faster than MLS, but it would also lose teams faster than MLS.  Sadly that prediction came true and the losses exceeded the gains six to four.  To put it into football terms, after three seasons WPS was -2 in takeaways.

WPS could continue another year as it is, but frankly it would be more of the same and would lead back to the same place. Five teams confined to the eastern time zone playing a shortened schedule to avoid Olympic conflicts is just plain ugly.

Puma has opted out of its seven figure annual agreement that paid most of the League’s central office bills.  Sponsors aren’t lining up to replace that funding and the league no longer has its partnership with Soccer United Marketing to fall back on.  If WPS does manage to hold on another year, it will be small, obscure and unlikely to improve its economic condition.  Attracting one, two or even three more teams the following year is possible.  There are legitimate inquiries to make commitments to join WPS, which could help US Soccer justify an extension of the minimum team waiver and buoy the League’s hopes for growth and survival.  But any additions could just as easily be offset by losses of existing teams.

I also don’t see that simply adding investors to the current business model which has failed every team every year will change the future of the League.  Believing that last summer’s FIFA Women’s World Cup or next year’s Olympic games will change the economic condition of the League is delusional.  Any bump is short term and not enough to overcome the inherent weakness of the model.  Again, 11 teams have tried it over three years and none of them have come close to breaking even with this business model and the League’s top sponsor is gone.  Adding teams to “Save WPS” without radically changing the model would simply put off the inevitable.

Suffice it to say the future’s not bright and you don’t gotta wear shades to view WPS’ future…and that’s not even considering the legal and public relations quagmire with magicJack and its owner Dan Borislow.

Chicago Red Stars' Women's Professional Soccer player Ella Masar, left, and 2010 draft pick Whitney Engen model their new uniforms for the Chicago Red Stars at Puma's 2010 WPS uniform unveiling hosted at the Trust building in Philadelphia Friday, Jan. 15, 2010. (AP Photo/Mark Stehle for Puma)

A new model is needed that will attract not just a handful of teams, but as many as 20 teams and a coast to coast footprint for the sport.  I was always told that if you’re not a part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.  So, for your viewing pleasure I present to you my bullet point solution for a new professional women’s soccer league in the United States and Canada that would solve the current mess and launch the sport into a positive era that would grow the sport for the long term (warning: the following contains recommendations that some may consider grotesque and may cause idealistic supporters of women’s soccer to become ill):

• Base player salary budget of $100,000 to $150,000 per team.  18 players per team.  $0k to $3k per month in season per player.
• 2-3 designated players per team.  $4k to $10k per month in season per player. DP salaries are off budget.
• Recommended annual operation budget of $200,000 to $400,000 not including player compensation, though teams that are willing and able could spend more on the business end.
• No NCAA eligible players
• April though August season (extension through September in Olympic and WWC years)
• Invite all current members of WPS, W-League, WPSL and MLS to place teams in the new League.
  • No entry fee for inaugural season.
  • $100,000 entry fee for expansion teams in ensuing seasons.
  • Must commit by last day of previous season to be eligible for following season.
  • $100,000 letter of credit for all teams to guarantee finishing season if teams can’t pay bills mid-season.
  • Operate league for the first year on a cooperative basis by US Soccer, USL and MLS.  USL and MLS operate the league going forward after the first season.
    • US Soccer would establish new, more realistic standards for a professional women’s league comparable to top women’s leagues in Europe.  This would allow both low budget and medium budget teams to compete on a relatively level playing field. In the first year, US Soccer would provide an overriding layer of governance similar to the 2010 D-2 League.
    • USL would use its infrastructure to manage the league’s administrative needs similar to its MISL relationship. USL’s compensation coming from low five figure annual league dues and a percentage of new franchise fees.
    • MLS/SUM would handle the league’s broadcast, marketing, sponsorship and communication responsibilities. MLS’ compensation coming from a percentage of sponsorship fees it generates.
    • If enough teams apply, play will be regional until the playoffs to limit travel expenses and increase rivalries.

Implications (bad and good):

• WPSL would be left out of the professional game and will likely lose teams to the new league. WPSL could more legitimately be pitched as a feeder league to the pro circuit.  New investors could start with a WPSL team and the learning curve to jump to the pro league wouldn’t be as great.  Could be a good selling point for new WPSL franchises.
• WPS as an entity and its office personnel would disappear and be replaced. The name could continue, but personally I’d prefer a fresh brand such as WMLS or anything else.
• Dilution of talent spread over more teams.  I believe as many as 20 teams could be assembled in this model between in the first three years and with that comes a spread of talent, which will reduce quality of play.  WPS, W-League, WPSL and MLS each likely have at least five teams that would very seriously look at joining this model.  If MLS is on board, they will add credibility and stability that would risk little to MLS and offer tremendous potential benefits in sponsorship and added integration into its local and national footprint.
• Some USWNT players may choose to play in Europe if they feel the competition won’t be as good in the new league or if enough teams don’t use their designated player slots as generously as needed to compete with European offers.  With up to 20 teams, there could be as many as 60 DP slots, which may or may not be used.  This is more than enough to accommodate full USWNT and many international stars – if the owners are willing and able to pay the $4k to $10k per month to keep this level of player in the new league. USWNT players receive their US compensation wherever they play.  Club salary usually increases their compensation by an additional 50% to 100% for most.  This proposed model shouldn’t change USWNT compensation much if at all.  More teams means it could actually increase competition for them and drive up their compensation.
• Second tier US players forced into retirement, because non DP compensation would top out around $3k per month.  Playing for a pro team provides a “business card” of sorts that gives players credibility and networking opportunities that help them gain decent paying coaching positions in youth and collegiate soccer.  This augments their “pro” compensation and provides a stepping stone to a post playing career.
• Top international players less likely to play in US.  DP slots would allow many to still play in the league.  And truth is, the depth of international talent has exploded over the last five years meaning those that choose not to stay can be more easily replaced than in the past.
• Many experienced coaches and administrators won’t be able to continue in women’s professional soccer at lower compensation.  There are only five teams, so there can’t be that many coaches and administrators that will lose their jobs.  Plus many more jobs, albeit low paying, will be created to seed a new generation of coaches and administrators.  Others will be able to finad a way to make it work by double dipping with other coaching or administrative positions.
• Lower salaries and operational budgets will create a semi-pro image that will further reduce sponsor, fan, broadcast and player interest.  It’s a step backward in image, but the reduced expenses are needed to bring fiscal sensibility to the business.  Increasing the number of teams will result in a growth of the base, get more people involved as investors, players, administrators and cumulatively as fans.  Critical mass of teams will ultimately generate more interest from sponsors, supporters and broadcasters in the future at which time teams can justify increases to their operational and player compensation budgets. If MLS teams indeed do join this League, they would be able to provide infrastructure that would be more professional than what WPS teams now offer and would serve to improve the image of the League for all stakeholders.

So there you go, my proposal to blow up what I helped create and start something new intended for long term growth and sustainability.  Some WPS teams are already embracing some of these recommendations, but not all.  Atlanta, for instance, is now a leader in controlling player costs.  Sky Blue FC has been a leader in business austerity from the beginning.  The current leaders of WPS should take control at this critical juncture and work with US Soccer, MLS, USL and the thousands of “Save WPS” petitioners to lead professional women’s soccer to a new and sustainable future.  It will require collaborative and unselfish work with great sacrifice for many, but I believe it can work.  What do you think?

At that point, like in a financial crisis, its future depends almost as much on the perception of its future as its actual pragmatic prospects: because if those who invest their money into its survival (owners, sponsors, fans) believe it’s a doomed enterprise, it pretty much is doomed as a consequence of that loss in confidence.

That moment might be coming right now for Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS) in the United States, at least judging from the spate of articles this week assessing its current state and future as we head towards the closing stages of its second season. There are two balanced, fair takes on the league out there by Jeff Kassouf and Beau Dure: neither, thankfully, are doomsday pieces, but look carefully at the positive and negative signals out there for us outside WPS’ inner circles to judge the league’s present state on.

There are the obvious alarming facts: attendance is well down (around 15% league-wide), mainstream media coverage is poor, St Louis bailing mid-season was a major blow, and the league is not going to hit its target for 12 teams by 2012 at this rate. The WPS head office recently eliminated several jobs, including New Media Manager, an area the league had excelled in with Amanda Vandervort in that role leading the way. Belts have been tightened considerably everywhere in WPS, and we know the league doesn’t have investors with the deep pockets MLS thankfully had to survive its heavy losses in the early years. AEG stuck with MLS; they walked away from WPS.

