Backpass: Banzai Pipeline
The Youth movement in Colorado has gone from a trickle to a gusher
For two weeks we’ve kind of puttered around our homes and apartments, glancing at twitter and instagram searching for soccer news - which is something of a groundhog-esque early indicator of Spring. Some MLS fans have found exciting news items to help tide them over till the season starts up in April:
kit drops…
DP signings…
heck, even disgruntled player departure controversies…
And the Rapids were silent. Well, almost silent - they announced some players switched kit numbers, which, ok. ‘MAYAKA TOOK 14! EARTHSHAKING!’
And then, in a span of 24 hours, it was player announcements galore. **FOUR** new players were announced: Oliver Larraz, Darren Yapi, Michael Edwards, and Dantoume “Yaya” Toure1. All Homegrowns.
This is super exciting news for the Rapids on so many levels. The first of which, and the most exciting, is a demonstration that the Rapids Academy is becoming an exceptionally effective pipeline of talent for the Rapids to draw from. The Front Range, with its athletic, outdoorsy lifestyle, its diverse population drawn from all over the world, and its 300 days a year of sunshine2, produces a lot of really good athletes - and soccer players in particular. Back in 2013, the Rapids decided to fully fund their boys academy teams down to the U13 level, meaning that if a kid was selected to the top level team at their age, uniforms, travel, and coaching would be entirely free. Mom and dad just had to cover gas for the many, many trips out to the DSGP complex for training on fields 17 through 22. That investment - the Rapids were one of the first MLS teams to fully fund their development academy to that age level - was the beginning of a shift in emphasis for the team that would take many years to bear fruit, but eventually, it did.
I’m happy about the Rapids youth explosion for many reasons. One is simple. I first interviewed Rapids Development Director Brian Crookham back in 2016 - he’s a heckuva nice guy, and seeing him succeed makes me happy. Another reason this gives me pleasure is based on my soccer GM-ing worldview: spending money to develop young talent rather than paying top dollar for the hottest phenom on the transfer market makes good sense, especially if you’re a smaller market team like the Rapids. If you’re Atlanta United and your owner is more-than-willing to blow fat stacks on a South American phenom and you can sell 65,000 seats 17 times a season, three $10 million-a-year-in-salary Designated Players is a plausible idea. The Rapids can’t do that, so they need to play moneyball a little, and a strong academy is a very moneyball strategy.
And this gets at a deeper notion of why this move seems like a profound statement by the Rapids - that they want to be a progressive, forward thinking development club. It took a long time to get here, but after a wave of youth signings in the past four years; Kortne Ford, Ricardo Perez, Cole Bassett, Sam Vines, Sebastian Anderson, Sam Raben, Matt Hundley, Abraham Rodriguez, Will Vint3, and the aforementioned Larraz, Yapi, Edwards, and Toure4; I think we can say that the Rapids have officially become a ‘play your kids’ team.
That might be because Rapids GM Pádraig Smith has embraced the youth-centric philosophy after trying to wheeler-dealer his way to success in the early years. Smith’s first two seasons as GM were marked with a lot of big moves - many of which were big misses. There was a lot of emphasis in 2017 and 2018 on players at European clubs and TAM spending, yielding us guys like Nana Boateng, Stephan Aigner, Joe Mason, Yannick Boli, Danny Wilson, and Johan Blomberg. One could argue that Smith made a hash of the roster for those 24 months. But one might also argue that Smith had no choice - he had to buy players rather that call them up because the Academy was suffering a bit of talent drought when he became GM. Shane O’Neill and Dillon Serna were signed as Homegrowns in 2012 and 2013, and then for the next many years, the team signed … nobody. From 2013 to 2017 - five years, zero professional prospects. Maybe the club had some guys but failed to identify them, or maybe between coaching and talent identification in that early period, there were some gaps. But whatever it was, Pádraig didn’t have the kids to play in 2017 and 2018 that should have come online in ‘15 or ‘16. So he bought guys instead. He’s become a lot more successful as a GM when he just has to buy a few pieces here and there rather than purchase an entire functioning squad with no help from the academy each year.
This sudden burst of four young signings is hugely exciting for the Rapids - and the supporters. You and I have both heard the difference in volume inside Dick’s Sporting Goods Park when the announcer calls out the starting lineup and names Tommy Smith (yaaay) and then Dillon Serna (OH MY GOD YEEEEEESSSSSSSSS). We love our local kids.
Even if I, personally, wasn’t responsible for one of the Rapids Homegrowns soccer development5, there’s something thrilling in knowing that that player down on the pitch next, standing right next to former Real Madrid star Chicharito, grew up riding his bike through Wash Park and saw his first show at Red Rocks, just like you and me. That they also get their bearings when they come out of a dark office parking lot by spinning around in search of the towering Rockies - “that’s west”. When it’s hot, they jump in the car and drive up to Vail because it’s an hour away and 20 degrees cooler. You know- they do Colorado things.
