Lagerwey: We’re a very experienced group that’s just a step away from winning a Championship.
Photo: Alex Caulfield (Sounders FC Communications)
Update: Later episodes –
Lager than Life Pt 2- My challenge depends on how much of a pain in the neck Clint is! (opens in new window)
Lager than Life Pt 3 – Sounders ‘heartbroken’ at Seahawks loss; handles CBA diplomatically, talks about swearing (opens in new window)
Lager than Life Pt 4 – I was nervous about meeting Joe Roth for the first time!
Lager than life. Sounders new GM vows to ‘listen but be an independent voice’
New Sounders General Manager Garth Lagerwey has seen only sunshine in his new home of Seattle. If that flaunts one widely held stereotype that it rains persistently in the Cascadian winter, then his other experience conforms to the other.
Speaking exclusively to Prost Amerika on a range of issues from the club’s pre-season base in California, he observed that his welcome had been warm in more than one way:
“I’ve been there for four days and the sun has shone every single day. Everyone is kind and polite like those northwestern stereotypes. “
The tale of how he got here though is interesting.
Lagerwey revealed that he got to know his predecessor and new boss Adrian Hanauer well because often Major League Soccer likes to gauge reactions to proposals or accept initiatives, by listening to the views of both a large and a small market side to ensure all interests are covered.
He and Hanauer regularly found themselves as representatives in that two person focus group; Hanauer representing the big dog of Sounders FC while Lagerwey stood up for the interests of small market Real Salt Lake.
As well as passion for the advancement of the league, he and Hanauer share other things in common as people, although later in the interview when discussing his friendship with Adrian Hanauer, Lagerwey avoids use of the world politics when talking more deeply about things that bonded them.
Lagerwey was more or less King of the Castle in Salt Lake, especially after the departure of that other highly influential figure, head coach Jason Kreis.
With an understanding but distant owner in Dell Loy Hansen, the former goalkeeper and lawyer could have continued the excellent job he had been doing growing the sport in the Utah city, as well as fighting the good fight on behalf of all smaller market clubs in Major League Soccer.
So why did Lagerwey abandon a city that was at the time of his arrival a relative soccer desert, for a place where in terms of the growth of the sport, ‘the grass was already rave green’ ?
“Damn, I like that!, he chirps before continuing.
“There was kind of two ways to play it when I was coming out of RSL. I felt like I had done the challenge when building a team from scratch. When I came to RSL in 2007, we had nothing. No infrastructure, no players. We had players, but I think we changed 21 or 28 in the first window. So very very little talent. Not a lot of structure and support. We had to build it all out.
“It was a really fun project. We felt like we did it the right way and we built a foundation that succeeded over time; even through a couple of changes to parts of the team. It definitely felt like I had done that, and the next challenge, a separate challenge, was to be a management challenge; Can you take some of those concepts that worked in a smaller market and apply them to a big market, and take all the tools, and all the talent and all the resources, harness them and get them pulling together in the same direction? And try to get the best out of a bigger group of people … people with different talents and with different resources?
“That was a management challenge and I got real excited the more I thought about it; (the challenge) of taking on that management challenge and seeing if I could really provide some leadership in the organization, and maybe make the people who had been there 1% better and likewise keep learning myself.”
Obviously word that his contract was up at the end of 2014 was no secret around MLS. One might have thought he could be joining his former coach Kreis at the new franchise New York City FC. However, there was a lot to attract him about the Emerald City.
“That’s part of the great thing about Seattle. I’m only 42. It’s certainly old relative to when I started, relative to the players and all that. But I’m still young in my career.
“I hope to be doing this for another 25 years at least. I felt like by going somewhere to a bigger organization, where I could learn … I could learn from Adrian. I could learn from Joe Roth. I could learn from Paul Allen, Drew Carey, from the people who had been in the Sounders organization.
“(I felt like) that was a pretty cool opportunity in and of itself. To have a little bit more of a platform to maybe get views or concerns vetted with the league, I think that was something that was desirable to me as well; to be more of a participant in the future of the sport in this country.”