Yet there are positives for WPS, too: while walk-up sales are way down on 2009 levels (and it’s worth remembering the major sophomore slump MLS experienced in 1997 as well), season ticket sales are up from 15-20% leaguewide, suggesting WPS is doing a good job in earning fan loyalty. Crucially, there are apparently still interested investors, with Dallas and a return to LA possible for 2012. The Women’s World Cup is next year and that should provide plenty of buzz, presuming WPS is around. WPS games are broadcast on Fox Soccer Channel. Importantly, sponsorship revenue is reportedly up 150% in local markets. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that the quality of the play is damn good.

Given the collapse of the previous women’s professional league, WUSA, who gambled on being big time and lost, WPS sensibly put together a much more cautious business plan for its early days. But at the same time, it’s tough to see the league’s best team and the world’s best player only drawing 3,097 fans a game. WPS is on the ropes, and I really hope they can punch their way out of this: I guess the best we fans can do is to continue to support the league, and believe it’ll pull through, as this venture’s success is vitally important for the future of women’s soccer worldwide.

Regardless, there seemed to be plenty to talk about in the game, especially from a US perspective. I don’t usually pay much attention to half-time shows, but given I am no expert on the state of women’s youth soccer, I was curious to hear what the studio experts would have to say about the game.

Immediately after the commercial break, they began talking about the lack of talented players coming through in the US system– I had missed the intro, but my ears perked up, curious to hear about what was happening in US youth development. Had there been a lull since 1999? Was the rest of the world simply catching up? What was WPS’ role in all this?

Except it soon became apparent they were talking about the US men’s national team.

Jennifer Doyle has said all this already too, in the context of the now infamous Nike commercial celebrating the US success in South Africa that features no female fans (about which she makes a related point worth reading).

At the half, incredibly, Ghana led 1-0.  The US looked disorganized against a scrappy team playing a ragged defense which nevertheless seemed to neutralize the US’s attacks. Were viewers allowed to enjoy a discussion exploring how the heavily favored US gave up a goal, and failed to equalize, in spite of what seemed like a dozen shots? No – instead we got a lame discussion of the state of the men’s game in the US.  For real. It was infuriating. I would have settled for a discussion of the senior squad’s draw against Sweden the previous day.  But a tired, worn out and totally half-ass debate about what the US men’s game needs?  Really?

I spent the day imagining what it would be like if we heard about the WNBA during NBA matches, how the women’s league was doing during EPL broadcasts, and if we were offered a history lesson on the suppression of women’s baseball during the All-Star game. It would be amazing.

Representations of female athleticism, of the accomplishments of women’s teams, are so few, so rare that girls must look to people like Landon Donovan for inspiration – he’s a LOT easier to see on TV than Sydney Leroux (who scored the second half equalizer today).  Girl players look up to him and his teammates, even though they aren’t nearly as competitive internationally as the women’s squad.  They should admire Donovan, Howard, Gooch, Dempsey et all.  They are great players. And they should admire Leroux, Rodriguez, Wambaugh, Solo, Kai and their teammates too.

Girls who support the sport should never be squeezed out of the frame – unless the intention is to give them a jump on mastering the art of self-erasure.

Even though Jennifer has already said it more smartly than I can, I wanted to mention this too as a fan of soccer. Perhaps executives at ESPN presume a male fan like myself would turn the channel if the half-time discussion wasn’t about men’s soccer. But then: why the hell would I be watching in the first place?  At the very least, when I watch a women’s soccer game (or, more to the point, any soccer game), I expect the discussion at half-time to focus on the actual game being broadcast.  Please.

A few months ago, Peter Wilt posted an interview here with Jeff Cooper in which he described him as arguably “the most powerful man in soccer in the Midwest and one of the most influential in the country.”

Cooper is the lead man behind a unique endeavour in American soccer: a professional men’s club (AC St. Louis, part of the NASL in the USSF Division II which began play this year), a top flight women’s professional club (St. Louis Athletica, in Women’s Professional Soccer which began play last year) and an ambitious youth club, St. Louis Scott Gallagher, that amalgamated three of the area’s leading youth set-ups.

It seemed as if Cooper was putting together the perfect regional pyramid of soccer, from youth to the professional game in both genders.

But Cooper could not find the investment he needed to win an MLS franchise as well.

And now it appears that there is not enough investment to keep all this going: as reported today, it looks as if Athletica will be taken over by the league due to the team’s financial dire straits. “WPS and its Board continue to work closely with the appropriate parties on the matter related to St. Louis Athletica, including the possibility that the league will take over the team which would enable the Athletica to play the 2010 season in full.”

The men’s team seems to be in equal difficulties, a particularly awkward situation for Cooper as the Interim NASL Commissioner.

According to reports, Cooper’s investors, the brothers Heemal and Sanjeev Vaid from England, have pulled out, leaving the entire organisation in severe financial peril. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat reported yesterday that costs involved with St. Louis’ stadium have been one of the main issues facing the club’s finances:

A reliable source in St. Louis said that the money woes for AC and the Athletica stem, at least in part, from costs associated with operating the Anheuser-Busch Soccer Park, which Anheuser-Busch Inbev donated to Cooper’s group last summer. “The cost of the park is too much to allow funding for the teams,” the source said.

Three months ago, Cooper told Wilt on these pages that “Our model could be adopted to any market. It is scalable for larger or smaller markets. In time, every pro team in the US will become a real “club” with a youth program, academy, women’s team etc. It is the evolution of the game in this country.”

Cooper’s dream was grand and worthy.

But are there lessons to be learned here, if indeed AC St. Louis and/or St. Louis Athletica are taken over by their respective leagues? Would resources better have been devoted solely to the top flight women’s team, rather than trying to run a professional men’s team as well?  Is the evolution of the game not at the stage that such an ambitious set-up can be stable without an investor willing to lose millions a year for several years? Is it sensible for men’s and women’s professional teams to be part of the same club, and thus dependent on the financial viability of each other?

Opening Day is special.  It is a day of renewal.  There is a sense of optimism that pervades every team. A sense that anything is possible and everyone is expected to be part of the festivities. It’s an annual holiday for all teams. Not every team gets to host the All Star Game, not every team gets to play in the finals, but every team does get an Opening Day.

I used to be obsessed with opening days in baseball. One year, I think it was 1981, I managed to attend five “openers”. The first was the New York Yankees spring training opener in Fort Lauderdale where I recall following Oscar Gamble’s Rolls Royce through the streets of south Florida afterwards. Then I hit the local hat trick of opening days - Cubs, Sox and Brewers. For the Sox opener, I organized a bus trip of fellow Marquette students. It provided good career training for someone who would be selling group outings for a pro sports team two years later.  And finally I managed to catch a minor league opener.  It may have been the Kenosha Twins – who sold pasties at their concession stands.

Last Saturday I hurried back from a Florida vacation to get to the Chicago Red Stars 2010 home opener with that same sense of excitement, possibility and optimism that accompanies each new season. While I have moved on from my day to day duties overseeing the Red Stars, I retain ties to the Red Stars as a team owner, one of four members of the team’s board, a member of the team’s charitable foundation board, a team consultant, a member of the WPS sponsorship committee, an alternate governor on the League’s Board of Governors and a season ticket holder.

After taking my wife home from the airport and unpacking, I stopped at the Milwaukee Wave office to pick up my game tickets and headed south for the 90 minute trek to Toyota Park.  On the drive down from Milwaukee, I received three messages on my BlackBerry – ok, I probably received a “few” more – but three that are pertinent to this column. One was from Alfredo Gomez that his daughter Miranda asked out of the game, because she was tired from a late night.  It sounded more like Fredo’s excuse to me, but he assured me that it was the Girl Scout overnight event at the Museum of Science and Industry that caused their cancellation!  Then indoor soccer legend Michael King texted me to say he was cancelling his trip from Milwaukee with his family, because something came up. This disappointed me, because I had gotten the ticket and food package for him and was looking forward to introducing him to Red Stars GM Marcia McDermott.

I was beginning to worry about the crowd,  and then I received the third message. It was Marcia’s pregame owners update where she tells Red Stars owners the starting lineup, expected subs, attendance projections and other information about the game. I was excited to see that Formiga would likely get some second half playing time and was encouraged by the projection of 4,000 to 5,000 fans.  I wasn’t surprised that highly touted rookie Casey Nogueira was listed as a sub, but later her father, Milwaukee Wave legend Victor Nogueira, told me that the non-starting status was the reason Michael King cancelled.  Michael knew Casey while he and her father starred for the Wave for many years.

Arriving at Toyota Park about 50 minutes before the game, I paid my $15 and pulled into the east lot near dozens of tailgate parties which were well under way beneath the sunny spring sky. I walked over to Local 134‘s party to find super fan Pott Rodriguez preparing beer bongs for thirsty fans. Though I certainly drank a lot of “what made Milwaukee famous” over the years, I had to admit that I had never ingested it this way.  Various fans got on their knees and chugged as Pott released the liquid.  I tried it and thought I did well not to spill any of the 12 ounce can of Miller Lite.  I was humbled later by my friend Colin Deval of  Match Pricks fame who told me that his first beer bong was an OE 40 oz.

