Ready for prime time!

TONY CiCICCO, coach of the women's Olympic gold-medalist, takes off on the American style of play and the glorious future of American soccer.

COACH: Who were the major influences in your career as a player and as a coach?

DiCICCO: As a player I would have to pinpoint a Springfield College teammate named Paul LeSueur, who later went on to play with the Cosmos.

Paul was the first person I ever knew with a genuine passion for the game. He was from England and had his hometown newspapers delivered to him.

I was impressed by the way the English journalists used to describe the games. One of them described a shot by Georgie Best, former star for Northern Ireland and Mann (United), as follows: "Georgie Best turned on a sixpence and sent the sphere smashing into the riggings." An American journalist would merely have noted that Best scored in the 16th minute.

The English have a flair and a passion for the game, and Paul was a major influence in my love affair with the game.

My first professional coach, Rene Koermens from Holland, was another huge influence. His work ethic and attention to detail were incredible, and he made all kinds of demands on his players. I learned a lot about coaching from him.

My biggest idol was Peter Bonetti, goalkeeper for the English National Team, who played for 21 years in the English first division, and who is now the goalkeeper coach for the England Youth Teams. He instilled me with a sense of pride in goalkeeping and showed me how I could compensate for my lack of size with quickness (my best quality), courage, and finesse.

I still look up to him, and he comes over from England every year to teach at my Soccer Plus goalkeeping schools.

COACH: What turned you on to goalkeeping and induced you to launch your goalkeeping school?

DiCICCO: I started in soccer relatively late, when I was in high school. Because I was behind everyone, I had to choose between goalkeeping and being a fifth-string midfielder.

One of my JV coaches once asked, "Who wants to play goal today?" I volunteered. The JV's were playing the varsity that day and I guess I did something right. I was given a uniform the next day. And then, suddenly, I was the starting goalkeeper!

I learned what it was to play a position without having anyone around who really understood it. I now tell funny stories about how I perfected the position. Every time a shot whizzed by me, I'd ask myself, "Why was I scored on?"

Coaches are now able to give their kids shortcuts on how to handle the position, excel at it, and give it the necessary commitment - all the things I never had and that eventually moved me to start my goalkeeping schools.

COACH: How do America's goalkeepers compare with those of other countries?

DiCICCO: Athletically, very well, as good as anywhere in the world. In work ethic, also very good, maybe even better than most other countries.

Our goalkeepers are ready to work as hard as it takes to become the best they can be. Our technical skills are very, very comparable to those of the international goalkeepers, possibly even better. Our goalkeeper schools deal very well with the technical side.

Where our goalkeepers trail is in their reading of the game, and in their ability to play the high-level games with high-level intensities. When the game is on the line and a cup is at stake, you have to be a top all-around soccer player.

Most of the European and South American players don't become goalkeepers until they are teenagers. By then, they are pretty darned good players with solid foundations. In short, they've become soccer players first and goalkeepers second.

We sometimes get that backwards. You can't have players becoming full-time goalkeepers at age 11 or 12. That's only going to limit them as they get older. You can have them play goal, but you must also make them continue playing on the field. As they become teenagers, you can develop that specialization.

We always have eight-year-olds who want to come to goalkeepers school, and they pose a problem. There's a bit of a safety risk at the position, and we don't think that anyone that young needs a goalkeeper's school.

And so we make sure that the kids do not specialize in goalkeeping at such a young age. It's not good for soccer and it's not good for the young athlete.

THE OLYMPICS

COACH: What prompted you to take on the challenge of coaching the women's Olympic soccer team?

DiCICCO: It wasn't prompting at all. I was in the right place at the right time, having worked with the team since 1991. I understood the team and understood what we needed to do at the highest level.

When Anson Dorrance (women's coach from 1986 to 1994) was leaving the team, he asked me if I wanted to take it over and I said only if the players wanted me to. The players endorsed me and the rest is history.

