Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
NCAA Soccer with guest Rob Dow, Head Coach at the University of Vermont
25 Feb 2025
How did Rob Dow balance NCAA success and fatherhood?
You have a very small geographic footprint, but you have hundreds and hundreds of clubs, almost 100 professional, or league clubs, and then you have a bunch of semi-professional, right? And so there's so much opportunity for players, and I know he's the anomaly, like Jamie Vardy, right? Come out of nowhere. And we don't have that capability right now. We don't. And it's...
it makes it challenging because you get this small group of players who have basically been picked since they were 12 or 13 and all the resources have gone into those kids. And then you just hope some of them make it, right? As opposed to casting a much bigger net, which this would do.
And hopefully you get a kid who's maybe goes to college for two years and was missed by the system who then becomes a national team player.
I mean, I think the point you make is a good one. You know, when I look at Germany and I look at Holland and I look at England and these countries are the size of sometimes small states in America or even like a bigger state. And then they're having at some level, an organ, a football organization.
They're probably like you said, a hundred plus, you know, like imagine the state of New Jersey having a hundred plus professional teams, somehow, somehow linked to professional or semi-professional. You're going to have, if you are any decent player, you're going to have the opportunity to be in with one of those clubs. And, and,
um yeah the the geography has has butchered a lot of this uh you know the development in u.s soccer what's your take i know we've talked about this briefly on on kids going into the portal and and and transferring and i i i really struggle with it but i also understand a kid who's not playing and this is their one chance to find an opportunity like what's your take on that
Look, I tend to like I'm not all for player power like wholly, but I think it's I think it adds a balance. Right. And when it adds a balance, then both sides have to get creative. But what what I didn't like was, you know, a young. young woman or young man going into a university at 17, 18 years old. And then for whatever reason, right?
They, they either don't perform well or they're falling out with the coach or a new coach comes in, which we've oftentimes seen. And you're not that coach's cup of tea. They don't like your style. They want to bring someone else in. So either you just sit there and rot or you transfer, but then you sit out, you have to sit out a year, right? This, this I kind of like, because I said, okay,
NCAA sports has now become a business. Well, back up. It's always been a business. I was going to say it's always been a business. It's now become an acceptable, obvious, out in the open business. And this allows some of these young men and women to navigate their own careers and say, like, this isn't a fit any longer. And I shouldn't be punished for that, right?
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