I stopped at another tailgate party and talked to Chicago soccer gadfly Alfonso Mitchell about the incredible Patti Smith book “Just Kids” that I finished reading on the plane that day. It beautifully details the poet rocker’s relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe and the New York City art and music scene of the late 1960s and 70s. The Patti Smith Group was the first alternative music concert I ever attended.  It was in the Milwaukee Auditorium (later the first home of the Milwaukee Wave) on June 6, 1979 and opened my eyes to a new world of music that became the main focus of my life over the next few years.  The book is an engaging and fascinating love story that I highly recommend.

After selling Fonsos on the merits of “Just Kids” it was on to the will call window to pick up my credential and Michael King’s tickets. I figured the tickets were wasted, but at least I could use the $20 in Levy Concessions money.

Standing in the will call line I spoke with several old friends including former US Soccer Secretary General Hank Steinbrecher who was accompanied by his wife Ruth Anne and niece Ingrid.  Also had a chance to catch up with former Wave goalkeeper and Chicago Fire executive Yaro Dachniwsky.  What are the chances that two former Milwaukee Wave goalkeepers would be at a Chicago Red Stars game?!?  Yaro is now representing Chicago Red Stars exclusive healthcare partner Weiss Memorial Hospital in their partnership programs.  After picking up my credential I walked to the north gate past half a dozen sponsor booths and interactive areas including a popular Radio Disney sing along stage. These areas, which were inside the Toyota Park gates last season, played very well outside the stadium entertaining fans who arrived early and didn’t want to go inside right away.

After having one of my four season tickets scanned, I walked into the stadium and saw two of my favorite Red Stars fans – Laura Rissover and her young daughter Jane. At the previous Saturday’s Fire game I had given Jane my 50/50 raffle tickets which she told me didn’t win (I buy 50/50 tickets at almost all Fire and Red Stars games and in a dozen years, have yet to win). I told Jane that she was going to bring luck today, so we went in search of a 50/50 raffle seller. After 10 minutes of searching all we found were two more people — IWSL President Flo Dyson and longtime Chicago soccer supporter Sue Ruby — who were also in search of 50/50 raffle ticket sellers.  I finally found a seller, but had parted with Jane by then, so when the numbers were called in the second half, I was hardly surprised that I didn’t benefit from any of Jane’s good fortune.

Nic Buchel, Jim Kogutkiewicz and Colin Deval in the back row and Robyn Vinje and me in front at the Red Stars game last Saturday.

I had an easier time finding the new Suncast Ball Toss promo tent where I ran into a crew of friends from the Highbury Pub in Milwaukee.  For $10, I purchased six balls to try to throw into targets at halftime on the field.  I kept one and gave the other five away.  Two thrown by my fellow Highbury Pub crew went in and a young boy I gave a ball to in the front row went in as well.  I gave my last ball to the same young boy since he did well with his first attempt.  His second toss went in – and then out of the target.  The Red Stars selected winners from those that went in the target and two of my balls were chosen.  Later, I distributed the prizes of T-shirts, scarves and buttons to the good tossers.

Along with the Highbury crew, I hung out in section 134 with the Red Stars supporters group Local 134.  My friends from the Highbury include Jim Kogutkiewicz and Colin Deval, writers of the Match Pricks blog.  The Match Pricks are also very entertaining soccer commentators on ESPN 540′s “Soccer Saturday Presented by the Milwaukee Wave“.  We invested Michael King’s Levy Dollars – and a few George Washington dollars – in a round of Miller Lites and hot dogs which were user friendly priced at $1 apiece!

Soccer supporters Jason Kekeis and David Racis, aka Capt. Chaos, who shares his drumming skills with the Chicago Storm, Rockford Rampage and Chicago Fire, tried with limited success to get the Local 134 supporters to chant, clap and cheer on the Red Stars, who were equally unsuccessful on the field in the  first half.  Red Stars goalkeeper Jill Loyden saved a hard Tina DiMartino shot in the 4th minute, but the rebound fell to the feet of Saint Louis Athletica’s Lori Chalupny.  Chalupny, a USWNT stalwart took full advantage and finished the chance.

Peter Wilt and Capt. Chaos (David Racis) drumming up support with Chicago Red Stars supporters group Local 134.

The Match Pricks bought more dollar dogs and more beer and we continued to try to liven up the section, but the efforts were to little avail.  Red Stars forward Ella Masar made several dangerous runs including one where she recklessly dove for a cross narrowly missing both the ball and the right goal post.  The Red Stars couldn’t seem to create any full chances until late in the half when Cristiane drilled a blast from the top of the box off the post to Hope Solo’s right leaving the home side with a 1-0 halftime deficit.  During the first half, visitors stopped by our perch in section 134 including Red Stars GM Marcia McDermott who mentioned that Red Stars Superfan Katie Ibarra, who was sitting one section away would be conducting a special halftime interview of Red Stars Coach Emma Hayes.  The star high school goalkeeper handled her interview over the stadium sound system as flawlessly as she protects the Joliet Catholic Academy goal.

At halftime I saw two of my favorite Brazilian Red Stars supporters, Debbie Pacchioni and Camila Bodini.  Camila, who helped greatly with Cristiane’s acclimation to Chicago last season,  recently moved to Italy, so it was wonderful to see her during her two week return to Chicago.  I then went up to the Red Stars suite where I ran into USWNT Head Coach Pia Sundhage.  We discussed the first half and the previous week’s Red Stars loss at Sky Blue and agreed that the potential of the team was far greater than the early returns.

Also in the suite were two fellow Red Stars owners, Arnim Whisler and Jack Cummins, as well as an old friend, Jerome de Bontin, who calls the Chicago area home, but recently served a term as President of AS Monaco.  The man who brought Freddy Adu to the principality of Monaco and I spoke about our mutual friend, longtime Amherst soccer coach and athletic director Peter Gooding who has served the sport longer and more deeply than I could ever hope.

Whether it was Coach Emma Hayes halftime talk or her substitution of Casey Nogueira into the lineup at left mid pushing Kosa Asslani into Ella Masar’s forward spot, the Red Stars had a new energy at the start of the second half.

Milwaukee's Erin Benson saw her first professional outdoor soccer game last Saturday, got a free scarf and became a Chicago Red Stars fan.

I heard a fan shout my name from the stands and saw that it was Milwaukee Wave season ticket holder Mark Benson who was with his wife Kris and their daughter Erin.  I left the pretensions of the suite – and free beer – several minutes into the second half and visited the Bensons who were attending their first professional outdoor soccer game.  Erin was excitedly telling me about all the different positions she plays for her soccer team when Red Stars rookie Casey Nogueira settled a cross inside the penalty area, curled a gorgeous right footed shot around Solo’s outstretched left arm and inside the far post for her first professional goal to tie the game.  We both missed the goal and stared impatiently at the video board for a replay that never came.  As you can see from the video above, it was a great goal to score whether it was her first or not.  As I left, I told Erin I was giving her my Red Stars scarf, because she brought us luck.  Seeing her brilliant smile get even bigger was one of the highlights of the day.

I moved from the Bensons to the Hacks who were sitting in the last row of section 125.  Nicole saved a seat for me next to her mom, Vivian, who I hadn’t seen since her husband Al’s wake two months previously.  We both enjoyed talking about the game and the new look Red Stars.  She was taping and didn’t want to know the score of the the Fire vs. DC United match, which was being played simultaneously, so I teased her with vague versions of the Twitter updates I was receiving.

I left the Hacks late in the match to find the Highbury crew.  On the way Casey Nogueira missed a point blank shot over the goal that would have likely won the match and made her an instant Red Stars hero.  I also went past a concession stand that was out of everything…except hot dogs.  So I rejoined the crew with another round of dollar dogs just in time to see a furious Red Stars extra time scramble for a winning goal that never came.  Even with defender and team captain Kate Markgraf moving well into the box in front of Solo, the Stars didn’t align that night and the game ended in a 1-1 draw.

Red Stars Super Fan Katie Ibarra poses with Red Stars and England National Team midfielder Katie Chapman

We sat in the northeast stands finishing our final dollar dogs of the night and waited for the, 5,100+ fans to file out of the stadium.  We shouted at Ella Masar as she ran up the stairs for an autograph signing while ignoring our supportive cheers.  We then turned our attention to Red Stars players signing autographs along the sideline wall. I yelled out to 20 year old Swedish phenom Kosa Asllani who looked at me blankly as I took her picture.  I spoke briefly with new Red Stars equipment manager Scott Emmens who was helping coordinate the autographs.  I joked with him that he was no Billy Barmes.  He played along, but had no idea who I was.  I then noticed England international Katie Chapman signing autographs not far from where Katie Ibarra was standing, so I told the star high school goalkeeper to move near the world class midfielder, so I could take a picture of the two Katies.   I’m no Robert Mapplethorpe, but I know a good photo op when I see one (right).

