By Charles Boehm – WASHINGTON, DC (Sep 25, 2014) US Soccer Players – Oscar Pareja is Colombian by birth and upbringing, a skillful two-way midfielder who ended his long playing career in MLS with the Dallas Burn turned FC Dallas. But his coaching career was born and crafted in the USA.
Pareja retired in 2005 and immediately began a tutelage that took him from the FC Dallas staff to the U-17 USMNT to a builder’s role at the FCD youth academy which now ranks among the nation’s best. A chance to lead the Colorado Rapids’ first team followed in 2011 and then – after a bittersweet tug-of-war last winter – Pareja made what he calls “one of my hardest decisions in my life” to leave a promising Rapids renovation project to take the helm at his former club in Texas.
Again packing his roster with exciting young talent, he’s led FCD to the upper echelon of the MLS Western Conference while the Rapids stagnated after his departure, putting him in the conversation for Coach of the Year honors while his team makes their case for a first-ever league championship.
Earlier this year Oscar Pareja sat with USSoccerPlayers.com for an in-depth conversation about his coaching methodology, his observations of his adopted nation’s soccer culture and even the budding career of his own son, a 13-year-old playmaker named Diego.
As a Colombian-American, what are your observations on the US coaching landscape?
This country gave me a very good education in terms of coaching. Getting through the youth system here in America was amazing. I had the opportunity to play many years in MLS and it was great – it’s a different league. So all the diversity that we have here in this country, it just makes the game grow. That’s natural. The game will keep growing.
Now what we’re missing here – if I would like to point out something, it’s maybe the experiences of those coaches, being international players with different backgrounds. I’m very glad to see the coaching staff within MLS and see guys on the line that have been on the field. I like that. And not just because they’re making good coaches, but they teach the game different, because they have been in that spot and at the same time they have been educated here. So it’s a good mix. The more we have, the better it will be. Playing abroad gives you a different perspective as well.
Certainly if we have some coaches who come from abroad and can adapt to this culture and respect it and understand it and learn from it, I think he has a different advantage, too.
You’ve seen the craziness of the US youth scene. How does it compare to the system back in Columbia?
I grew up in a different system, was developed in a culture where everything was just about soccer – and it was wild, too. Same problems. And different scenarios, but it was the same. Now we have t he opportunity to be more free in that scenario of playing with not much structure. Here the structure helps – sometimes too much, in my opinion – but I have learned about this system a lot and I have enjoyed that time with the youth. I’m still participating with my place with development on the youth side. But I really think it is great, this wildness like cows, let’s say it that way – I think it’s part of the game.
The US has the most soccer coaches in the world, but is not producing elite players, especially creative ones, with regularity.
Right, and it’s going to be more and more difficult, really, because now the access to information, the internet, the globalization of the information just make it [so] anyone can be a coach in three days. You can download training s and coaching practices – how does Barcelona do it, or Manchester United do it? Everybody has access to it through internet, sitting at home.
And that copy of the information sometimes is misleading to people who become a coach overnight, and go tell the kids what to do. It is a big problem. So we have to filter the coaching staff and analyze who really has the aptitude to do it. And if the people who play the game – for me, with all my respect to coaches who don’t play – if you played I think you have an advantage.
Many MLS coaches have stepped right into the job immediately after the end of their playing careers. You took a more deliberate path.
Every case is different. I have seen it in every way. I have seen coaches who just leave the cleats in the locker room and turn into coaches, managers the day after, and do well. There are some others that, it’s not the same – they become coaches right away and immediately they show that they’re rookies.
Every scenario is different now. Now where I may agree is that the education into being a manager and the experience that we can have through coaching youth, or college in some cases here in America, or being assistant coaches and watching the game from a different standpoint – that’s crucial and it helps a lot. It’s not necessarily a must-have but I would say it’s very necessary.
Why did you take the path that you did?
What I’m going to tell you is very real – I don’t think I talked about this until now. I start coaching, or being an assistant coach, right away when I retired. And at the same time I was coaching a very young team – I think it was U-12. But at the same time I was an assistant coach for the [FCD] first team, and I had my son, who was six years old, that played the game. So I had three different scenarios.
That moment I understand that teaching, the delivery of the message, is totally different in each scenario. I can’t coach my son with the same tools that I coached the U12s, and I couldn’t coach the U-12s with the same tools that I had with the grownups. When you retire, you think that everything is the same, really. In that moment I learned it’s not that way and I chose the path to start from the very beginning, and I took my first national youth license. That was my first course, and I went into my [US Soccer] A License and major licenses after. Understanding the whole chain helped me. I see the game differently after that.