And it is fundamentally an exciting thing to be able to recognize the players on your club as kids who grew up in your community - kids that used to sit in section 105 as little guys and dream about what it would be like to play for the Colorado Rapids. It gives real meaning to the concept of a ‘home team’.
So a toast! To the Rapids banzai pipeline. May it yield many more wonderful players in the years to come.
…
Additional Backpass points of order. First, there are matters of roster-nerd-housekeeping we need to take care of. The addition of four players to the roster is great news, but it also creates a logjam in the team. The Rapids went from having their first completely full roster in recent memory - 30 players6 - to having their first *overstuffed* roster in club history, as far as I know. They’ll need to get the roster down to size by the compliance date, which is usually on-or-around MLS Opening Day (MLS 2021 roster rules have yet to be released, so we don’t know for sure yet when that is.)
They can do this the simple way, by loaning a bunch of their Homegrown players (HGPs) to USL clubs like the Switchbacks. Or, they can sell or trade a few players to make space. I don’t see any indications of that latter prospect, but you never know. I do think porking-out the roster with youngsters does imply that the Rapids are willing to sell on their two most prized youngsters, Sam Vines and Cole Bassett, to Europe if the right buyer came along and threw enough money at them.
The signing of four youth players is also interesting from the perspective of the recent announcement that Dillon Serna and Edgar Castillo have been invited to join the Rapids in training in Tucson. Serna is already signed to the Switchbacks, and now I think it’s pretty clear that Matt Pollard was right when he said on the podcast that he though his invitation was simply to let him get a workout before the USL season. With the roster the way it is, I don’t see how Serna can earn an MLS job, no matter how great he looks in Arizona. Castillo - I’m even more confused about. Is he joining the Rapids in Arizona so that he can give other coaches a look at him in games in hopes of scoring a job? Do Colorado really consider him an option as Vines’ understudy at left back, even with Steven Beitashour on the roster? Are the Rapids stockpiling LBs because their crack team of fitness scientists know something about the effects of global warming on the hamstrings of MLS fullbacks that the rest of the league doesn’t? It’s a bit of a puzzle.
…
I want to add a disclaimer to everything I’ve said here about how great the emphasis on youth development is. It *is* great, but only if you add the perspective that for every Sam Vines and Cole Bassett, you are also going to have a Sam Raben and Gale Agbossoumonde - guys that are talented soccer players, but that weren’t MLS-level talents. And that’s ok, and those guys aren’t failures. They competed at the highest level, and they were in the global top 1% of soccer players, but they weren’t elite *enough* to make the cover of the FIFA video game.
There is danger that an intentional shift towards a youth mentality might result in additional pressure at the academy level on kids performance - that instead of treating 13-year-olds like kids, you treat them like a product; instead of learning, you prioritize performance; that soccer teams and coaches become less interested in youth soccer players as ‘humans’ and more interested in them as ‘potential assets’. In short, you can make soccer miserable for some poor little guy - and suck all the fun right out of the beautiful game, making it just a job, or worse. This is a problem endemic to all youth sports in America, where some parents are either living out their own fantasies through their sons and daughters or pushing them super hard because it might get them a four-year free-ride in college. I hate all of this.7
One of the reasons I like Brian Crookham so much is that in my conversations with him, I genuinely got a sense that he cared about the person more than the soccer player - that he was truly proud of those kids that played in the academy and went to college and got a business degree and did other things. I get that sense from talking to Rapids U15 coach Marcelo Balboa, too; and I have heard from many many people that Rapids Goalkeeper coach Chris Sharpe pays as much effort to the skills and techniques of a 3rd string U11 keeper as he did to the form and performance of Tim Howard.
So be proud of the Rapids academy. But don’t let’s go nuts about it, mkay?
At one point I compared the physique and playing style of Rapids player Bismark Adjei ‘Nana’ Boateng to *the* Yaya Toure. So I might have a hard time calling Dantoume “Yaya”. I don’t wanna put a hex on the kid.
Which is total bullhonkey. It’s really 245 days.
This was brought up on our latest podcast, but Will Vint was quietly left off the roster for pre-season training and will not, to my knowledge, be on the Senior roster to start 2021, for “personal reasons.” We hope, whatever’s going on, that Vint is alright and returns to joyfully playing soccer soon.
The Rapids also have homegrowns Kellyn Acosta and Auston Trusty, although they were developed and signed to senior contracts by FC Dallas and Philadelphia Union, respectively. While the Rapids Academy did not develop Michael Edwards (DC United) or Dantoume Toure (New York Red Bull), they do get at least some credit for being willing to sign the two to professional contracts.
Holding the High Line’s favorite photographer, John Babiak, *can* claim to be personally responsible for at least a tiny bit of the development of Rapids youth talent Oliver Larriaz.
Colorado has had between 26 and 28 players on their 30 man roster since 2014, which is totally fine by MLS rules. The minimum roster size is 24 players.
In England, the problem of what happens when a kid gets axed from the Arsenal or Manchester City academy - after decades of single-minded commitment to just football - is a serious one. Young men that have often failed to focus on their studies can’t quite find their way without soccer, and don’t have a lot of career options available to them.