From there, I snuck my Milwaukee brethren into the Toyota Park Stadium Club for some soccer VIP shoulder rubbing.  The entry into the Stadium Club is always delayed for first time visitors by the requisite stop at the Chicago Fire’s two trophy cases.  Note to New York Red Bulls, that’s two cases, not two trophies.

Post game in the club is always fun after a good match.   There are plenty of old friends to talk with including fans like Joe Pakovits and Tim Schulz, internet media members like John Schulz and Enrique Fernandez, and Toyota Park staffer and Red Stars fan David D’Andrea who appreciated the Red Stars scarf I gave his wife for their anniversary.  There is also a mix of soccer royalty (Pia Sundhage and Victor Nogueira), Red Stars staff (Marcia McDermott, Pat McNamara, Greg Zaskowski, Alyse Lahue, Carrie Sear and David Quinn), Red Stars players (Marian Dalmy who addressed the crowd and Karen Carney) and Red Stars coaches Emma Hayes, Denise Reddy and Nathan Kipp.  Arsenal supporter Colin Deval was in Gunner heaven seeing former Gunner Katie Chapman, talking to former Gunner Karen Carney and being recognized and hugged by former Gunner coach Emma Hayes.  My postgame highlight was holding Lucas, the two week old baby of Red Stars Director of Sales Greg Zaskowski.

The Highbury crew’s Nic Buchel, also an Arsenal supporter, received an added bonus by getting to meet his childhood hero Victor Nogueira - though he was surprised by the nonplussed attitude of the world class goalkeeper.  Victor and I discussed the Red Stars coach’s decision not to start his daughter in only her second professional game.  Even though he’s a soccer professional, he’s also a soccer dad.  He supported his daughter’s case by stating that Casey should have started, because she is on the national team.  I asked him how many national team players he thought were on the Red Stars.  After he replied “three or four”, Victor seemed a bit surprised and a little more understanding, when I told him that the Red Stars have 12 to 14 national team players on their roster.  I told him that WPS is the EPL of women’s soccer and in any case, his daughter will likely be starting soon enough.

Even though the Red Stars failed to take a full three points for the second time in as many matches this season, there was a feeling that the Red Stars got the better of the play in both matches.  As we walked out of the stadium, this knowledge fortified the enthusiasm we brought into Opening Day and kept the Opening Day optimism train chugging beyond the first home game.

Where do American soccer players come from?  The simple answer is California.  The more complicated answer offers an intriguing chance for the amateur cultural geographer in me to analyze the rosters of American professional teams—something I did a few weeks ago prior to the MLS season to consider the state of the men’s game, and something I’m doing this week on the women’s side as a nod to the start of the Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS) season.

The idea is that knowing where elite players come from offers a thought-provoking, if imperfect, picture of how the game works for different types of people and places.  In this case the general picture suggests some similarities in the geography for male and female American players, but also highlights the peculiar demographics of soccer in the US.

When I analyzed the MLS rosters I suggested four key factors in men’s player production: population, climate, soccer culture, and immigrants.  After looking at the WPS roster it strikes me that for women’s player production I have to swap ‘social class’ for ‘immigrants’ in that equation; American women’s soccer seems disproportionately represented by players from relatively wealthy suburban areas, while relatively underrepresented by players that are first or second generation immigrants.

Take Connecticut for example.  The state with the highest per capita income in the US also has the highest per capita women’s player production of any US state (by my calculation there are 6 WPS players from among Connecticut’s 3.5 million people).  On the MLS side, in contrast, all Connecticut has to offer is the Revolution’s Pat Phelan (and even he was born in Houston and went to prep school in Massachusetts).  Certainly socio-economic status is not the only thing going on in Connecticut; there might well be some kind of ‘Kristine Lilly’ effect, for example, where her impressive longevity and prominence has inspired her younger fellow Connecticuters.  But across my analysis there are suggestions that opportunities in women’s soccer are based on a combination of class and culture that probably limits the American game.

But I’ll explain my analysis more first and let you interpret the data for yourselves.  And then I’ll explain a bit more about what I think it all means.

As when I looked at MLS rosters a few weeks ago, the goal here was to identify where players spent their formative years.  But what does “formative” mean for a soccer player?  I’m going teen years (pre-college) on the logic that it is during that stage of life when people decide whether to fully commit to the game.  I realize, however, that an argument could be made for other stages.

I suspect, for example, that college is particularly important for women’s player production—more so than for men.  Whereas MLS rosters are loaded with teenagers who never bothered with college, or players who went for a year or two, the American contingent of WPS players almost all played four years of college soccer.  In fact, the only teenager in WPS is Swiss import Ramona Bachmann—who turns twenty in December.  In age, and in other ways, WPS American players are more homogeneous than the American players in MLS (there are, for example, only seven American players in WPS over age 30).

Nevertheless, because college programs are often more of a geographical mish-mash, the focus here is on states and metropolitan areas as hubs for youth development in American women’s soccer.  It was somewhat easier to find that data for WPS players than it was for MLS players both because the WPS web-site is much more informative and because there are fewer women’s players.  Using the WPS list of players as of 2010 opening day, and cross-checking with college player profiles and with Wikipedia, I ended up with a spreadsheet of where 137 American players in WPS spent their adolescence.  As I noted when looking at the men’s players, I’m sure I got a few minor details wrong—but with large enough numbers the statistical inferences can still be right.

By State

As with the men’s side, players from California seem to predominate in American women’s soccer.  I count 33 Californians in WPS (of which 24 are from ‘Cal South’ – either greater Los Angeles or greater San Diego), with Illinois second among US states at 10 and New Jersey third at 9.  Of course, California is also the most populous US state (with about 36.5 million people), so in some ways it is more interesting to consider how other big states do not seem to be producing proportionate numbers of players.  I was surprised to find, for example, that Texas only has 5 players in WPS despite being the second most populous US state (with about 23.5 million in population), while Florida only has 4 players in WPS despite being the fourth most populous (with about 18 million people).

The other states in the top 5 of population do a bit better despite much less soccer-friendly weather: New York State has produced 8 players from just over 19 million people, while Illinois has 10 players from 13 million.  Those are ratios are not bad on a relative basis, but they are lower than the other, smaller, states with the highest women’s player production per capita:

• Connecticut: 6 players, 3.5 million people
• Hawaii: 2 players, 1.3 million people
• Colorado: 6 players, 4.7 million people
• New Jersey: 10 players, 8.7 million people

On the other side of things, the largest states to produce no players include:

• Tennessee (pop. 6 million)
• Kentucky (pop. 4.2 million)
• Oklahoma (pop. 3.6 million)
• Iowa (pop. 3 million)
• Mississippi (pop. 3 million)

On a per capita basis, of the states that have produced at least one player, the least productive seem to be:

• Maryland (1 player from 5.6 million people)
• Minnesota (1 player from 5.2 million people)
• Michigan (2 players from 10 million people)
• Texas (5 players from 23.5 million people)
• Georgia (2 players from 9.4 million people)
• Florida (4 players from 18 million people)

By Metropolitan Area

In US Youth Soccer state associations matter, but for club soccer purposes much of the competition level is based upon metropolitan areas—players from New Jersey and Connecticut often depend more on playing in the greater New York area than in their home states, just as players from Northern Virginia and Maryland depend on greater Baltimore-Washington DC.  And from that perspective, being expansive in defining the reach of such metropolitan areas, the New York area seems to be about average with 18 WPS players from 22 million in population while the DC agglomeration has only 3 WPS players from 8.3 million (the greater Baltimore-Washington area did much better for men’s players with 12).

Nevertheless, on a per capita basis the East Coast metropolitan areas still don’t compete with other parts of the country:

• San Diego has produced 7 players with 3 million in population
• Denver (including Colorado Springs and Fort Collins) has produced 6 players with 3 million in population
• Birmingham, Alabama has 2 players with 1.2 million in population
• Indianapolis has 3 players with 2 million in population

It may be worth noting here that Denver is the only metropolitan area to be in the top five for both men’s and the women’s player production per capita.  Though I wouldn’t have thought of Colorado as America’s soccer hotbed, by my calculations as of 2010 Denver seems to win the title of per capita US soccer capital.

On the other side of things the most notable big metropolitan areas with few WPS players include Houston (with 1 player from almost 6 million in population), Atlanta (with 2 players from almost 6 million), and the Florida cities (Tampa and Orlando have produced one player each despite each being around 3 million in population, while Miami – Fort Lauderdale has produced two from 5.5 million).  At risk of pandering to stereotypes, it does seem as though living in the American South is not a good thing for women’s players.

In fact, while North Carolina is certainly not the “Deep South” it does offer an interesting example when contrasting male and female player production.  In my analysis of men’s player production North Carolina was impressive: both the greater Raleigh – Durham area and the Greensboro – Winston-Salem area were among the national leaders in player production per capita, and Charlotte had one or two.  But on the women’s side only Raleigh – Durham represents (with 2 WPS players from 1.8 million people); the one other WPS player from the state of North Carolina grew up in the Ashville area.  That also means that the Charlotte area, with zero players from 2.3 million people, seems to be the largest metropolitan area in the US without any WPS players.

The rest of the poorly represented metropolitan areas are not all in the South; places such as Minneapolis-St. Paul (with 1 player from 3.5 million) and Detroit (with 2 players from 5.3 million) also have low per capita ratios.  But for those places the same was true on the men’s side and it seems more easily attributable to Minnesota and Michigan weather.  For places such as Memphis Tennessee (which is home to 3 MLS players, but zero WPS players) or Dallas Texas (which is home to 11 MLS players, but only 3 in WPS) it seems more relevant to ask questions about local sport cultures: are girls and women being given the same opportunities to play?

Equal Opportunity?

Ultimately I suspect opportunity is the key variable in any analysis of patterns in American player development.  On both the men’s and women’s side of things, soccer in the US is still disproportionately (though certainly not exclusively) an expensive suburban sport.  While there are many players from the greater Chicago, New York, LA areas, for example, there are virtually no players from within the actual city limits.

This seems even more pronounced on the women’s side than on the men’s side; for the women’s game a suburban bias is compounded by factors including: a greater emphasis in the women’s game on college as a route to going pro (with college disproportionately accessible to children from middle and upper class families), a lesser emphasis on women’s soccer in immigrant families, and lingering stereotypes both about gender norms and about who plays women’s soccer.

Still, by highlighting the seeming social class issues in American women’s player production I don’t mean to undermine the talent and hard work of contemporary players: regardless of where WPS players grew up, and regardless of the opportunities they have had, at an individual level all of them have earned a place and their skill is a joy to be appreciated.  Becoming an elite player always requires a combination of opportunity, talent, and hard work.  But at a national level anyone who cares about American soccer, for which success depends upon a broad and diverse base, would do well to keep in mind something else that requires hard work: creating truly equal opportunities.

(Note: As with the men’s analysis, there ended up being too many specific locales and names to list each individually—but I now have most of them in my spreadsheet.  So if anyone is curious about other specific places, players, and proportions, feel free to leave a comment with any queries and I will try to respond)

Putting together a pro soccer league schedule in America is as difficult as solving a Rubik's Cube.

There are plenty of analogies to making a schedule for a professional soccer league in America…it’s like making sausage, it’s like solving a Rubik’s Cube, it’s like solving a complicated code or a cylindrical geometry push-button combination lock.  There are countless combinations and dozens of variables and restrictions.

American soccer schedules are significantly more difficult to complete than those in most leagues around the world for a few important reasons:

• Several teams are second or even third tenants at their stadia
• Travel distance is significantly greater than almost all other pro soccer leagues
• The number of teams (and sometimes divisions) changes from year to year
• There is often an unbalanced schedule

I’ve always loved the scheduling process and viewed it as a competition of my team battling the League and all the other teams to secure as many prime dates (and times) as possible.

There are many moving parts with two basic goals, which at times can be at odds.  You want the schedule to give you the best chance to maximize revenue and to win a championship.

Some of the business decisions are subjective:

• Are Sundays better than Fridays?
• Are Sunday evenings better than Sunday afternoons?
• Are Thursday nights better than Wednesday nights?
• Is 7:30 pm better kickoff time than 7:00 pm for weekday games?
• Is a weeknight in the summer better than a Saturday in April?
• Is a home game in September better than a home game in June?
• Do these questions have different answers for outdoor soccer vs. indoor soccer? For women’s vs. men’s soccer?

(BTW, i believe the answers to all the questions above is “Yes”)

Then there are the ways to improve your competitive edge:

• Minimize travel by scheduling multiple game trips
• Schedule home games against teams that are tired from another game and/or difficult travel
• Play weak teams more in an unbalanced schedule
• Play teams with a lot of national team players during international game windows (though this can hurt attendance)
• Schedule more home games in the final month

Other variables include:

• Television needs
• Rivalries
• World Cup conflicts
• Opportunities for double headers (WPS/MLS)
• Local youth tournaments that can be leveraged for ticket sales
• Desire to evenly balance and spread home dates over the schedule
• Desire to minimize home dates during cold weather months
• Team rankings of their preferred dates

And there are certain tricks that newcomers to the process (or those that are less competitive) will miss such as:

• Submitting minimum number of date avails to the League
• Doing the League’s work to try to find date flips that will improve your dates (mainly by resulting in an additional weekend date)

Like making sausage, making a schedule isn't pretty.

For my money, the master scheduler in professional soccer is Brad Pursel, MLS Vice-President of Team Services.  In this terrific Goal.com article Kyle McCarthy, shows how Pursel has helped with the MLS schedule process since 1997 and led it since 2002.  Pursel describes the challenges in assembling the MLS schedule this way.  “It’s one of those twisted puzzle things you enjoy putting together,” Pursel said. “You take a lot of lumps along the way, but it’s part of the process.”

MLS uses both computer outputs and manual adjustments to make an initial schedule that will make up the foundation of the schedule.

“We’re getting to the point where we have enough input from the teams and our TV partners that when we assemble those early drafts, they’re in pretty good shape,” Pursel told Goal.com. “When we go through the back and forth with the teams, it’s about fine tuning and making some of those harder final decisions.”

As an example of the process, the following  shows how this year’s Women’s Professional Soccer schedule was put together.  The outline shows the tight timeline WPS COO Mary Harvey and WPS Head of New Media Karyn Lush had while working with GMs to phenomenally put together the schedule in the face of tight deadlines, conflicts from college and professional venues alike as well as the sundry issues described above:

2010 WPS Schedule Process:

1. Tuesday, Jan. 26: Created master calendar of teams’ stadium availabilities

2. Thursday, Jan. 28: Working with GMs, listed priorities for scheduling algorithm including:

• 24 games total per team – 12 home and 12 away. Each team will play every other team three times and

three opponents a fourth time. The first consideration went to FC Gold Pride to alleviate their travel costs.

Then we considered geographic rivalries.

• There must be a minimum of one game on each Sunday for Fox Soccer Channel (FSC) to broadcast.

• McDermott Rule: No team should host more than two games / weekends in a row unless the team specifically requests this or agrees to this.

• As we’re playing 24 games in 22 weeks, each team must play a minimum of two mid-week games.

• Avoid MLS and NASL/USL conflicts as much as possible.

3. Friday, Jan. 29: Sent master calendar of teams’ stadium availabilities and guidelines to the scheduler.

4. Wednesday, Feb. 3 – Thursday, Feb. 4: Draft 1: Determined actual home dates for teams.  Due to high # of issues, sent back to scheduler before showing the draft to teams.

5. Wednesday, Feb. 10 – Thursday, Feb. 11: Draft 2: Sent to teams for feedback. Due to a handful of new stadium availability issues, sent back to scheduler.

6. Friday, Feb. 12 – Sunday, Feb. 14: Draft 3: Sent to teams for final approval and kick off times. Seven of eight teams approve of schedule.

7. Monday, 15: Draft Re-sent to teams as Feb. 3: Re “tentatively final” pending FSC feedback. Sent to PR / Web managers to prep schedule announcement. One team raised an issue. Went back to the scheduler to solve outstanding issue.

8. Tuesday, Feb. 16: Drafts 4-7: Reviewed at league office and quickly rejected due to either (a) not solving high priority issues or (b) creating new issues which would be labeled high priority.

9. Wednesday, Feb. 17: First pass of TV schedule sent to FSC. Talks ensue. Draft 8 is sent to teams for final approval and kick off times. All 8 teams approve schedule. Schedule sent to PR / Web Managers to prep schedule announcement.

10. Thursday, Feb. 18: FSC approves TV schedule, final schedules noting final TV games sent to teams.  Schedule announced at 12 pm PT.

Finally, I have a real-life scheduling challenge for you to weigh in on.  Here is the difficult decision my professional indoor soccer team, the Milwaukee Wave, may very well face in the coming weeks.  If the Wave finish the MISL season in first place, we will host the championship game the weekend of April 2-4.  Each of the dates has serious drawbacks for selling tickets:

• Friday, April 2nd is Good Friday and the Milwaukee Brewers have their first game of the year in town, an evening exhibition game vs. the Detroit Tigers at the domed Miller Park.
• Saturday, April 3rd has another Brewers/Tigers exhibition game at 1:00 pm, youth soccer during the day, the NCAA basketball Final Four semi-final games tip off on national television at 4:10 pm and 7:00 pm and Milwaukee Bucks are home vs. Phoenix Suns at night.
• Sunday, April 4th is Easter Sunday

Let me know in the comment section below what day and time you would choose to play.  After a couple days, I will give you my opinion on this difficult no-win decision.

