In Developing Talent, a U.S. Coach Turns to His Roots

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/sports/soccer/07iht-soccer07.html

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LA LONDE-LES-MAURES, France — The midday sun is blazing, the coastal breeze is a blessing, and the data from heart monitors worn by every young American working out in a stadium between the mountains and the Golden Islands will help the coaches to know how far they can prudently push these young players.

“Your first touch is the important one,” the head coach, Tab Ramos, calls out.

This trainer is looking for touch, control and movement. Those were the same qualities that marked him out as a player 30 years ago — and they are core traits for this new generation. Two weeks from now, the United States will kick off against Spain, the favorite to win the 2013 FIFA U-20 World Cup in Turkey.

Also in a group with France and Ghana — among the leaders in world youth soccer — the young Americans are facing the ultimate test of where they are in the global game. They reached the final of the regional Concacaf Cup, and lost to a penalty goal late in added time against the host Mexico in heat and high altitude. But this is a group of players that Ramos says he would take anywhere, against anyone.

Ramos is not a boastful man. Determined, yes, but there remains in Tab Ramos a hint of the humble lad, the street player, who came out of Montevideo to settle with his family in New Jersey at age 11. Even then, there were good judges of natural talent in New York — and they could barely ignore the huge and obvious skills in the diminutive child he was then.

After representing the United States at three World Cups and at the Olympic Games — and finishing a degree in Spanish from North Carolina State via correspondence courses — the head coach to the Under-20s regards himself as an all-American.

“I have had this crest,” he says, pointing to the U.S. badge on his shirt, “for 32 years.”

The pressure on results, a part of the global culture and not simply engrained in the United States, seems to there: Ramos has no contract beyond this summer tournament.

Yet in some ways his work is more intrinsic to developing the United States as a soccer nation than the role that Jürgen Klinsmann holds as the senior men’s head coach. The United States is not going to win the next World Cup, or even the one after that.

But 2013 is be the centennial year of the U.S. Soccer Federation. Nobody knows better than Sunil Gulati, a senior lecturer in international trade and economics at Columbia University, and the president of U.S. soccer, that it has been 100 years of playing catch-up in the sport he loves, but that his country has not always taken seriously.

It does now.

Klinsmann might be trying to fill some gaps by seeking out players of his own native German origin, but Ramos is also doing what comes naturally: 8 of the 11 players who pushed Mexico so far in the Concacaf final in March are of Hispanic origin.

Ramos corrects a visitor who describes some of these developing talents — Daniel Cuevas, Benji Joya, Alonso Hernandez, Mario Rodriguez and others — as Hispanic or Latino. “They are Americans who happen to have Hispanic roots,” he says.

What they have, in Ramos’s eyes, is a real American attitude of never being afraid to take on any team on the field. His players are the best he can find, wherever they come from — players who he believes who can “be 10 years in the national team for the U.S.”

The Hispanic aspect will not go away. How could it, when the fastest-expanding group in a population that tripled through the 20th century to over 300 million was by far the Latino element? And why would it, with the native love of soccer among Mexicans, Uruguayans, Brazilians and others as natural as drawing breath?

The Census Bureau and the United Nations agree that by the year 2050, the U.S. population will swell again to more than 400 million — of whom a quarter are likely to have Hispanic roots. And as the United States goes in search of a style for its growing soccer ambition, it would seem logical that the Latino game that suits Argentines and Brazilians and Mexicans well enough will become the American way as well.

Ramos insists that he is looking for the talent and the winning mentality in his players — and nothing else. Klinsmann talks about seeking out players with hunger for the ball, hunger to compete, and ability to move through the transition between defense and attack that is faster today than it was in his playing time, or Ramos’s.

To achieve that, a young player has to possess the ability, and then to develop the strength and speed to receive the ball at great speed against opponents who are coached to deny them the time and space to express those skills.

Ramos believes he actually has a more rewarding job than Klinsmann. “I get to mold a team,” he says, stressing the word mold.

Barely a month ago, he became aware of Alonso Hernandez, a 19-year-old out of El Paso, Texas, who suddenly broke into the first-team roster of a leading Mexican club, C.F. Monterrey.

The coach there had worked with Ramos, and Ramos studied video of every second that Hernandez had played before he called him into his squad.

Americans back home made conclusions from the team losing to France, Colombia and South Korea in the Toulon youth tournament this past week — and beating only the Democratic Republic of Congo. The coach has tried new combinations, with different players while waiting for regular starters to be released by their Major League Soccer clubs.

He committed his players against a French team that fielded other players, and against the physical Congolese, the talented Colombians and the organized Koreans. The target is June 21 in Turkey.

“What we have,” Ramos concludes, “is the connection between youth and the senior national team.”

U.S. soccer has been 100 years in the making. There could well be players under Ramos’s wing who will break into the World Cup in Brazil just one year from now.