Lagerwey is currently with the squad in California and trying to make – while avoiding – early judgments on individual players. Squad building is the meat and bones of the job. If there is anything Lagerwey knows in soccer it’s this.
How many times have you read lazy journalists predicting a transition year for Real Salt Lake when key figures such as Jamison Olave, Fabian Espindola or Jason Kreis have left, only to see the team once again excel and challenge the big boys with a brand new squad? We’re probably doing it again somewhere as you read this!
On this occasion however, he has inherited a squad that won the Supporters Shield and this allows him to make more quiet beginning to his new task:
“One of the things I promised myself from a personnel standpoint coming in is I would spend the pre-season observing and what I meant was, when I said that, was that you have a lot of good soccer players here; and that’s exciting. That’s compelling.
“(But) until you get into an organization, you can’t get truly a sense of what the academy depth is, what’s the talent for S2, what are the backups doing, because you only see those guys three or four times a year in matches. Maybe it’s ten times … but still you don’t know them like your own personnel.
Lagerwey (l) talks with Head Athletic Trainer Chris Cornish (back to camera) and Head Coach Sigi Schmid (r)
Photo: Alex Caulfield (Sounders FC Communications)
“So that was part of it, coming in and saying ‘hey I think the back half of the roster is also pretty solid here’ and that’s a good foundation upon which to build, because I think one of the publicly expressed concerns about the group is that it’s pretty old.
“That’s a case of ‘is the glass half empty or is it half full?’ We’re a very experienced group that’s just a step away from winning a Championship. You always have to balance those things but if I am coming in, and hope to be with the club a long time, you have to think about things like building the academy, into S2, into the back half of the roster with the onus that you probably do have to turn over half of the roster in the next three years.”
Those are all normal things and that’s what I was referring to.
Having commented on the depth of his new squad to the club’s own website, he was challenged to name a battle for position that particularly excited him. Although he avoided that specific answer, he threw out a more interesting bone to chew on.
For the second year running, he is working with a brand new coach. That’s usually a circumstance associated with failure and dismissals.
“One of the things that’s interesting to me, and you’ll tell me if it’s interesting to your readers … This is my third head coaching staff in three years. That’s a thing you’d associate with a failing franchise. For various reasons, I’ve had three pretty good head coaches in Jason Kreis, Jeff Cassar and now Sigi.
“One of the things I think we got wrong last year at RSL was taking guys who had a good month or a good pre-season and preferring them over players who had been good for a couple of years previous to that.
“When you come in and you’re new, it’s important to have a viewpoint to be independent, but its also important to listen in the case that the group has a lot of success as the Sounders have had.
“It’s balancing those things and taking that experience of having worked with a number of staffs now that has made me pretty flexible with how we view these things, which is all a long winded way of saying I think it would be remiss of me to get into specifics of position battles because it’s less of what I think right now, than what our group thinks. I think the fan base is pretty familiar with that in terms of young players pushing through to the group and the veteran players that have established themselves.”
In Part 2, Lagerwey talks about a little more about personnel matters before entering onto more contentious issues facing the league.
He talks about the effect of DeAndre Yedlin’s meteoric rise on the club, tells us which question he was dreading and which one he absolutely knew was coming! (He declares he’s going to duck it and then answers it in full.)
He also discusses moving from a ‘team without stars’ to a team with some of the league’s biggest stars joking the challenge “depends on what kind of a pain in the neck Clint is!”
Then the GM is asked to comment on some of the issues surrounding the league, finances and the CBA before going on to talk about his new bosses, Adrian Hanauer and Joe Roth. He also tackles a question about supporter culture.
You can hear the full length interview on the upcoming debut episode of Prost Amerika’s new All MLS podcast starring Matt Hoffman, Sean Maslin and Brian O’Connell.
Also in the series:
Lager than Life Pt 2- My challenge depends on how much of a pain in the neck Clint is!
Lagerwey – The Best in the Business
Sounders should hire Garth Lagerwey – October 2013
Lagerwey: Removal of the salary cap is our worst case scenario – August 2012
More Sounders FC Pre-season Coverage:
Ockford takes VERY early lead in race for 2015 break-out star
