🇧🇿 - Can coaching education rescue soccer in Belize?
Plus an insane penalty shootout & a memory of Daryl Grove
You can’t pick your geography. No matter how hard countries might try to be somewhere they’re not, Andorra is still in Europe, so it plays in UEFA. Mexico is still in North America, so it plays in Concacaf and Belize is still in Central America.*
So, even though it has much more in common with the Caribbean members of Concacaf, it traditionally has been judged against countries like neighboring Guatemala or nearby Honduras.
When judged by those standards, soccer in Belize rarely measures up.
The senior men’s national team boasts just 21 wins in 90 matches since the team’s competitive debut in 1995, with a fourth-place finish in the 2003 Copa Centroamericana the standout moment in the country’s soccer history. Four of those wins are over Nicaragua, the only other Central American country Belize ever has beaten.
With a population (419,199) that would make it the smallest country in Central America even if you multiplied it by nine and a lack of the kind of soccer culture that makes some of its rivals perennial contenders to qualify for the World Cup, it would be easy for Belize to accept it never will be a powerhouse in the sport. Or, they can try to change it.
That’s exactly what Jonathan Hooper wants to do, which is a little strange for someone who had never heard of Belize a few years ago. Hooper is an Englishman in his early 30s, and he’s spent most of his life so far in education. He has a law degree, a Master’s in education and taught computer science.
Now, he’s the head of coach education for the Football Federation of Belize, plus the head coach of the U-17 boys national team and the assistant coach for the U-20 and U-19 boys national teams.
It was just more than a year ago that Hooper landed in Belize with the goal of volunteering and making a difference for two years before returning home. It’s an unconventional goal that puzzled even those he was trying to assist.
He chose Belize in part because of the lack of a language barrier and never imagined he would be doing as much as he’s done in the first of a planned two years away from the UK volunteering. Hooper initially hoped to work with the Ministry of Education but found that after several months of correspondence they were worried he “was an email con artist or scammer or something,” he said with a laugh. The FFB was more accommodating
“I guess the biggest shock to me, obviously I arrived and had never said to them in advance, ‘Here’s what I will do for you.’ I said, ‘I’m free labor, I’ll help,’ and I was kind of thrown into a meeting my first week and it was like, ‘Can you just present why you’re here?’ And that’s a really difficult question!” he said on a Zoom call.
It didn’t take long for Hooper to win FFB officials over, so much so that days after arrival he was taking charge of a U-17 club squad representing Belize at a tournament about two months out, a journey he chronicled in one of a series of YouTube videos.
Hooper says you’ll never see him coaching a senior national team, but he’s not a novice. He coached a women’s team in England and worked at a school that encouraged cross-pollination with coaches from other sports, some of whom he said had won Olympic medals in their disciplines. He also has an FA Level 2 qualification.
Even still, he was surprised to be thrown into the fire, and was shocked to find that two players who had gone through his first training session but didn’t seem like they quite belonged were actually suspects in a drive-by shooting on the run from police.
Sadly, Hooper said, crime is a recurring issue in Belize City, the country’s largest metropolitan area. He recently proposed a weekend soccer school, designed to bring down the age at which people in Belize start to play the game. Many kids in Belize start as late as age 10 or even 12. In meetings about the program, most regions asked about getting balls and supplies. Belize City asked about security.
The program, based on a study Hooper carried out from his home in Belmopan, will essentially mean free clinics for kids ages 5-10 every weekend at sites all around the country.
Additionally, Hooper is expanding the coaching education team from eight volunteers to 30 over the next three months, and hopes to include at least 10 women in that number with no females currently part of the coaching education team. Coaching education could be critical for Belize’s national team to go from Central American doormat to feisty underdog.
While outsiders often can run into resistance, Hooper said his ideas generally have been welcomed, perhaps in part because “I’m always trying to give people opportunities to grow alongside me to eventually step in and take that (responsibility).”
Deon McCauley is one of Belize’s few recent soccer success stories, with his 11 goals in 2014 World Cup qualification making him top scorer worldwide alongside Luis Suarez and Robin van Persie. But the forward said projects like those Hooper are trying to launch can help Belize compete and establish a more professional structure.
“That’s excellent for somebody like him to be down there,” McCauley said in a phone interview. “Obviously, we don’t have all the resources that we need as a country to show at the highest level in this sport. That’s another thing: We need to get the resources that the players need in order to feel comfortable, go out there and give it their all.
“We always have to worry about so many other issues rather than just going out there and playing ball. Most of the guys, they work and they play soccer at night. It’s a hobby to them, you know?”
