Bite-Sized Review: How Successful Soccer Players Are Made

Captain for Life: And Other Temporary Assignments
By John Harkes, Denise Kiernan
(Gale Cengage, 1999)
260 pages

Outliers: The Story of Success
By Malcolm Gladwell
(Little, Brown and Company, 2008)
320 pages

When I borrowed John Harkes's 1999 memoir from my dad a couple weeks ago, I was both aware and unaware of my fortuitous timing.

On the one hand, I didn't know former U.S. National Team coach Steve Sampson would spill the beans about why he really left Harkes off the 1998 World Cup roster and thus thrust Harkes's book--especially the chapter deliciously entitled "Blindsided"--into the soccer zeitgeist more than a decade after it was published.

But the reason I grabbed the book from my dad's shelf in the first place was to find some clues to this mystery: How is it that Kearny, New Jersey, a blue-collar city only about three times more populous than Westbrook, produced not only John Harkes, but also two other standouts (Tony Meola and Tab Ramos) for the U.S. National Team?

Well, according to Harkes, the formula was simple: Kearny's residents possessed an unusual (at least by American standards) "love for the game." Fortunately, Harkes fleshes out this initial bare-boned explanation with anecdotes about his upbringing in Kearny.

First, there's the cultural heritage these players inherited from their immigrant-heavy families and neighbors. Everyone in Kearny either had played soccer or they were still kicking the ball around. And instead of talking about the latest last-second thriller that happened during, say, March Madness, Kearny was abuzz with the exploits of their soccer teams back home in Scotland or the results of the latest World Cup qualifier. As Harkes puts it: "We grew up in a town where soccer was the number one sport for everyone."

The other anecdotal evidence Harkes uses to explain Kearny's disproportionate contribution to the higher levels of American soccer is his recollections of the healthy mix of formal and informal soccer-playing opportunities Kearny offered its youth when he was growing up. Harkes devotes a few pages to his formal experiences playing for a club sponsoring teams from the U-8 level to the U-19 level, and he spends a couple other pages recounting his successful high school career. Most intriguing to me, however, is Harkes's reminiscences about his informal soccer-playing experiences.

Referring to it as the "heart of Kearny soccer," Harkes recounts the invaluable role Kearny's pick-up soccer scene played in his development as an expert soccer player. Forty minutes before classes in junior high were devoted to pickup soccer games, as were the forty-five minutes during lunch and the after-school sessions lasting until darkfall. Emerson Courts, a playing surface that brings to mind Westbrook's Cornelia Warren Four Season Rink on Lincoln Street, is remembered fondly by Harkes as the place where he had the freedom to develop his "own style, skill, and flair." That's undoubtedly true, but Kearny's Emerson Courts and the countless pick-up games played elsewhere were also evidently instrumental in Harkes's unintentional adherence to the 10,000-hour rule.

Until two weeks ago, I hadn't thought about Harkes's book since it first came out in 1999. However, after finishing Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell's eminently readable meditation on how people become successful, I just had to read Captain for Life to see if it contained soccer-specific confirmation of Gladwell's theories.

Sure enough, Gladwell's consideration of how one's birthday and cultural legacies factor into success (or lack of succes, as the case might be) both seem plausible, as Harkes, Meola, and Ramos probably would not have become international caliber soccer players if they hadn't grown up in soccer-mad Kearny when they did. Nor would they have achieved soccer expertise if they hadn't fulfilled the 10,000-hour rule, which is described in Outliers by the neurologist Daniel Levitin:

The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert--in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number [10,000 hours] comes up again and again.

Gladwell fittingly examines the 10,000-hour rule in the part of the book entitled "Opportunity." Which leads me to answer the question I'd asked earlier about Kearny by asking another question: How does the WSL provide its players with the opportunities (read: time) needed to achieve expertise on the soccer field, if that is in fact a goal they strive toward?

Fortunately, parts of Captain for Life and most of Outliers provide good places to find the answers.

- John C.L. Morgan

Related: Bite-Sized Review: How Soccer Explains the World (February 3, 2010)