Over the last decade, Akron’s engendered a deserved reputation as one of the most sheltered developmental alcoves for young players in all of college soccer.

From Ken Lolla to Caleb Porter and now Jared Embick, the Zips have pushed out a stunning repertoire of pro players over the past 10 years. Darlington Nagbe. Perry Kitchen. Wil Trapp. DeAndre Yedlin. Kofi Sarkodie. Teal Bunbury. Zarek Valentin. Steve Zakuani. The list lengthens by the day.

More than that, Akron plays a truly aspirational style of soccer. The Zips, faithful to keep-it-on-the-grass soccer to the end, most recently made an impressive run to the College Cup semifinals in 2015 before falling in penalties to Jordan Morris and eventual champion Stanford. And they did it by playing through the midfield and connecting the back and front lines with a dizzying array of passes. Porter’s famous style that produced the moniker “Death by 1,000 Passes” during the Zips’ run to the 2010 national title is alive and well.

Embick’s ascended to that throne with aplomb. And based on the style he’s helped engender, it might not be long before an MLS franchise approaches him with an offer he can’t refuse as well.

In the meantime, Embick is one of the brightest minds in American soccer. TopDrawerSoccer.com recently sat down with the Akron boss to get his take on the current shape of American development, training focus, MLS’s commitment to its academy system and more.

What’s your take on the current development landscape in a general sense?

“I think ultimately you have your U.S. national team that looks at it from the perspective of, how do we get better and win a World Cup? And then MLS is basically about how do we promote our Homegrown players. I don’t necessarily think the two are completely in cahoots on how it should work. I think our biggest issue is between 12 and 18. When you watch a game overseas, like I watched Leverkusen and Schalke this weekend, I think there were five and six kids between 18 and 21 that started and played regularly in the Bundesliga. When everyone here says that they think it’s the worst between 18 and 22, ultimately if you asked a lot of academy directors over there, they’d tell you they don’t think they have much between 18 and 22 that they like.

“What they do better of is they can get guys ready to start between 18, 19 and 20. Go through those leagues like Germany and see how many starters are there playing meaningful minutes between 18-21. What do we have: Pulisic, Kellyn Acosta? I think that’s kind of where we have to get better. We have to get guys ready to be pros by 18. I don’t think it’s as easy as just saying you need to go sign Homegrown. Our guys aren’t necessarily ready. That’s what I’ve noticed.

“Over Spring Break I went over to Germany, Belgium and Holland and I watched first team trainings, but I also watched a U17 tournament with Barcelona, Benfica, Ajax, those type of clubs. And then a U19 tournament with Leverkusen, FC Köln, Tottenham, PSV. The difference of pace and structure between those games and you watch even our (Development Academy) playoffs, it was night and day.

“When I was at Genk (in Belgium) I was in with the youth academy director, and my friend coaches the U13s there. I was just asking some normal philosophy questions, how they try to develop this or that, and he just whips out his computer and he’ll have a whole powerpoint presentation on this.

“What they emphasize in training, for most people, how they think training works is you play a game, you do some things well, you do some things not so well and you spend that week trying to fix those mistakes, and then you play the next game. That’s how you would assume most people work at it in the U.S. When we first started with Caleb (Porter), that’s how it kind of worked. They don’t look at it that way overseas. They have a plan. Youth results are of minimal importance 90 percent of the time. They’ll want to go to some tournaments and do well, but they’ll go in two week structures. So for two weeks they’ll work on build-up play against high pressure. Then they’ll work it down against teams at low pressure. They just stick to training based on that for two weeks. After those two weeks they’ll look at defending. Maybe these two weeks we’re going to do high pressure. The results are that they’ll still get results because they’ve got good players, but if they do any film, it’s on those areas of the game.

“At Genk, the whole powerpoint shows them how they want to play, and it goes through each of these phases as well. They’ll talk about key things they want to achieve. So by the time a kid is 18 and makes a game, he’s probably gone up and down the field with where he should be and what he should be doing for 5-6 years. So then you can imagine those guys can play a lot faster just from them having an idea of what they want to do, how they’re going to go about it. Each year, if he can show he can do it well, he advances to the next age group.

“This is how they did it with De Bruyne. I’m thinking to myself, up until two years ago even I stuck with the, alright, we did switch the ball well or we didn’t switch the ball well, so we’re going to work on those things this week. They build their whole foundation year by year by getting more detailed. That’s how almost all the clubs we’ve talked to do it.

“Then I asked them the question everybody asks, is why wouldn’t you just play like the first team? Like with Barcelona, obviously they’re the most famous for playing their youth like the first team. They’ll say that they love to play that way, but there’s two things that keep us from doing it. Barcelona, they buy the best youth players. These guys aren’t all from Barcelona. And he said that those clubs made the decision to hire anybody based on that philosophy.

“Bilbao, they can only take players from the Basque region (in Spain). They pretty much have a new coach every 2-3 years. So if he has a different philosophy then the next, then we’re changing our youth philosophy every 2-3 years. They’d just rather develop a total player instead of maybe developing a first team philosophy and have guys who can play a couple different styles of play.

“I think that’s the way our youth has got to go, and I think maybe with the Development Academy it’s starting to go that way. But in our games (in the U.S.), there’s just too much time and space. Compared to the next level, they’re just too slow of pace, even guys we get from the Development Academy. It can be a struggle for the majority of them. It takes a while to adjust them to the speed of college.