Photo by Thomas Hawk from flickr

The periodic debate about whether athletes should be role models (recently, think John Terry, Tiger Woods, or marketing Women’s Professional Soccer) offers much fodder for provocative discussion.  What are the obligations of sports celebrity?  Is it reasonable to expect athletes to be good at things other than their sport?  Do children really model their behavior and decisions based on tabloid reports about sports heroes?

What the role model debate usually does not offer is systematic analysis or evidence about whether athletes actually have any influence on other people’s behavior—an absence I became aware of a few years ago when working with one of my University of Portland students on a thesis project.  At that time Stephanie Lopez (now married and playing in WPS and with the Women’s National Team as Stephanie Cox) had a vested stake in the debate.  She was on the verge of playing with the US Women’s National Team at the 2007 FIFA Women’s World Cup in China, was in the midst of a college soccer career that would earn her the Senior CLASS Award “presented each year to the outstanding senior NCAA Division I Student-Athlete of the Year in women’s soccer,” and was even identified in an article on ESPN.com as “soccer’s unassuming role model.”

Bright, earnest, and intellectually curious, Cox wanted to try and explore whether and how elite athletes matter as role models—and she had access to a pretty good sample through her participation with the US Women’s National Team and with the Portland Pilots.  So we looked at the somewhat limited existing scholarly literature on role models, surveyed her teammates with some standard personality inventories and open-ended questions about being a role model, and tried to systematically consider what being a role model is actually about.  Cox did an excellent job with the project, but only had a semester before moving on to start her professional career.

So I went back to the original survey data and put together an article that, after the usual slow slog of academic life, was recently published in the International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching (if anyone is interested in seeing the full article and doesn’t have access to a good library, feel free to send me an email).  Which is all to say that Cox should get the credit for gathering the data, and I should get the blame for the interpretations—including the bits offered here as an attempt to contribute a small something to the debate: what does it say about soccer and society that the role model thing keeps coming up?  And what does being a role model mean for the players themselves?

The role model thing in concept?

The role model debate, while common to a variety of sports, has been a particularly prominent part of American women’s soccer.  After the dramatic success of the 1999 Women’s World Cup in the USA, for example, the original WUSA professional league was premised partially on the idea of the players as role models: “With this league,” claimed US team captain Carla Overbeck, “there will be 200 role models who are very willing to make a positive impact on some child’s life.”  And then when the league failed, Julie Foudy said, “I miss [WUSA] because young girls and boys in local communities where we were playing got to see strong, confident women as good role models on a weekly basis.”

The wisdom of emphasizing role modeling as part of a business model for women’s sports is worth debating—and interesting versions are available elsewhere (see, for example, Wendy Parker’s piece here on Pitch Invasion and Fake Sigi’s response).  But since I don’t have any particular insight into the business side of the debate, my interest is more in some good social science questions embedded in emphasizing women’s players as role models.

Why, for example, does the emphasis on being role models tend to be so much more prominent in the women’s game than the men’s game?  Sociologists think it has to do with broader social inequalities, pointing out that the disproportionate emphasis on women and on racial minorities as role models implicitly highlights individual behavior and obscures social forces as influences on success.  The idea here is that framing Mia Hamm or Brianna Scurry as role models conveys a misleading message of bountiful opportunity—success is simply about individual hard work and talent, so institutional discrimination and structural inequality can be safely ignored.

And then there is the question of why we expect athletes to be good at stuff besides their sport anyway?  Part of it is probably what social psychologists call the “halo effect”—the tendency to mistakenly assume that greatness in one domain of life should generalize to others (for an example, see this analysis applying the halo effect to the Tiger Woods situation).  But the most interesting explanation I came across suggests that it also has to do with broader social changes and the increasing attention to celebrity culture both in sports and elsewhere.

It turns out that early interest in role models by researchers and theorists was focused on the concept as limited to very specific roles.  A teacher would be a role model for teaching, a business manager would be a role model for management, and a soccer player would be a role model for the specific requirements of the game.  But a funny thing has happened over time—the concept has broadened to suggest that a role model should be an exemplar for a comprehensive set of traits that make for a good life.  It is no longer good enough for Hope Solo to be a really good goalkeeper—she now has to be a humanitarian, a fashionista, a social analyst, a business woman, a moral exemplar, a master communicator, and many other things that have little to do with her ability to keep the ball out of the back of the net.

Scholar Chris Rojek argues that these strange expectations have to do with our modern, commodified cultures of sports and celebrity: “the leading Sports Stars, in common with the leading celebrities from celebrity culture, are adopted as role models by fans and their lives are followed as parables of normative behavior.”  Why?  Because as a society we have a need to believe that the people to whom we give insane amounts of both attention and money deserve it.  We want to believe that John Terry’s wealth, fame, and England captaincy are about more than his being a really good central defender.  But, as Terry has made obvious, it is not.

The reality is that elite soccer players, and elite athletes of any stripe, are often relatively young people, still in the process of identity formation, who have devoted themselves primarily to their sport—often at the expense of education, diverse relationships, and other life experiences.  Of course, there are exceptions.  Some athletes are broadly talented, exceptional people.  But it turns out that when you survey something like morality athletes tend to come out as, on average, less developed than non-athletes.

So while I tend to think sports has the potential to do much good, it is far from an automatic process.  At an individual level there is little evidence for the old cliché that “sports builds character.”  But does that hold true for that group so often held up as role models: high level women’s players in the US?

The role model thing in practice?

Cox and I ended up surveying 20 players from the US women’s national team as they prepared for the 2007 FIFA Women’s World Cup, along with 19 players on the highly ranked University of Portland team.  We expected there might be some average differences between players from the two teams, but couldn’t find many—so in the end we aggregated them together.  We also thought we might be able to separate out some of the players as particularly exemplary role models, and asked the players, some team administrators, and groups of fans to identify players on each team that stood out.  But it turned out there was very little consensus about what constituted an “exemplary” role model—another interesting indication that while we use the term all the time, we don’t exactly know what it means.

One piece of the survey tried to do some brief personality assessment, looking at basic traits and things like “generativity,” “empathy,” and “helpfulness” that we thought might particularly dispose the players towards being positive role models.  But when we compared the players’ average scores with those of other non-athlete groups there were essentially no significant differences.  While our measures were somewhat crude, the basic finding was that the players did not have a particularly distinctive constellation of measurable traits relevant to role-model status—like any group of diverse individuals the players were high on certain traits, low on others, and it all evened out when averaged together.

Another piece of the survey asked the players about their own role models while growing up.  Consistent with the findings of other researchers, the players overwhelmingly (82%) identified their own family members—brothers, mothers, aunts, uncles, and other people with whom they have had much direct interaction.  36% also identified female soccer players as having been role models, while 21% identified male athletes (though only one of the 39 players identified a male soccer player).  The reality is that even the best soccer players mostly model their behavior off the people they interact with every day, rather than people they primarily know through the media.

A third piece of the survey asked the players about the characteristics the players associate with being a role model.  Most of these answers focused on what I called meritocratic personality traits in the article—things such as being hard working, dedicated, tough, and positive.  These responses fit with Rojek’s suggestion that sport is “one of the paradigmatic institutions that articulate and elaborate the meritocratic ideal and reinforce achievement culture.  In sport the value of individual discipline, training, teamwork, endurance, determination and ambition is potently stressed.”

Though that meritocratic ideal may somewhat undervalue the importance of opportunities, inequalities, and resources, I was most struck by its prominence in our surveys compared to responses emphasizing sports specific skills (which were only identified by 2 of 39 players).  Considering that the players are public figures because of their athletic ability and were taking a survey specifically targeting soccer players, it was interesting that hardly anyone seemed to think of the way they played the game as part of being a role model.

A final piece of the survey asked the players about how comfortable they were being role models, and how central it was to who they are as people.  As a general theme here the players felt very willing and able to be role models, but it did not seem central to their self-concept.  Modeling comprehensive personal traits might seem to be a daunting task for relatively young women in a specialized athletic role, but it’s what we’ve come to expect.  Should we?

The role model thing in an ideal world?

It might seem obvious to suggest that soccer players should primarily be models and reference points for their soccer abilities, but that goes against a pervasive cultural discourse.  Still, in trying to systematically analyze that discourse, it strikes me that for both the players and the fans it would be useful (and maybe even liberating) to recognize and reflect on the ways the popular concept of athletes as comprehensive role models is more of a social construction than a real experience.