If Belize can get to a level where players like him who “eat, sleep and dream” the sport are the rule rather than the exception, McCauley says they’ll be able to compete.
For now, he has his sights set on captaining the Jaguars through the World Cup qualification campaign scheduled to begin in March with a group he views as ‘attainable’ thanks to Belize’s positive history against Nicaragua, though he admits Haiti will pose a challenge with its roster of professional players based in leagues that provide the sort of training Belize’s players lack.
“You go in the morning, check your weight, have weight training, have different sessions, video time, it’s a whole lot of stuff that people in Belize don’t realize that players need to excel in this sport,” he said. “It’s hard going against those guys playing in the French first division, Canada, here and there. We only can do so much. Us as players have to take on our own personal training or whatever it takes for us to get to that level,”
McCauley himself may have a part to play in Belize’s attempted coaching revolution. The 33-year-old lives in Georgia and, in addition to playing in the UPSL, also is in his second year on the coaching staff of local youth club Georgia Rush.
“I don’t brag to them,” he said, when I asked him if he mentioned his past achievements to his 2010 boys team. “I have my technical director usually telling the parents that I’m famous in Belize, that I scored a lot of goals and stuff like that when I’m introduced to them.
“It’s kind of humbling to get reminded I accomplished things like that. Every time I go to the national team and score goals, he shows the goals to the kids to give them a little motivation.”
Whatever it takes to provide that spark, whether it’s a 10-year-old from suburban Atlanta or a six-year-old in Belize City kicking a ball for the first time.
*Yes, I know Australia plays in AFC and Israel is in UEFA and we have a trio of geographically South American countries in Concacaf. Please do not send me emails about this.
Shootout streak
We’ll talk more about the Concacaf League in future editions of the newsletter, but did you see that penalty shootout Thursday night? Honduran club Motagua rallied from two goals behind to force a shootout and then won that shootout 15 to 14.
The shootout took EIGHTEEN rounds, 36 kicks were attempted. Comunicaciones defender Gerardo Gordillo blew a chance to win it not once but twice.
The entire shootout, which you can watch below, lasts a half-hour:
Apparently there was a game in a South Korean high school match last year in which 62 kicks were attempted (shout out to Twitter follower @danpin08 for the find) and that lasted an hour.
Tim Sokol ran down a professional match, the 2005 Namibian Cup final, which saw 24 rounds of kicks.
The Concacaf League returning has been a bit rocky, with two matches postponed because of COVID-19 testing (Belize’s Verdes FC withdrew), but even before going to the third shootout in four matches in the competition, Thursday’s game was a classic. The matchups in the next round could produce even more competitive games.
A memory of a friend
I wasn’t as close to Daryl Grove, the host of Total Soccer Show and advocate for American soccer who died Thursday night after being diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer in early 2019, as many were in the American soccer community. Yet, like so many, I was privileged to call Daryl a friend and cherished the brief time we did spend together.
I’d encourage you to listen to his co-host Taylor Rockwell’s words posted Friday morning, to read this thoughtful tribute from fellow niche-soccer-newsletter-baron Snaves and to poke around soccer Twitter and see what people are posting about Daryl.
The sheer number of tributes and their uniformity in mentioning Daryl’s genuine passion for the sport, his support for people who, like him, wanted to start a project because they believe in the local game and just his unfailing cheerfulness and sheer niceness should tell you a lot about the man. Right now, it sells to be edgy and biting, but Daryl’s legacy is one of care.
My biggest involvement with Daryl was that he was often a guest I could rope into coming on the American Soccer Now in 10 or 15 Minutes podcast on short notice. In fact, I was looking back at emails we’d traded over the years and multiple times he shifted around recording TSS, the project he was trying to build into the podcast juggernaut it later would become (but at the time was still mostly a show on community radio) so he could help out and hop on the ASN show.
To be totally honest, if I was working on one of my main projects in the past few months and some kid was like, “Hey, want to come on this fake game show podcast that will be over in 15 minutes? It’s a pain to record and we get a few hundred listens max per week?” I’d be like, “Yeah, good luck, no thanks.” Daryl not only joined the fun, he got the tone exactly right and made the show better.
Losing Daryl from our community has inspired me to make time for those sorts of opportunities and also to work even harder to create work I’m proud of and that hopefully the soccer community enjoys.
That includes this newsletter, and I’m excited to get back to a more frequent publishing schedule now that some of my other obligations are winding down.
I hope you, too, will take some inspiration from Daryl’s life and make your communities better places.