But it was just a case of my being in the right place at the right time. A lot of other qualified coaches could have done an outstanding job with that team. The transition was so smooth, it was basically seamless.

COACH: What kind of coaching style did you adopt in leading the women to such a great victory?

DiCICCO: Probably the key word is sophistication. We became a sophisticated team; in some ways the most sophisticated women's team. Let me tell you something: When we think of sophistication in women's soccer, we're only talking about 25 players. There's no sophistication below that. Players in Scandinavia, the Continent, or South America see soccer every single day when they turn on the TV. They are constantly exposed to high-level competition. The liner little points of the game are constantly on display, whether it's dummying the ball to let it run out of bounds, or making a goal kick, or whatever. That level of sophistication is lacking in this country.

The only players who have it on the women's side, and I'm not making a gross generalization, are the players who invested two years of training and playing against international competition. That was one of the things we needed to focus on, and we accomplished it.

The other thing was the ability to adjust systems, styles, defenses, etc., in the heat of the game: to be able to change gears and do something a little bit different to expose another team's weakness or to shut down something that they were able to do very well.

For years, our national team only played one way - could only play one way! Now they can play different ways. By being able to make subtle changes in the system or the defense or how the team is playing, coaches now have a much greater opportunity to influence the game. That is something that we brought over from Europe the last couple of years and it helped us win the gold medal.

COACH: Since America wasn't as soccer-oriented as the other countries, were our women forced to pick up the game a lot faster?

DiCICCO: You have to look back over the last 10 years. We started women's soccer at the same time as the rest of the world. Because of their old values and biases, the women in the soccer-oriented countries never were able to get a jump start over our women.

In our free society, soccer was allowed to become the activity of choice to a lot of young people, especially young women. And because we have great athletes and none of the biases of most other countries, we emerged as one of the premier teams in the world.

You also have to credit Anson Dorrance and all the other early coaches for giving our women the opportunity to emerge. It allowed us to get a jump on the world. And how did the world react? Just the way America did when its World Cup women's basketball team and the 1992 Olympic team failed to win the gold. We thought, "Hey, wait a minute, this is our game, our women should be winning our game."

That's the attitude the rest of the world has about soccer! So they started putting more energy, emphasis, financing, and so on into their women's leagues, and that wasn't happening here. What had served as a training ground for the winning of the World Cup in 1991 - college soccer - hardly sufficed any more. Those 18, 19, and 20-year-olds were now playing against 25 and 30-year-olds who had spent their entire lives in the game.

The reason we won the gold medal in 1996 was that we took a different approach. We realized we couldn't replicate those types of leagues in time for our women to play Olympic soccer, but we could use the world as our league!

And that's what we did. We brought in our pool of players, trained them for 18 months and played as many international games as we could. We went overseas, we invited them here, we played and learned as much as we could from them. We simply made the world our league!

That was the contribution U.S. Soccer made to our team, because they had to fund it. If they hadn't spent that money or were not proactive enough or forward thinking enough to value women's sports, specifically soccer, we would not have a gold medal today. No way.

COACH: So would you say that at least part of our success was due to our liberated culture?

DiCICCO: Absolutely. Except for the Scandinavian countries, the world does not value women's sports the way we do. Imagine what a young girl wanting to play soccer in Italy or Brazil or England has to go through. They have obstacles that our fathers and mothers would never accept or stand for. Our liberated culture was a key factor in our huge success.

COACH: Do you think the international teams will now be gunning for you?

DiCICCO: They've been gunning for us since 1991, when we won the World Cup. But I do believe that the federations around the world will be putting more emphasis on their women's programs. The stereotyped thinking about women is slowly beginning to diminish and more countries are beginning to view soccer as a great way for girls to express themselves athletically.

We're now seeing it happen in Brazil. The Brazilian women went all the way to the Olympic semifinals because their leaders are starting to put more emphasis on their programs.

The lesson for American women is clear. We cannot rest on our laurels, be content with the status quo. We have to create the very best environments for our young women - programs, fields, coaches, and especially a women's league.