Towards that end, one of the most thought-provoking perspectives I came across in this research came from sport philosopher Randolph Feezell.  He points out that well-intentioned efforts to hold up athletes as comprehensive role models and moral exemplars puts them in the position of implicitly endorsing values they often have not reflected upon, and distracts from a more appropriate appreciation for their physical and athletic abilities.  Feezell suggests that even well-intentioned programs placing athletes in non-athletic settings for purposes of community service are problematic—they reinforce the misleading notion that athletes are morally special.  From this perspective, soccer players should be presented to the community as models of athletic excellence.  Period.

Of course, that may not be realistic—the cultural discourse of elite soccer players as role models is probably not going anywhere.  And that is not entirely a bad thing.  Women athletes in particular have done much to destabilize gender stereotypes, and everyone—soccer players and otherwise—can do with reminders about the importance of social responsibility.

So the point here is really just to try to think about the role model thing with a bit more precision.  I know, for example, that Stephanie Cox during her time with the LA Sol made an effort to work on a mentoring program where players went to work with school children directly and regularly—using their status as part of a quiet habit rather than a marketing abstraction.  And as a teacher I’m impressed when any of my students, athletes or not, make earnest efforts to engage their communities for the better.  But as a soccer fan I know that should not matter as much as the simple reality that Cox is a really good left-sided defender.  Expecting anything else seems to say more about society than it does about soccer players or about the game.

photo by Jamie Francis/The Oregonian

Davis was recently drafted as a goalkeeper by the Chicago Red Stars, recently graduated from the University of Portland, recently completed a national team training camp (with the U-23’s), and recently was kind enough to sit down with me and talk about it all.  I actually talked with Davis before the WPS draft, and do not have any particular insight regarding her role with the Red Stars.  In other places she seems to have said the right things—“Obviously it’s been my dream since I was a little girl…I know Chicago is an awesome city… it’s a huge sports town.”

But my interest, motivated partially by my academic life studying human development, is more in Davis as a profile in what it means to be a young American player full of potential who also has this “real life” thing to figure out.  I’ve known Davis indirectly for a few years, just enough to be aware of her reputation around Portland as intense, engaged, and thoughtful—both on and off the soccer field.  And I have a long standing curiosity in thoughtful perspectives on what it means for American soccer players to go pro.

For most, it’s not about the money.  Though I have no idea exactly what Davis will earn, it won’t be much.  The average WPS salary has been quoted as $32,000, but that average includes minimum salaries of $40,000 for national team players and a few international salaries such as Marta’s reported $500,000.  So the average player actually probably makes more like $20,000.  In other words, significantly less than the typical college graduate who isn’t an elite athlete.

For many, there would be other options.  Davis has been a serious student, and holds academic ambitions beyond her undergraduate degree in theology (with minors in education and social justice)—maybe law school, maybe graduate work in ethics.  She feels called ultimately to some sort of human rights work.  But that is tough to combine with professional soccer, even in the low-paid world of WPS.  If you want to go pro, soccer kind of has to dominate your identity.

Davis, however, doesn’t seem like the type of person to let any one thing define her.  She is passionate about soccer, but she also lit up when I asked her about the signature line in her email—a quote from mid-20^th century writer, monk, and social activist Thomas Merton: “We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.”

“Merton is just my man” Davis explained.  “Theologically and spiritually, I just connect with his line of thought and where his heart’s at.  But also, for my own self, in life and in soccer we are constantly searching for what we are, who we are, and our identity.  But I think that literally all the answers are already there.  It’s just a matter of it being revealed in us.  And learning to trust ourselves a little bit.”

“There’s so much insecurity that comes around, especially in sports. It’s just you’re constantly being measured, and questioning yourself, and compared to this person or that person, in this constant pursuit of something.  So for me it just grounds me to remember, ok—it’s already there.  Just work with what you’ve got.  Don’t look too much around at other people…I love that quote.”

Learning

It’s been an eventful year.  In the summer of 2009 Davis got called up to the full US National Team for a training camp, and shattered her jaw in a collision while playing in an exhibition with the U-23 team.  In the fall she helped lead a good Portland Pilots team to the quarterfinals of the NCAA tournament, losing at that stage after being sent on the road for the second year in a row to UCLA—the school from which Davis transferred after her freshman year.  In the winter she graduated from UP, and in January she was drafted.  But hovering around it all is the fact that in June of 2009 her father committed suicide.

Davis has been remarkably open and peaceful about losing her father, who she calls her best friend.  As she told her hometown paper in July, her Dad had been struggling with depression for many years and “he was kind of just too tired to do it again.”  And as she told me when I asked her if she thought her Dad was important for telling her story, “I think it definitely matters to the story…he still influences me every day…We primarily communicated through emails because he was a little bit deaf.  But he was a brilliant guy, a lawyer, an English major.  So we connected intellectually.  And he was always a source of comfort, and affirmation, and perspective.”

When I asked about him getting tired, she explained, “yeah, he struggled with depression and he had an addictive personality.  But he just stopped taking his medicine…something was off.  But he and I were pretty open with each other.  I knew his demons; I knew what he struggled with.  Did I ever expect that?  No.  Not really, just because he would always come back around.  He would always find a way to make sense of things.”

Finding a way to make sense of things is not always a specialty of elite American soccer players.  From a young age our players are tightly programmed, carpooled to suburban club teams, shuttled around the region with state teams, targeted for college scholarships.  Davis actually remembers being frustrated as a 12 year old when told by her coaches that she would have to either switch from field player to goalkeeper or find a new team—until her Dad confronted her in the kitchen: “You have the talent.  Use it.”  She explained “he helped me realize what was inside me, like the Merton quote.  My dad was amazing at extracting things out of me, and saying: ‘Look, you have it too.  You can do this.’”

By age 14 Davis was playing goalkeeper with her first in a series of youth national teams, soon to be travelling the world at the pinnacle of US youth development: Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Russia, and more places that opened her eyes.  But even on those trips the system is tightly programmed.  I’m regularly amused by US Soccer web features celebrating their various travelling teams finding the best Starbucks in Shanghai or the perfect hotel pool in Egypt.

But Davis tells me it depends some on the team.  She admits the players often joke about travelling to amazing destinations only to hole up in the hotel for weeks, but she also remembers fondly a trip to Brazil with the U-20’s where head coach Tim Schulz encouraged the team to soak in the culture—to go to the beach, hike in the rainforest, visit the market, and see true passion for the game: “Soccer can be just absolutely beautiful as a game itself.  If you break it down technically it is almost like a dance or an art.  Having the ability to participate in that is like being able to make music, in a way.  When I think about soccer like that I think about Brazil.”

Promoting the Ronald McDonald House (photo by Will Crew, on espn.com)

And when I think about soccer at its best I think about a game that can open minds—which is one reason I’m amongst the odd group of serious American fans who like college soccer.  When it is done well I like the idea of sports being combined with education, and I like how a player such as Davis seems to have used her college experience to genuinely explore ideas and identities.  She started at UCLA, attracted by the prestige of the place.  But it wasn’t for her—“I made the decision to commit to UCLA when I was like 16 years old.  I mean how much do you really know about yourself when you are 16?”  So when she transferred to Portland she immersed herself in soccer, in school, and in the community.  She’s particularly proud of taking the lead on a successful initiative for the team to adopt a room at the local Ronald McDonald house—where they had an ongoing tradition of student-led volunteer work.

It’s all led her to feel a commitment to something beyond soccer, maybe in combination with soccer.  But that path is less clear and seems more challenging to make sense of.  Beyond college, it is hard to think of soccer players who genuinely combine the game with serious intellectual engagement—though they may be out there?  But for Davis, perhaps thanks partially to the hard-won perspective garnered from an eventful year:  “It’s pretty simple when it comes down to it.  I honestly believe I have a talent for soccer.  A gift for soccer.  I’m in a place right now that’s pretty special.  I have opportunity before me.  My capacity to continue to get better is still there.  I’m not at my peak yet.  And in the same right, I think that I have a gift for the academic world too.  I have a desire in my heart to continue my education, to continue learning.  I think that I have tools necessary for that.  Have I arrived?  No.  Have I arrived athletically?  No.  Who knows if I ever will arrive either.  It’s more the capacity for the pursuit is there.”

Pursuing

Davis looks like she was made to be a goalkeeper.  She has square shoulders that frame a tall athletic build at once compact and lithe.  In her goal box she conveys an air of being simultaneously commanding and fraught, as if she cannot let the ball cross the line because she realizes the stakes.  As if she sometimes wonders what life would be like if she was not made to be a goalkeeper.

