We were fortunate enough last week to speak with U.S. Soccer Women’s Technical Director April Heinrichs on the status of player development on the girls and women’s side.  Heinrichs, who is now overseas assisting the Women’s National Team at the London Olympics, has an extended history in the women’s game including coaching the USA WNT to an Olympic Gold Medal victory in the 2004 Summer Olympics. One thing I like about April is that she gives detailed answers and avoids fluff and clichés. As a result, we are running this interview in three parts. Be sure to check out Part One.

As we begin Part Two, April elaborates on her hopes for a national scouting database to be developed.

AH:“As I said, we need to have a systematic process with electronic ratings, so all the right people can access it. Otherwise your scouting of a given age group is only as good as the coach in that place. Having all the scouts able to enter, all the coaches able to tap in to see what the scouts are saying, that is what we need. It would help us keep current on a player, but another by-product of the database is that we can also track the efficiency of a scout, and see who the better scouts are over 2-3 years.

April Heinrichs

“I can go watch U15 girls play, and I can go and tell you who some of the better players are at that event, but if I can’t compare them to the best players at the U15 national level, it’s just a dart on the wall. If the coach doesn’t have experience working with U15 players, then it’s a random dart on the wall.”

Question: Do you think this will be similar to the database that has been built on the boys’ side?

AH: “Yes. We’re starting to create a flow chart of how we want information to flow. I’m not sure if the men track how scouts are rated.  There’s also a physiological testing component we’ll want to pursue. We can pursue a similar model to the men, but tailor it to our satisfaction.”

Question: Any other data you would like to process through that?

AH: “We’ve done a large research project on youth national team players in our pools.  More than 300 players have answered a survey from the University of Delaware, a qualitative research study that asks questions to gather information. They’ve helped us to process the data and we’re learning a lot about our players. We’d like to integrate the lessons we are learning from that with new database. In 3-5 years, we’ll have a wealth of information to create new and even more relevant initiatives in the women’s game.”

Question: What kind of data are we talking about?

AH: “Just a sneak peek on some things we are zeroed in on through the survey: We now know where every youth national team player comes from, we know the demographics of each player area based on their zip code, whether they attend public, private or religious school, their parents’ involvement, their parents’ background with soccer, how many times they train per week, how many games they play per week.  We’ve crunched numbers on the actual months of birth. We’ve also collected data on our world cup rosters to look at things like height, birth order and all kinds of things. We’re still processing it to see how it impacts what we need to do at U.S. Soccer.

“Eventually we want to roll out a series of articles on all of this data. The main point of it is: Let’s be evidenced based, rather than culturally or gender or whatever other bias we might hold based on my perspective because I coach college or was a club director, instead of guessing, assuming or relying on old data or data collected on the men’s side. I hope when we roll out the articles, people will read it with a fresh perspective. We don’t want to just analyze world cup rosters, but players from 13 to their upper 30s - all of our players.

"Hopefully it helps modernize some of the coaches who have been out there for a while, who are good coaches but they can be energized and made to think about some things they haven’t before. It’s also very important for some of the administrators to give thought to this. The data is relevant to parents, players, coaches and administrators. Hopefully it helps change our culture. When I took the job, we all know things were going on culturally that had shifted us not in a positive direction. Now we need to get everybody to sign on and change things. We need to do things in a way that serves player development rather than just focusing on youth teams winning.  When we focus on teams we neglect individual player development.”

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