WOMEN'S SOCCER AND SPORTS

COACH: Are you surprised at the rapid growth of women's sports on the pro and college levels?

DiCICCO: No, not really. Sports are entertainment, and we are all in the entertainment business. If your game is entertaining, people are going to watch it. Women's athletics, and specifically soccer, are incredibly entertaining. I knew it the first time I ever watched our team play.

That was the tragedy of not giving our public a chance to see its Olympic women's team on TV, particularly when you think of all the people who would have been watching women's soccer for the first time, maybe even watching soccer for the first time. The semifinal and the final were classic games. Our women are now playing an entertaining brand of soccer, and that is why it's growing.

COACH: Do you think there is an American style of soccer, or are we still piggybacking on the Europeans or South Americans? Are we starting to stamp our own identity on the game?

DiCICCO: That's a great question, because we are starting to do just that. And guess what, the biggest reason for that is American coaches are coaching our players!

I was a big fan of Bora (Milutinovic) but he was going to coach what had always worked for him - not necessarily what worked best for the American players - the way American coaches like Steve Sampson do it.

Whenever American coaches succeed on the international level, it's because they are catering to the American players' instincts and attitudes.

Americans are aggressive by nature, they are attacking by nature, they play a combative, athletic style. There are thinking aspects to that game, and things that can be taught to support that kind of play. That's what Americans like in athletics, and any time you bring in a European to coach an American team, it's not going to be the same.

I'm not saying he's not going to succeed, but he's not going to be able to reach American players with an un-American style of game.

The women's game in America has always had a home-grown style. The women's game has not had much ethnic infiltration for all the reasons we have talked about. It's really only American girls who play the game and coach the game and therefore have only themselves as a frame of reference. They have always played the game with the aggressive, attacking, athletic, competitive mentality.

Steve Sampson has infused all of that into our men's national team, and he has had great success. He has been a blessing for American soccer. He has opened the eyes not only of our soccer federation but of the world to the fact that American coaches can coach.

I think Anson did it on the women's side, when we won with an American coach and American players organized into an American system for the first time. But Steve did it on the men's side, and that was a harder sell.

We have a style. And it's a good style, an entertaining style. Yes, it requires some sophistication, but it is clearly an emerging style.

COACH: How would you compare the American style of coaching to that of other countries? Have Americans closed the gap in knowledgeability?

DiCICCO: Absolutely. American coaches are good. Simple as that. There are good coaches all over the world, and a lot of the foreign coaches are more experienced than many of ours, but American coaches are doing fine.

They work hard at their coaching. Not just at the tactics of the game, but on the benefits of nutrition, conditioning, and psychology. That is the way we approach athletics and coaching. It's not just dribbling, passing, and tackling, it's everything. Our coaches are proving that they can hold their own tactically with the coaches everywhere in the world.

COACH: To what do you attribute the rapid rise of American soccer?

DiCICCO: It's a great game played by kids who love it! When I was growing up, I never played youth league soccer, I played Little League baseball. Baseball was my first love and my kids now play both games.

But I'll tell you what: Put those kids on the field and let them chase the soccer ball around, then put them in a baseball setting and watch them stand around most of the time they're out there. It's easy to see where these kids are going to migrate! They want to run and they want to chase and they want a simplistic game, and soccer is a pretty simple game. It is just sometimes played by complicated people.

Kids love it and they migrate to it. The so-called soccer explosion is happening because kids are playing. So when we see families at MLS games now, it's not the kids dragging the fathers. It the kids and fathers going together.

The kids who first played in the youth leagues are now fathers and they are raising kids who also love the game. It's infiltrating our culture and our society. They're going together to MLS games, as opposed to the old NASL days, when the kids went because they loved the game and the dads went because they were trying to be good dads.

The ground-up growth is what, after 10 years or so, is making soccer take root in this country. Another generation is now playing the game. The sons are playing, and the fathers played. Maybe not the grandfathers, but by the time that becomes true the game will be even bigger in America.