There are many perks that come with being a great soccer player, but opportunities for identity exploration are generally not among them.  In fact, in the study of lifespan development there is a term for what happens to adolescents who commit very young to a particular identity—such as that of an elite athlete.  We call it foreclosure, and it is generally considered a bad thing.

There is also an idea that in contemporary Western society the identity exploration of adolescence no longer leads directly to a relatively settled identity in adulthood.  Instead, there is a whole other stage of emerging adulthood—a period of continued exploration necessitated by greater educational expectations, increasingly eclectic career paths, delays in the age at which people start a family.  This “new” stage is full of exciting opportunities, but it can also be full of anxiety and uncertainty.  And I have an untested theory that it can be particularly challenging for elite athletes whose success and focus through their youth offers little help in exploring other domains of their potential.

Davis recognizes the challenge, but is more optimistic than me: “Soccer is amazing, and I have an extreme amount of goals in that.  But there’s this whole other side [of academics and intellectual engagement].  Can I do both?   I’ve had coaches in my life that have told me no, absolutely not.  There is no way to be an Olympian and try to get a masters or a doctorate.  And for me that’s heartbreaking.  I feel like they are so much both a part of who I am that I want to do both.  And I know that in the past people told women’s soccer players, you can’t be a mom and have a family on the full national team.  And then people like Joy Fawcett, they totally just shattered that.  They were like, yes we can.”

So when I ask Davis about who of her US Soccer predecessors she particularly admires it is not necessarily the goal scorers or the goal stoppers—it’s players such as Christie Rampone.  Davis explains, “Being into camp last year and seeing the way that she functions as a mother, and as an elite athlete, and just the integrity that she has is amazing.  It’s absolutely amazing.”

But it is also interesting that it is hard to think of examples of players—male or female—who’ve balanced anything other than soccer and family, no matter how amazing that particular balance may be.  There are, in fact, ways in which excelling at soccer requires a single-minded focus that precludes the types of intellectual engagement towards which Davis could be inclined: “It’s ironic because part of what I’ve learned to be successful in soccer is to just not think.  But it’s such a part of who I am, it’s been a challenge for me to keep things simple and turn it off.  Because I can analyze and over-analyze anything in the world.”

So for a player such as Davis is “the draft” an opening, or is it just another step in “turning it off?”  Will she get a chance to genuine explore the possibilities of emerging adulthood, or is she destined to struggle with the necessity of identity foreclosure?  By going pro Davis is living the dream of many young players—but is it her dream?

She thinks so.  “I love it.  And I think that when you love something you stay with it.  Regardless of what it gives or takes.  Just like a relationship.  And I think that it’s good for me to remember that I do love the game.  Regardless of what’s going to happen.”

St. Louis based soccer executive Jeff Cooper

This week’s column is a Q & A with Jeff Cooper, one of the most fascinating leaders in American soccer.  Cooper, a St. Louis area attorney and businessman, plunged into professional soccer only a few years ago and in that short time has arguably emerged as the most powerful man in soccer in the Midwest and one of the most influential in the country.

Though he played soccer collegiately at DePauw University, until recently Cooper’s main focus was as Managing Partner of SimmonsCooper law firm in East Alton, Illinois.  The firm started as an asbestos litigation firm in 1999 and went on to diversify its caseload including cases involving asbestos and mesothelioma, business disputes, intellectual property and international affairs.

Cooper first came to prominence in the soccer world by leading a valiant, though ultimately failed effort to bring an MLS team, soccer stadium and real estate development to Collinsville, Illinois.

He did succeed in aggregating three of the top youth soccer clubs in metropolitan St. Louis – St. Louis Soccer Club, Scott Gallagher SC and Metro United SC and launching Saint Louis Athletica in Women’s Professional Soccer in 2009.  Most recently, a failed effort to purchase USL from Nike led to a prominent role in the creation of the new North American Soccer League that includes Cooper’s expansion Division 2 men’s team, AC Saint Louis that surprised people by signing a high profile technical staff and lured MLS star Steve Ralston back home to finish his career in St. Louis.

This Q & A seeks Cooper’s perspective on the many areas of soccer he’s become involved in over the last few years.

1. How did you come to be the President and Interim Commissioner of the NASL?  Could this be like Bud Selig’s “interim” commissioner position that lasted more than a decade?

Jeff Cooper: I was voted Interim Commissioner by the NASL Board, probably because I was the only guy in the room dumb enough to take on such a time-consuming, non-paying job!  I will only be in this position until our League office is built out and a real Commissioner joins us.

2. What lessons did you learn by going through the failed USL acquisition followed by the forced merger with USL1?

JC: I learned that I need to say “no comment” sometimes.

Jeff Cooper pulled together some of the top soccer clubs in St. Louis and joined them with pro men's and women's teams to create an integrated soccer club unseen anywhere else in the United States

3. Unlike most, if not all, other owners of pro soccer clubs, you are building a truly multi-dimensional business with pro men’s and women’s teams, an integrated youth club and shared facilities.  What are the keys to building a unified business vs. simply owning a series of related businesses?  Can your business model be replicated anywhere in the US or is there something unique about St. Louis that will allow it to succeed?

JC: The key is to make sure that you utilize all of the various economies of scale. An organization like ours thrives or dies on communication.

There are many unique things about St. Louis and its soccer culture, but we aren’t one of them. Our model could be adopted to any market. It is scalable for larger or smaller markets. In time, every pro team in the US will become a real “club” with a youth program, academy, women’s team etc. It is the evolution of the game in this country.

4. Your selection for head coach of AC St. Louis, Claude Anelka, has limited coaching experience and has failed badly in his first attempt in Scotland.  Why will he succeed in an unfamiliar environment?

JC: He may or may not succeed. Claude has a lot to prove here. Luckily, he will have Francisco Filho by his side. Francisco has developed some of the worlds top talent at Clairfontaine and Manchester United and we think he can do the same at AC St. Louis.

5. Is the NASL better off operating completely independent of MLS or are there benefits to work together on areas such as player development, marketing and sponsorship?

JC: The NASL should definitely be working with MLS in various capacities. There are huge benefits to the game if we work together on player development.  We get to compete on the field in the US Open Cup. Off the field, we should try to help the development of our nations top league in any way we can.

6. What lessons can be gleaned from the discontinuation of the LA Sol’s operation?  What changes need to be implemented by teams and the League to prevent other teams from failing?

JC: WPS now has 8 really solid owners who are committed to the long term vision of the league. The teams have already adjusted their business models from our experiences last year. I feel like our league is at it’s strongest right now.

Jeff Cooper's plans for a major real estate development anchored by an MLS team and stadium in Collinsville, Illinois ultimately fell short.

7. What more did your group need to show MLS to get a team?  What obstacles prevented you from meeting MLS’ standards?

JC: We needed more financial depth. It’s that simple.

8. Which side of the Mississippi would’ve been better to base an MLS team, the Illinois or Missouri side?  Would the benefits of the population and corporate centers on the Missouri side outweigh the benefits of being the Illinois side’s only pro sports team?

JC: Either side will work very well. As your question points out, there are great benefits to either. The proven model for a pro soccer team is to own your stadium at the smallest possible cost. So we are still looking at opportunities to grow our current stadium or move to a larger, lower-cost facility.

9. The Seattle Sounders only drew 2,000 to 4,000 per game during their final USL1 years yet exploded to 30,000 per game in their first MLS year. Does that give you any trepidation starting a Division 2 team in a major league market?  How do you market a minor league team to a city that is used to major league sports teams?

JC: AC St. Louis will be the biggest soccer team in St. Louis regardless of which league it plays. I think there were a huge number of issues with how the old USL marketed it’s teams. We plan on doing a much better job of helping teams gain greater attention in each market.

On a side note, I will say that I love to watch what is happening in Seattle. It shows how the game is growing in the US. However, I hope we don’t hold cities like Portland to the same standard going forward or there may be an inappropriate sense of disappointment.

10. Is the “St. Louis as a soccer hotbed” notion a myth associated with the history of the sport’s support there or is St. Louis truly still ahead of the rest of the Midwest, and nation, in soccer interest and development?

JC: Per capita, St. Louis still produces more elite level players than any market. This year, with the debut of AC STL, the fans here will have to prove or disprove the notion of being a soccer hotbed.

11. What interests do you currently have in English professional soccer. Is it too mature a market to have significant upside economically or are there still bargains to be found? (Cooper formerly sat on England’s League One Brentford FC Board of Directors.)

JC: I don’t have any current business interest in English soccer.  And to directly answer the question, there are no more bargains in English soccer.  Even the clubs that can be bought for £1 have millions in debt.  There is so much heavily-financed competition at the lower levels that it is nearly impossible to get promoted as a regular well-run club. The economics are completely out of whack. We have already seen a number of teams go into administration and we will unfortunately see many, many more do so over the next 12-24 months.