Since the fateful night a year ago on the wet pitch in Couva USMNT fans have been calling for change within US Soccer, myself included, and now that the pieces are in place to begin working on that change fans are already saying that the change isn't enough or detrimental and that we should have a coach now. Let's look at why these pleas are prematrure.

The most common refrain I hear is we should have a coach by now and I don't see how that's possible. After the final whistle blew in the last WCQ Sunil knew he was done as the president of US Soccer even if publicly he stated he was thinking about running for reelection. He couldn't appoint a new coach because what authority did he have even if he was still the president until the election held earlier this year? Then after the election new boss Carlos Corderio ran on the promise of instituting a GM position for both the Men's and Women's team. He couldn't immediately turn around and hire a coach before the position that was the cornerstone of his campaign was filled or what little goodwill he had with the fans would be gone. Now the position of GM is a new thing for the USSF even if sister organizations within the US have had similar positions for years, USA Basketball calls the position team director and USA Hockey in fact calls it General Manager, so the board of directors have to figure out what the roles of position are and that takes time to figure out then you have to find someone who will take the job. That brings me to Earnie Stewart, the first GM in USSF history only took the job over a month and a half ago so he has to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of the player pool in order to find a coach that fits what we can do as a team and then develop a shortlist of guys that fit the team. This takes time and Stewart has said he is shooting to have the job filled by the end of the year at the latest.

On the there isn't enough change statement Earnie is trying to centralize everything which is something that has not been done before in US Soccer. France has central training center and 14 satellite ones, Germany only centralized their development system after disaster that was Euros 2004 because of resistance from the regional associations. England has St. George's Park where every team within the FA is housed amongst a host of nations. So Earnie having the coach in Chicago where he can work hand in hand with the new coach, scouts, youth coaches and other personnel is a radical departure for US Soccer that is the change that people wanted where there is more input on the player pool than a coaches whim.

This ties in to the change is detrimental, everyone points to the Tom Byer pilot program being ended after the six month period it was brought in and this was the smoking gun that US Soccer didn't care about developing players. The question I always was left with is how is this program different than what we do now? I don't have kids and I don't coach youth soccer so I honestly don't know what development plan is being used but everyone has sworn this was a radical departure from what we do now but no one has explained how. Now the only thing I can really can go off of with Earnie is the Union academy which is starting to crank out talent for the Union, during a game earlier this year 3/4 of their defense had come through the academy, here's an interview with SBN he did last year on youth development.

Don't get me wrong I'm not happy with a lot of things US Soccer does or has done but I'm not going to start being fed up because we haven't radically changed an organization in eight months from a new president being elected, people within the German structure had tried to make changes for the better part of a decade before people actually listened. So give people a chance to do their job before saying they don't care about your pet project.