A master class in soccer

Photo Courtesy of tacoma tide

PASSING IT ON. Coach Fran O’Brien shares his experience with the young players on the Tacoma Tide. Steve Mohn, one of O’Brien’s young players, takes a shot in a recent game.

Fran O’Brien, coach of the Tacoma Tide, has racked up more than a few soccer victories in his long career and has seen what a good team looks like, inside-out. The Tacoma Tide’s past weekend’s games (June 6-7) were supposed to tell him something about where they are as a team at this point in the season.

The team came into the weekend with a 3-2 record, fresh from a convincing 5-0 victory over the Spokane Spiders, a team that had beaten them the first week of the season. The Tide came out of the weekend with two more victories, including a very consequential 4-0 triumph over the previously unbeaten Vancouver Whitecaps.

“At the beginning of the season, I would not have said my expectations were all that high for us,” said O’Brien, following the strong weekend showing. “But at this point, I would have to say our expectations are quite a bit higher.”

The Tide, whose roster is made up of mostly college players, did not have its full complement of weapons when the season began. But now, with more depth and the strong play of midfielders Macheal David, Chase Tangney, forward Rory Agu, and the fierce goal tending of Jordan Jennings, the team is settling into a winning groove.

And after a loss by Yakima to Spokane last weekend, the Tide is now in first place.

The coach said he likes almost everything he sees about the team, in particular the way the players respond to teaching.

“It is a very coachable group,” he said.

O’Brien, his players know, has considerable experience to draw from as a professional player during the 1970s and 1980s in Ireland and then for the Philadelphia Fury of the North American Soccer League (NASL). When the Fury moved to Montreal after the 1980 season, O’Brien went with the team and spent the next two seasons with the renamed Montreal Manic. In 1983, he signed with the Vancouver Whitecaps and spent the next two seasons with them. In 1984, he was a second-team NASL All Star with the Whitecaps.

When the NASL folded at the end of the 1984 season, O’Brien signed with the Dallas Sidekicks of Major Indoor Soccer League (MISL). He finished his career in 1987 with the Tacoma Stars before retiring from professional soccer and going into the construction business.

When O’Brien signed on to coach the team in 2007, his immediate goal was to develop a talented group of young soccer players who had already achieved a place in the USL Premier Development League, conceived as the top level of men’s amateur soccer competition in the United States. How far this – or any – group of talented athletes can go, he knows, is largely a function of cultivation, of teaching the tactics and techniques elite players come to acquire.

It is becoming apparent to him that the players are learning what he is attempting to teach.

“Their passing skills and technique are quite good. We are working at staying focused on getting the ball, maintaining possession of the ball, challenging aggressively for every possession,” he said.

And the big lesson: Attack. O’Brien is seeing his team taking on a much more assertive personality. As a result of a more attacking style, the team’s scoring opportunities are increasing dramatically.

The league the Tide plays in, known as the Premier Development League, is likened to a shop window for professional teams hoping to discover aspiring professional players who may enter the MLS SuperDraft. Many of the players currently playing in Major League Soccer and elsewhere began their careers in the PDL.

O’Brien’s assessment is that in a few short years the development of players in the United States now rivals that of the players in England and Ireland. And the players on this team, most of them from the Tacoma area, have an opportunity to compete at the next level.

“They are very talented players, and they are good workers – they are learning doing a lot of the right things, making good decisions. And it is showing on the field.”

With their past few performances, victories of 5-0, 2-0, and 4-0 (this against a “residential” team from Canada, one that lives together and that practices every day), the Tide has put itself in a good position for one of the two top spots in their division – a requirement for playoff qualification. Next weekend (June 14-15), the Tide travel to Utah to meet the Ogden Outlaws and then the BYU Cougars. O’Brien is waiting to see if they can take these teams to school on the road.

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