Sunday, November 17th - 10 hours

With the coaches from the Portland Timbers coming up soon, the coaches have been discussing who they would recommend going to Academy. I remember in high school we had a coach that was brutally honest about who he would recommend to colleges because, as he said, he had built a reputation with college coaches and if he just started recommending people who weren't actually good enough, the coaches wouldn't trust his opinion of who was a good player and who he was just trying to do a favor for. The coaches here were taking the same approach. Even if a player was good, was he or she good enough to be recommended to next level coaches? After a long break down of only a handful of players to begin with, they narrowed it down to just one of the 05 boys that they all agreed to recommend this year. On a personal note, he was one of the boys yesterday that would not stop running his mouth, but he is very good. Maybe the Academy experience will help him humble up a bit seeing how much growth he still needs to make on the field to be a truly great player. He has the potential, so that's what I'm going to hope for him. As a coach, I loved when the directors would all show up to my games, usually that was only sometimes at tournaments. It was nice being included in director type conversations in evaluations like this and having a wider range of knowledge of players they were discussing.