COACH: How important is the success of MLS to the continued growth of soccer at all levels?

DiCICCO: Very, very important. The game will achieve its full potential only when it can complete the circle, and it has to have the professional league. That's what draws the best athletes, that's what's going to draw the TV contract and money into the game, that's what's going to elevate all the levels below it, and it is going to elevate the women's game, too, which is somewhat lateral to the men's game and the pro league.

COACH: What does MLS have to do to establish itself as a major American sport, along the lines of the NBA or NHL?

DiCICCO: They have to make sure to control their growth and be realistic about it. Not just with respect to the league, but with the players. The players have to be partners in that process. Most of them are too young to remember or understand what happened to the NASL. The fighting for players and the bidding wars for players eventually bankrupted the league.

We're still merely missionaries for this great emerging game. I believe our women internationalists over the past six years have done a great missionary job and have understood how growth has to be one step at a time.

The men have to understand that, too, because it is going to take a while to sell the MLS to everyone in America. And the ones we need to sell it to are not you and I and the other soccer enthusiasts, but the rest of the population, the people in charge of the dollars, and the large corporations. But I am confident that the league front office is moving in the right direction. They have exhibited a great sensibility, and we are going to need that kind of sensibility from the players and their agents and everybody else.

COACH: The MLS has just approved the addition of a fifth foreign player to every team roster. Doesn't that appear to reflect adversely on the progress of our home-grown players? We keep saying that American players are catching up to the foreign players, but now we are encouraging the addition of foreign players to the rosters. Doesn't that say we are going to improve the league by using more foreign players?

DiCICCO: I'm not close to that situation, but I will say this: One of the noticeable growing pains of the MLS in its first year was that it had some outstanding players on every team, and also some very average players.

Should the league replace the average players with foreign talent or should it do a better job looking for domestic talent? I'm not sure. But I would hope that if it is thinking of expanding the number of foreign players to four or five, it also has a plan to pull it back to three down the road.

Right now, it is trying to raise the level of play in the league to make it a viable training league for the national team and also help sell the game by making it more skillful and more creative.

But I am concerned about what happened in the old NASL, where we had foreign players coming over and becoming citizens practically overnight through the intervention of their well-connected management teams. So, all of a sudden, we had the requisite amount of "Americans" on the field, only they weren't the home-grown American kids. Those kids were sitting on the bench - kids who might have developed into players had they been given the chance. And there were home-grown kids who never even made it to the bench, so that didn't help, either.

But I don't think that's going to happen here, because in the old NASL days, the coaches were foreign. And if I were a coach, and were told that my job is to win, I, too, might look at my pool of American talent and think, "Where am I going to find players in this place? But I can go back to England or wherever, and I have my network, I can make a few calls...and overnight I can fly in few good players, players I'm familiar with, who can fill some vital positions." It's a no-brainer.

The American coaches did extremely well in the MLS this year. My hat's off to Bruce Arena and the job he did. He had a lot of critics saying he was stepping into the professional ranks and here he goes and wins everything in sight.

I will go along with the five-foreign-players rule, as long as it doesn't eliminate home-grown players from the playing pool.

Because America is a real nice place to come and live, we can effect the foreign players to come. We saw that happen in the '70's, and we want to make sure that MLS continues to feature American players, and I believe its player development programs will ensure that.

But the biggest safeguard remains the American coach. The American coach knows where to find American talent, and how to develop that talent. I applaud the U.S. Federation and the "A" leagues getting together to develop a great talent pool. Below them is a good third division, and with that type of organization a coach is going to have a lot of places to look for talent.

It even worked the first year, though it wasn't as well organized as it is going to be in the coming years. The MLS will have a multi-tiered system in which players can develop and coaches can identify prospects.

Since the MLS can use a boost in its playing level, perhaps the addition of another foreign player can turn out to be a positive move. But the balance between home-gown and foreign players will always have to be carefully monitored.