“We just played the Columbus Crew this weekend, and we struggled with the jump in the speed of play. The best way I can explain it is people who run on a treadmill for 6 miles an hour for 60 minutes and have no problems. Then we go play an MLS team and we’ve got to go run on the treadmill at 10 miles an hour for 60 minutes. Well, you can probably do it for about 40 minutes, and then there will be a serious drop in our performance. And then it’s wherever we’re at in the game; could you hang on or make subs or changes to adjust it? Essentially that’s what happened. We were 2-2 with the Crew reserves and then it was 4-2, we gave up two late goals.”

You guys get a lot of high quality 18-year-olds, a lot of kids from the Development Academy. Can you pinpoint general areas where American players of that age are deficient?

“They don’t work hard enough and they’re not really fully attuned to details. A lot of them will be the best player, and in the majority of those cases they have to play to help their team win, so they’re not forced to do the work rate they’ll need to do at better levels. And then just tactically, even the other day we went through a video session, and you go through some of the basics and you ask them how you position yourself. Without me telling you where you’re positioning, how else would you figure it out? There’s always four things you look at to determine your position. Well, they struggled to get through that. To me, they should’ve known that by 14 at the latest.

“Just simple things like that. I think where the Europeans get us is, they’re not better athletes. They’re not necessarily more technical, they can just do everything at a little bit faster of a pace because they’re just more tactically organized throughout their career in understanding where they need to be more times than our guys understand where they need to be.
“We’ll have odd results here and there, but consistently I don’t think we can get those results. Not the way we’re training and dealing with players now.”

Do you think MLS does enough to promote development?

“They’re more into branding and marketing and growing the league than they are about developing younger players. It’s hard for an 18-year-old to jump up to the MLS for a variety of reasons. We’re still more interested in bringing over guys at the end of their career that’ll put fans in the seats and gain revenue than we are promoting a Kellyn Acosta. Probably if Kellyn Acosta was at any other club, he probably wouldn’t have been promoted.

“(FC Dallas) has promoted a lot of kids, and the majority of them have not worked out. Until it gets more stable with our league, I just don’t think they have a clear path. The youth has to get better and the league has to decide that we want to go that direction.

“You can break it down all the way to if we had promotion-relegation, would that help all this? A huge part of it I think is, there’s no incentive in this country for the development of players. In Europe, that’s how some clubs survive. They promote youth, they stay mid-table, sell their kid off for $20 million when they get a special one and that funds the club for a while. They might not have the funds to compete and win it all, but they can develop.

“Here, the Cleveland Internationals have I think eight guys in MLS. Well, their kids have to pay to play in their academy because there’s no funding to help it. If they would’ve gotten money for those eight kids in MLS, that means another 40 kids don’t have to pay. Those things I think over time help. The message is hey, we might not win this, but we can produce maybe another Darlington Nagbe we can sell, and things are different.”

If you were the head of development for USSF, what’s the first thing you do?

“It’s tough. I’d definitely push some compensation. I’m not a fan of the U.S. having a national team for each age group. I think at that age it sends the wrong message. It kind of entitles the kids. If anything, you bring them in for a month or a year or something.

“My message would be to increase the tempo of the games. I know they said hey, we want everyone to play through the back, play through the midfield and that’s going to help develop players. Well, it can. It can get you more technical, but ultimately we need to be able to play with less time and space. So preaching compactness, pressure and those things on the other end; playing through pressure, things like that.

“We can figure it out, but how you get those changes across, it’s not going to be easy. You talk about the massive land we have in the U.S. You change something in Belgium, where every major team is within two hours of each other, it’s a lot easier to organize and implement than it would be here.

“You’ve got to put it on the MLS. It’s your domestic league. It’s got to develop the majority of your players for your pool. That’s where most of the better kids are going to gravitate toward, so the MLS teams have to be different, have to be at a better level. Unfortunately Jurgen (Klinsmann) as technical director is kind of in a bad spot.”

Akron’s played a really flowing style of soccer for about a decade now. Is that just a decision that teams have to make to play better soccer? Do more pro teams in the U.S. need to make that decision?

“I think what gets difficult about it is, even in college what hurts is the one game where you’re not clicking on all cylinders you may lose, and then there’s your season. Like Stanford (a 0-0 game Akron lost in penalties in the College Cup semifinals) was the only game we didn’t score a goal in, even though we probably had a little anxiety in there that hurt our speed of play. And then it’s like, alright, well is this the right way to go? Could we go the other way and just defend and counter? It’s easier.

“In MLS, as sad as it sounds, it’s just a really athletic league that can punish teams that open up and play. And when your job’s on the line, you can really just play it safe. I know Caleb’s gone a little more conservative (at Portland), but (Gregg) Berhalter at Columbus, those guys really open it up and play.

“I think it is a decision from a coach and a decision from a club. And you also have to make the decision to stick with it despite some results. It’s not easy to teach. It’s not easy to say let’s play through the midfield. There’s got to be more coaching in how you break down teams, in how you control counter-attacks. That’s why I think people talk highly of (Bayern Munich coach) Pep (Guardiola) and those guys. They do it, but they also win at a high rate with it. When you get to (Everton coach) Roberto Martinez, those guys try to play but they’ve been losing.

“I just don’t think it’s that easy to coach. You take a player out of the MLS and put him as a coach, he hasn’t had the time to maybe develop how he wants to play the game. So you’re going to get just, what’s the easiest thing to do? Get numbers behind the ball when you’re losing, two banks of four, and go from there. I think it’s harder to say, look, we’re going to push our fullbacks on and drop our D-mid in and open up these lines of play by moving the ball here and some quick combinations to get through. Then over in the attacking half, stay disciplined with some positioning and this and that.

“I just don’t think those players that are coaching in MLS now that have been players have learned that as players. You get guys learning on the fly. I still think MLS, we have to get it better if we want to improve.”