Tom Sermanni was named the new head coach of the U.S. women’s soccer team on Tuesday and like I said, there are going to be a lot of unhappy American and U.S.-based coaches.
Sermanni is Scottish and coached the last eight years in Australia. Many American coaches interviewed for the job and the common denominator amongst almost all of them was the feeling that the U.S. job should be filled by someone who has come up through the U.S. system. That won’t change any time soon.
Tony DiCicco elaborated on that in an interview with ESPN’s Jeff Carlisle:
“I’m going to be honest with you, I thought I was the best candidate and I still do,” said DiCicco. “I’m disappointed that [Gulati] thinks so little of American coaches. But it’s hard to say for me that he didn’t make a good choice. Tom Sermanni is a good choice and can — as so many of us can — win with this team.”
DiCicco said in that same interview that he was the second choice to Sermanni, who is a friend of DiCicco’s. I wondered how willing U.S. Soccer would be to go back to DiCicco. He was very successful in his previous time as U.S. head coach, but I suspect there was a reluctance that ‘going back’ to a former coach meant not going forward with the program, whether fair or not.
Regardless, expect this topic of U.S. coaches being in charge of the national team to be a point of contention for years to come. If a pro league can sustain itself (news on that soon), perhaps it opens the door further for a coach in the next cycle (late 2015, at the earliest). And remember, Sermanni was around for all three years of WUSA as an assistant of the Bay Area/San Jose CyberRays and then, in 2003, the head coach of the New York Power.
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Do you think an American or a ‘U.S.’ coach (example: Paul Riley is British but built resume in U.S.) should have been selected? Should it have been a woman? Should either of those even matter?
