No Reservations Needed

Soccer Digest, August, 2001 by Scott Plagenhoef

Carter and Bradley head up the Academy, but have plenty of instruction al assistance. Fire assistant coaches Dennis Hamlett, Daryl Shore, and Tom Soehn--along with Fire Camp Coordinator Frank Klopas--also lend their expertise to the Academy. Veteran Fire players such as Peter Nowak and Hristo Stoitchkov have also become involved with the training.

One of the primary benefits of the academy is that it offers year-round training. High school rules still prevent kids from playing in other leagues while they represent their school. This may set up the first true club vs. high school conflicts similar to those which college-aged kids have been forced to make--thanks to archaic NCAA rules restricting varsity athletes from playing their sport of choice for anyone other than the university, even in the offseason.

Despite that potential squabble, the Fire Academy is another step toward adopting global methods of producing soccer players. Naysayers still rally around college soccer, but the play of Beasley, Convey, and Landon Donovan--legitimate national team pool players all, despite each being under 20--should prove them wrong. With a more reserve teams around the country, in a few years the surprise success of Convey could be the norm. And with a dozen Conveys to choose from, who would complain?

RELATED ARTICLE: West Ham Boys

OF COURSE YOUTH ACADEMY SUCCESS doesn't necessarily translate into success at the senior level Even if the players themselves make the leap from one level to the next, there is the little matter of holding on to them, In England, it's no trick for storied clubs such as Arsenal, Manchester United, or Liverpool to keep their top products, but that continues to be a problem for the team that recently has been that nation's best academy, the less glamorous West Ham United.

Over the past few years, West Ham has developed top-notch stars such as Rio Ferdinand (who was sold to Leeds earlier in the year for 18 million [pounds sterling], a record for a defender), Joe Cole, Jermaine Defoe, Michael Carrick, and Frank Lampard--five of the most precocious talents in England. Many of them--along with Australia's Michael Ferrante--were at the heart of the record-breaking 1999 FA Youth Cup championship run, and each has figured in Sven-Goran Eriksson's plans for the England national team and/or has been a youth international. That 1999 team won the FA Youth Cup over Coventry by an aggregate score of 9-0, and also captured the first-ever FA Youth Academy title.

The seniors have had less success, finishing 15th in the Premiership this year. The resignation of coach Harry Redknapp throws into further doubt the future of the club and upsets the possibility that this prodigious group with grow into the core of a brilliant team, but the academy itself shows little sign of slowing its production.

RELATED ARTICLE: Absolute Beginners

WHO NEEDS RESERVES WHEN THE UNITED States has high school and college sports, right? Those systems are fine for the other American sports--particularly football and basketball, in which teenagers are generally not physically ready to compete with twenty and thirtysomethings--but not for soccer. The rest of the world doesn't wait to develop its players, and increasingly neither is the U.S. In the 1998 World Cup the United States was one of only four nations not to have an U-23 age player (the limit of the Fire Reserves and Olympic rosters, as well as the age of most college teams) on its squad. (The youngest U.S. player was then 23-year-old Frankie Hejduk.) The others were a hapless Austria, a very average Scotland, and an out-of-sync and out-of-step Germany. Cameroon--the 2000 Olympic and African Nation's Cup champions--led the way with nine U-23 players on its roster. Here's a look at how frequent U-23 players were on France '98 rosters, followed by a France '98 All-Star team of young players: