Today I want to talk about coaching. Not coaches, in particular, or coaching searches, but just coaching. In most sports in the United States, you learn coaching by experience. If you want to be a basketball coach, you find a way onto the staff at a local high school or college as a manager or graduate assistant and work your way up to assistant and hopefully head coach somewhere. Pretty much the same thing goes for football, baseball, hockey, horse racing, and so on. There isn’t a licensing program you have to complete to get a job. You can either coach and make a living, or you aren’t good enough and find something else to do.

For some reason, soccer is different. UEFA has a confederation-wide set of coaching standards and licenses. The US has two different sets of coaching license certifications, one overseen by US Soccer and the other by the National Soccer Coaches Association of America. I’m sure Mexico has its own licensing standards, as do Africa and Asia and CONMEBOL and so on. But why? What makes soccer coaching different from other sports that a coach has to be licensed to do his or her job?

Soccer isn’t any more or less complicated than American football. It’s probably a little less complex from a tactical standpoint, given all the moving parts in any given football play. It’s not like there’s a lot of equipment to keep up with. Team psychology is part of any sport, so that can’t be what makes soccer different. The cynic in me says licensing is a requirement so the issuing body can make money. There may be some truth to that, but not a lot.

I don’t know the answer, but here are some links:

• The USL to Hartford, CT train is steaming along nicely
• I’d laugh more at North Carolina FC but sequences like this one, which is nuts, hit a little close to home
• The latest playoff projections have Louisville City sitting fifth and missing a home playoff game. Others I’ve seen push City up to fourth, which isn’t a lot of consolation.