🇵🇷 Dave Sarachan is relishing the challenge of coaching Puerto Rico

The former USMNT coach explains why he took the job and what he expects out of June's WCQs.

Photo via FPF

Dave Sarachan was ready for a new challenge.

After serving as the interim manager of the United States in 2017 and 2018, he settled in with North Carolina FC of the USL Championship. When that team dropped a division to League One this winter, Sarachan left and started looking for something different.

It came to him through a contact, Manny Garcia, a former Puerto Rico U-23 player who works in player operations for Atlanta United. Garcia mentioned to Sarachan that Puerto Rico’s new federation president, Ivan Rivera, had big ambitions. After conversations with Rivera and other federation officials in which Sarachan expressed his desire to return to the international game, the long-time assistant to Bruce Arena replaced Elgy Morales as Puerto Rico manager and technical director and got to work preparing for qualification matches against Saint Kitts and Nevis and Trinidad and Tobago.

“In a perfect world, you want a few years to prepare. We only had a few months, but I found it intriguing,” Sarachan said when we chatted via Zoom last week. “I think in this region of Concacaf, Puerto Rico traditionally has has not been very strong.

“We know that based on their past results, based on rankings and all the rest, but I took a look at their games, watched some of their younger guys and felt like, at least in this chunk of time, this might be a good project for me, because, at the end of the day, I love coaching.”

The job of trying to get Puerto Rico qualified to the World Cup is not a simple one, nor is developing soccer on an island still better known for producing baseball players and boxers. That difficulty was precisely what drew Sarachan in.

“In my career of coaching, I find challenges are important,” he said “This was a big challenge. That was a driving force to get involved, and we'll see where it all leads.”

The 66-year-old is locked in for June’s World Cup qualification matches in which El Huracán Azul takes on the Bahamas and Guyana.

After that, Sarachan isn’t sure exactly what his role will look like, whether he’ll keep trying to build soccer on the island, a U.S. territory that is a full member of FIFA and other international sports organizations, or hope his few months of work serve as a springboard for the next man to come along.

“The Federation and myself both sort of approach this as, ‘Well, let's just take this phase first, the World Cup qualifiers in March and in June,’ and so I'm committed through these qualifiers,” Sarachan said. “We are going to sit and talk about a bigger-picture plan to see if it makes sense for them, if it makes sense for me, moving forward.

“But I feel committed to trying to help Puerto Rico in a bigger picture way, because I think there's there's a lot of potential there that they haven't tapped into.”

Since there is no domestic pro league in Puerto Rico, many of the players who the previous staff brought in are born and play in the mainland U.S. There were five USL Championship players on the squad Sarachan called in March. Seven more players are either at U.S. colleges or play in another U.S. lower league, and 17-year-old attacker Wilfredo Rivera signed a pro deal with Orlando City’s first team after coming through their academy.

With so little time, Sarachan was able to communicate easily with most players thanks to their English skills from time in the 48 states. He had bilingual speakers translate for members of the staff and players without mainland U.S. experience like Ricardo Rivera, the Spain-based winger who scored the equalizer helping Puerto Rico to the draw against Trinidad and Tobago.

It was a good result after the team got (metaphorically) punched in the mouth by St. Kitts and Nevis in a 1-0 loss. Sarachan said the defeat to the Sugar Boyz hurt since Puerto Rico had little film on and struggled to execute the game plan it had been working on in a short period of time.

Read More on Saint Kitts and Nevis in the previous edition of the newsletter

“Like all national teams, even with the U.S., you know, you're getting players from different parts of the of the world, but also from different sort of systems and different managers,” Sarachan said. “So, the bigger challenge (than the language) was trying to implement my philosophy and ideas with the group, as I saw them play in January, how I felt we could kind of move it from a soccer perspective. So it was morning, afternoon, evening, all day, every day for 12 days of video, on-field and individual meetings.”

Sarachan probably could be on a beach somewhere (maybe even Puerto Rico) instead of spending 12 days trying to go through bilingual film sessions, but he returns to that challenge that keeps him energetic and excited about working with young players and seeing the project through.

“I'm having fun. I'm enjoying it,” he said. “The national team work has a different rhythm because you're not together all the time, and when you are, it's intense. There's a lot a lot of work to do.

“When I left the last camp in the last set of games, I looked back on it as, in my career of coaching, it was it was probably as challenging and as much fun as I've had, because I had to take a group that I had no knowledge of, really, in 12 days and prepare them for a World Cup qualifying set of games.”

While still not mathematically eliminated, Puerto Rico needs a lot to go right to top the group. The June qualification matches may be more about establishing a foundation for the future.

Puerto Rico fans will wonder if Sarachan will be the one to continue taking on that challenge and building on that foundation or if another test calls his name.

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• Jon Arnold @ArnoldcommaJon

  With Guus Hiddink recovering from COVID-19, Patrick Kluivert is set to step in to lead the Curacao national team in June's World Cup qualification matches. Kluivert helped kickstart Curacao's rise, coaching the team in 2015 & 2016.

  

  Not much to say here beyond that I hope Hiddink’s recovery goes well and think it’s cool Kluivert is able to step in and work with Curacao once again. Clearly, Curacao is a place where a lot of people are passionate about working and helping the sport grow there.

• Tonight marks the kickoff of the FLOW Caribbean Club Championship in the Dominican Republic. Even I don’t give this tournament the attention it probably should get (I have to sleep too, friends), but there are some familiar faces on the rosters. Sticking with the Puerto Rico theme, former national team standout Hector “Pito” Ramos is on the roster of Metropolitan.
  
  With the Caribbean Club Shield canceled because of the pandemic, all the teams are in one big-ol’ tournament with the winner headed to the 2022 Concacaf Champions League. (The loser of the final and the two losing semifinalists go into Concacaf League.) With Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago not sending teams because of the pandemic, we’re going to be learning about a lot of teams we’ve never learned about before.

• The Concacaf Beach Soccer Championship also is on the horizion, kicking off Monday.

  Mexico is the reigning champion, and the U.S., Panama and El Salvador also have won the event in the past.

  I know the pandemic makes everything more difficult to organize, but this tournament is taking place at the Costa Rican federation’s sporting complex which is not actually located near a body of water. The last one was in Puerto Vallarta and the one before that was in Nassau.
  
  I’d probably look to get it back on an actual beach in the future, but playing it anywhere you can haul in sand could open up a lot of possabilities for future events.

  Enjoy the weekend, tell a friend about the newsletter. See you next week!