We remain in the mostly-dead period in USL-land between Christmas and the New Year. Knowing Scott Stewart and his wiles, I expect all kinds of Louisville City news to drop like the ball in Times Square, except not at midnight January 1. More like 10 a.m. January 2 while I’m trying to get home from a certain college football-related event in Florida.
Most sportsy (and, really, non-sportsy) websites fill in this dead period with listicle posts that they wrote back in October and scheduled to post this week so they could give their barely-paid employees a week off from investigating whether LeBron’s hair transplant is really fooling anyone. BUT NOT US HERE AT LOUISVILLECOOPERS DOT COM! We’re just making up word salad like it’s any other Friday.
To wit: many people are saying that UofL’s hire of John Michael Hayden as the new head soccer coach is bigly. Even ex-Jefe Tom Farmer got in on the act! And unlike my buddy Mike Rutherford, he didn’t just cut-and-paste the UofL press release, he actually went to the news conference and stuff. Mike works really hard and has had a very difficult year being a UofL sports fan so I’ll forgive him for this serious lapse in judgment one time.*
*See, what I’m trying to do here is create a fake QUIEN ES MAS MACHO competition between two people that I happen to like so that the Invisible Hand Raises both of their Games(TM USL) and we, the sheep consumers all benefit because that’s how capitalism reportedly works.
Anyway, back to John Michael. I’m a little surprised by this hire, in that I expected UofL to try and find a like-for-like replacement for Ken Lolla, who suddenly left the post a few weeks ago. Rumors on the interwebs were that current Akron Zips coach Jared Embick was Vince Tyra’s number one target, having made the College Cup final earlier this month. Lolla himself was the Zips head man before taking over UofL’s then-moribund program. Hayden was also a rumored candidate, but it seemed to me a more logical choice to hire someone that had similar high-level head coaching experience to lead what’s become a nationally prominent program down on Floyd Street.
That said, Hayden, a Louisville native, college All-American at IU and former MLS player at Houston, certainly picked up some invaluable experience under Lolla and must have impressed the UofL brass enough to earn the spot. To his credit, he’d already earned his A license from USSF before returning to become an assistant at UofL in 2015.
He’ll have his work cut out for him. College coaches in the US have to compete not only with each other for recruits, but also with MLS and foreign professional clubs (including USL sometimes) to sign top youth prospects. More and more of the nation’s top soccer talent is skipping school to take a chance on a professional career, while the differences between college soccer and the professional game become more apparent.
In any event, Hayden’s appointment has drawn nothing but positive responses from the soccer community thus far. I hope he continues what has become a good relationship with our own club in the future, and invite everyone to join me in wishing him the best of luck as the new Cards head coach. Except when they play Kentucky, but that’s mostly just me.