Do you see a Colombian influence on soccer in this country?
The passion. The passion that we have for this game. That’s the result of a country which is sick [from] soccer….We’re just about that game, and we bring that here. My country, my people are – for me, especially a couple generations, we struggled during the decades [of civil war] and that made us stronger.
We dealt with extreme adversity during the political conflict and that generation for me is gold, because they know how it is to have, and how it is not to have. And we jumped over many hurdles. So adversity for us is not a problem … We bring that to this country.
It’s different here – we generally don’t have that sickness to the same degree yet.
Right, but that’s nobody’s fault. I think it’s a wonderful country. I love this country, I love the people here and I’m very thankful for the communities, the structure, the culture. I’m a Colombian 100 percent, and my country is the place I would like to go to die. But this country has molded me into my professionalism and I appreciate that a lot.
How can we grow the best players, especially creative ones, without that sickness? How will we create an American Mauro Diaz or an American “Pibe” Valderrama?
That’s a very good question, because those guys are the result of that sickness. There’s no other way. We have Landon Donovan and we have [Clint] Dempsey and we have [Michael] Bradley, and they’r e special, too. But the players that you mention? It’s going to take a little time, because the country has – let me use an analogy.
The country has to turn into a sickness of soccer, where our kids are soccer all the time. And that’s a result. The science proves it – it’s about repetition. It’s about frequency. It’s about doing it over and over. And that’s what we do down there [in Colombia]. Now here, it’s changing. But it’s still going to take a little time, especially now that technology is taking a lot of time from the kids too.
So many distractions.
Yes, and the competition with other sports. And they have the advantage here to belong to many other different activities, which is great, it’s wonderful. But you have to pay a toll for that, and that’s probably missing that one [special] player.
Where is your son Diego now? How did you make the decisions for his development?
He likes the game, and I’m behind him all the time – I’m just holding the bike here and letting him go. He is a wonderful human being and I know God is going to help him beat his own path. The good thing is that he doesn’t want me to hold his bike too much! So I just let him go and the game is going to teach him what he needs to know.
[Diego finished the 2013-14 school year in the Rapids youth system, then transferred back to Dallas to rejoin his father’s club.]
Do you think he will go to college, or pursue a pro career?
I want him to go to college, that’s correct. I am probably the most admiring person in the world of this system here. I think America has a great system, having the opportunity to go and study and be professionals, and at the same time continue with their career in soccer, I think it’s great. I would love my son to have that opportunity – finding a professional soccer player who is a professional person in other areas is wonderful.
But so many people believe that the college system is one of our greatest drawbacks in terms of player development.
I agree with it. But I don’t think we have to think about not doing it, I think we need to know that during their college period it has to be a different structure, where they can keep going with the same frequency and intensity and dedication to the game. I think there’s some holes there, with all my respect, but the education is complementary to the soccer career. I don’t think they reject each other, I don’t see it that way.
In Europe, they do it, they have the Beckhams and the Zinedine Zidanes and they have all these guys – there are countries there that are sick with soccer, too. But the education is a priority. So I think we can put our hands to our college system and we can have better soccer players without breaking their career when they go to college. It’s just a continuum; they can complement each other.
You’ll have to talk to the NCAA, then!
I do think there is a way to do it. Obviously I’m coming from a country that, I had coaches when I was 16 that told me, ‘Either you play or you study.’ And that was a terrible mistake. I just finished my degree four years ago because I had coaches who really forced me not to study. And I knew that I could do both. Now we have a lot of athletes in Colombia that don’t have their degrees, and for me that’s a mistake. Now I’m talking to you about a country that is sick with soccer – but we have to be sick of education, too. They complement each other. This country [the U.S.] is sick of education. I like and respect that a lot.
Most coaches I speak with want to get the kids in a pro environment as soon as possible, but our system is unique.
Let’s make an example. Can a guy who is going to college to study, can he train every day in the mornings? Or in the afternoons, can he belong to that professional environment? For me the answer is yes. Can he extend his period of study, maybe not four y ears or five years but maybe seven or eight – but still be that person who is educated and dedicated in a professional way to soccer? Can we get our kids when they are young and give them more frequency of training?
Because maybe the missing part is not there [in college], but is down there [at youth level] when the kids are training just one time a week or two times a week. Maybe we can give the more training. So I would defend the education, and the way that education and soccer complement each other, I would defend that. I know we can still be sick of both and have that one player that we can be proud of.
Charles Boehm is a Washington, DC-based writer and the editor of The Soccer Wire. Contact him at:cboehm@thesoccerwire.com. Follow him on Twitter at:http://twitter.com/cboehm.
More from Charles Boehm:
