[Preface: With all of this discussion concerning South Carolina clubs and mentioning the Dallas Texans, I thought folks might be interested in this.][
Dallas Morning News Article Link]
Reviled by rivals, Hassan Nazari changed the rules in youth soccer
By BARRY HORN / The Dallas Morning News
Seventh in a series exploring the impact of youth sports.
Not everyone who competes against Hassan Nazari and his teams refers to the coaching director of the Dallas Texans soccer club as "The Satan of Soccer."
Some who really don't like him prefer "Hassan bin Laden."
It can be a tough crowd inside the world of select youth soccer, where rival clubs compete for children's skills, their parents' money and the rewards reaped from recruiting the proper combination of dollars and soccer sense."Cutthroat," is how Nazari rival Kevin Smith, coaching director of the Solar Soccer Club, describes the competitive youth soccer environment.
And Nazari is perceived as the bloodthirstiest of all.
"We all want to win," Smith says. "That's the name of the game. But Hassan wants to kick everyone's ass any way he can, and we all want to really kick his.
"That's just the way it is."
That's the way it is in a world where boys and girls as young as 11 who don't measure up to a coach's expectations can be erased from a roster at season's end.
That's the way it is in a world where children sign contracts binding them to teams because coaches can't be trusted not to recruit them away in midseason.
That's the way it is in a world where teams that don't win enough games are summarily exiled to a lower league.
That's the way it is in a world that can cost parents thousands of dollars a year, and short-term return on the investment frequently is measured in an ability to win games.
That's the way it is in a world where players scratch for college scholarships and one in 50 may graduate into at least a partial reward.
That's the world where Hassan Nazari has found his nirvana.
Perhaps that is why Nazari, a native of Iran who played in the 1978 World Cup, is not particularly wounded by any slurs.
He flinches only slightly when they come up in conversation.
Rather, he says with a touch of pride, the name-calling is proof positive that the soccer club he envisioned, founded and built to his own specifications has arrived.
Nazari wanted to build a supersized club with a huge feeder system in the mold of successful European clubs.
Not yet 10 years old, Nazari's Texans have mushroomed into the largest and arguably the most successful soccer club in North Texas, leaving older, more established clubs in their wake.
The North Texas State Soccer Association recognizes 30 clubs that field at least six competitive teams.
There are an additional 122 clubs that field five or fewer teams. And still, better than one of every 10 select players in North Texas plays for the Texans, who boast 68 age-specific competitive boys and girls teams based in Dallas, Arlington and Lewisville.
In May, the Texans won an unprecedented eight Texas State Cup age-group championships.
Such success has earned the Texans a coveted sponsorship from the Nike empire. Only 19 other youth soccer clubs nationwide are recipients of such benevolence from the giant sporting goods company.
"The rivalries in youth soccer are big. The jealousies are bigger. The place the Texans are in used to be somebody else's place," Nazari says.
"We came in, and we took it."
Took it by instilling a win-at-all-costs philosophy that leaves little room for players to develop their long-term skills, his rivals say.
Huy Nguyen / DMN
In less than a decade, Hassan Nazari has built his Dallas Texans into a soccer power – while alienating many area coaches.
Took it by ignoring rules. Took it by ruthlessly recruiting, padding teams with topnotch players who might get more playing time and chances to develop at other clubs.
Or, as his legion of supporters maintain, took it with a foreign but sensible philosophy of what a U.S.-based club should be. Took it because of Nazari's keen eye for talent. Took it with sweat and hard work.
Took it because Nazari was selling a better product, and parents and their children were buying.
"I'd heard rumors about Hassan for a long time, but I never paid attention until after he started coming after my players," says Scott Kerlin, coaching director of the Tarrant County-based American Eagles.
"I know what he did to me."
Kerlin and Nazari played professional soccer together for a brief season in the mid 1980s on the Dallas Americans, another in the progression of ill-fated teams that failed to make a go of it locally, but whose alumni rooted themselves in the community and helped build the world of select soccer.
The former teammates no longer speak to each other.
Just another envious competitor, Nazari says.
Besides, Nazari says, he has all the friends he needs within what he refers to as "the Texans organization." That includes the parents of 1,100 players ages 11 through 19, a score of loyal coaches and an army of devout volunteers.
"I've liked Hassan from the day I met him," says Kenny Medina, who is in charge of all of the Texans' girls teams. "He is a straight shooter, and you always know where you stand. He is not the most diplomatic person because he doesn't try to be."
As when Nazari talks about his friends working at rival clubs.
"Outside of the Texans organization," Nazari declares, "my enemy's enemy is my friend."
Asked to name a competitor whom he could identify as a friend, Nazari shrugs.
Escape through soccer
Hassan Nazari, 47, was born in the city of Abadan in southwest Iran. His father was involved in the petroleum business.
Nazari was 3 when his mother died. Two years later, his father died. Raised by an older sister, Hassan found escape from his recurrent sadness on the soccer fields.
Over the years, he developed into a gifted sweeper on a local youth team. He loved playing the position that is the last line of defense in front of the goalkeeper.
Courtesy photo
Nazari (right) played sweeper for his native Iran in the 1978 World Cup. He's shown before a qualifying game vs. Kuwait.
"You have to be extremely smart to play the position," he says. "You have to know all the angles and how to use them."
At 16, Nazari joined the Iranian national team. He played on the Iranian team at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal and the 1978 World Cup in Argentina. Nazari, a national hero, might never have left his homeland if not for the 1979 revolution.
Unsure of soccer's place in the new Islamic Republic, Nazari fled to train with a club in Spain. He ultimately played soccer for five years in the United Arab Emirates and two years in Saudi Arabia.
In 1985, his travels took him to Dallas to visit a brother. Not long after, he signed on to play with the Dallas Americans in the four-team United Soccer League. The season started in mid-May and ended abruptly when the league suspended play five weeks later.
Nazari, however, made a fateful connection on the Americans. Teammate Charlie Kadupski doubled as coaching director of the Storm Soccer Club. He asked Nazari to work with some of his teams. Nazari leaped at the chance.
"I didn't need the money," Nazari says. "I had been a professional soccer player for a long time. I wanted to help teach this great game to young players."
Nazari coached with the Storm for eight years, developing some of the club's top teams. But he wanted more. He wanted to run his own club based on what he had seen in his soccer-playing travels throughout Europe and South America.
"Clubs here were not really clubs," Nazari says. "They were individual teams sharing the same name. The under-11 teams had no idea what the under-15 teams were doing. The coaches all had different philosophies. They went to different tournaments
"I wanted to start something closer to what the great European clubs like AC Milan and Ajax were doing. I wanted continuity, a philosophy. I wanted accountability. I wanted to stand out. I wanted to compete nationally. I wanted to be known internationally. I wanted to be the best from top to bottom.
"I had a vision."
And so he began traveling the country to study successful high-profile teams. He went to San Diego to look at the Nomads, to Tampa to watch the Chargers and to St. Louis to pick the brains of the Busch, a club sponsored by Anheuser-Busch Inc.
And he made frequent trips to Houston to visit an old friend, Roy Rees, the Welsh-born coach of the U.S. national under-17 team and the coaching director of the Houston Texans.
Model organization
The Houston Texans for years had been regulars at tournaments in Dallas. Nazari marveled at their success.
Rees' Texans were born in 1986 out of what he calls "a couple of parent-driven teams with nothing in common." Rees changed that.
"There was no vertical alignment," Rees says. "They had different sponsors, attended different tournaments, had no connection other than their name.
"That's not how the rest of the world works, not how players are developed. I changed the philosophy."
Of course, Rees' status as a national team coach didn't hurt. Players flocked to his Texans from throughout Houston, as well as Austin, San Antonio and as far away as Mobile, Ala.
Huy Nguyen / DMN
Hassan Nazari says his club has inspired jealousy by surpassing more established rivals. Critics accuse of him breaking rules and ruthlessly recruiting players.
Nazari, with Rees' blessing, copied his Houston blueprint, borrowed his club's name, adapted a little and in January 1993 unveiled his Dallas Texans with plans to begin play that spring.
Rees was certain Nazari would be successful. If Nazari didn't have the magic of national team credentials to help lure players, Nazari had something almost as valuable.
"He can charm anybody just as he charmed me," Rees says.
"He is a salesman. He knows how to make small talk. He remembers names. He'll zero in on a player on another team and approach him after the game to tell him how well he played. He will go the extra yard. He can be a blatant recruiter. He has mastered the ability to recruit without violating any rules."
Rees, who now coaches in Southern California, doesn't talk to Nazari much anymore.
"He got what he wanted from me," Rees says. "There is really very little use I can be to him anymore."
Bitter departure
Nazari's departure from the Storm club was not amicable. As coach of some of that club's best players, he took them along with him to the Texans. That was expected, says Kadupski, still the Storm's coaching director.
"When you leave a job and go to a new one, it is best not to talk poorly about your former employer," Kadupski says. "He began to make insinuations. It was not good."
Nazari says he was simply advertising the virtues of his new club.
About the same time that Nazari was starting his club, the coaching director of the Dallas Hornets decided he no longer had the time to run his club.
Schellas Hyndman, tired of the administrative side of the club game, decided to devote himself exclusively to his job as soccer coach at SMU.
Many of Hyndman's players gravitated to Nazari and the Texans.
The Texans debuted with five boys teams in the spring of 1993. Nazari coached four of them.
"We'd been with Hassan at Storm and felt that if he was in charge of a club, he would make it competitive, he would make it the best," says Jeannie Bradford, whose son Eric had played one season for Nazari before following him to the Texans.
Today, Jeannie Bradford is a paid administrator on Nazari's staff.
Huy Nguyen / DMN
Diane Sullivan, whose son plays for the Texans, greets Nazari after a victory at Richland College. Nazari says he has all the friends he needs within the club he built.
The Bradfords' team, the '82 Texans, struggled in its first season, prompting Nazari to institute Sunday practices and skills training. Those are fairly typical these days but were relatively foreign a decade ago.
The following fall, those Texans finished second in the North Dallas Chamber of Commerce Soccer Association's Classic League – the top boys' league in the area.
They won the league championship in the spring of 1994 and in five subsequent springs.
"In youth soccer, like in soccer at all levels, success breeds success," says Hyndman, a Nazari admirer who until last year was a technical adviser to the Texans.
"That team helped establish Hassan as a winner."
Hyndman, who has recruited a steady stream of Texans to his nationally ranked college program, including Nazari's stepson Kellan Zindel, says most of the Nazari-bashing comes from envy.
"There are a lot of people in college soccer who don't like Jerry Yeagley, who has won five national championships," Hyndman says of the Indiana University coach. "And plenty who will tell you that Bruce Arena [the former Virginia and current U.S. World Cup coach] is egotistical and not mannered.
"But they are successful," Hyndman says. "Bruce won five NCAA championships, and his peers never voted him coach of the year. That tells you something."
Nazari coached another stepson in youth soccer. But Hyndman couldn't get him. Garrett Zindel went on to a stellar career at the Air Force Academy and is now an Air Force pilot stationed overseas.
"Who knows?" Nazari says. "Maybe he'll be the one to get Osama bin Laden."
'The right idea'
Dave Simeone is the national staff coach with the U.S. Women's National Team program. He was director of coaching from 1993 to 1999 for the North Texas State Soccer Association, the governing body that oversees 170,000 registered players.
Simeone says there have been complaints about coaches as long as he can remember. Usually, he says, the more successful the coach, the louder the complaints, the ruder the name-calling. Nazari is only the most recent target.
Once upon a time, Horst Bertyl, coaching director of the Dallas Comets, was the object of dissatisfaction, Simeone says. Bertyl was among the first club coaches to be paid for his services.
Courtesy photo
In 1977, an Iranian magazine recognized Nazari as the nation's No. 2 soccer player. He later played in Dallas – for five weeks.
"He was the devil incarnate for a while," Simeone says. "And then everyone was paying their coaches.
"That's how it will be with Hassan. His was the right idea. Bigger is the way clubs will be going. They are copying his model whether they want to admit it or not. Until everyone catches up, he is the devil."
Says Bertyl, "Hassan was aggressive in going after players he wanted. It was a surprise to most clubs. There were rules he pretty much ignored. You know how parents are: His teams were winning, parents flocked to him."
What makes Nazari unique, Simeone says, is that he founded his club and structured it so that he makes the ultimate decisions.
"All the other coaches operate in a system where they have to answer to boards and to parents," Simeone says. "With the Texans, Hassan is the system. Anyone who doesn't like it can go elsewhere.
"Hassan is the master of his own fate."
Which is the way a club has to be run, Nazari says.
"We have a lot of volunteers with good hearts," Nazari says. "But soccer people have to make soccer decisions. It is a huge mistake some clubs make that because the parents pay the money, they know the game.
"Standing around watching your son or daughter play the game does not make a parent a soccer person, just as standing in an operating room doesn't make someone a surgeon.
"I don't go to our parents and tell them how to run their businesses," he says. "The decisions have to be soccer decisions, not politically correct decisions."
Keith Hodder, one of Nazari's coaches, joined the Texans three years ago. He had been the coaching director at the Dallas Comets and the Texas Comets.
"Those were good clubs, but they were not particularly well run," Hodder says. "There was a lot of infighting. Hassan doesn't allow that."
Questions of recruiting
On a dark, dreary day in early October, Hassan Nazari bounds into a Lewisville restaurant, not far from his Flower Mound home. Although it is raining heavily outside, he seems to have avoided every drop in making his way from his Lexus to the front door.
Not a strand of his salt and pepper hair is out of place. His Nike outfit looks as if it had come directly off the rack. Before he rounds the corner, his cologne trumpets his impending arrival. He apologizes for being a few minutes late.
He dismisses accusations about illegal recruiting with a wave of the hand.
"That's because recruiting is not illegal here," he says. Recruiting is not illegal in that all players technically become free agents for about a month before they sign their one-year contracts in July.
Coaches can invite anyone they please to try out for their team.
They are not, however, allowed to promise money or equipment or college scholarships as inducements. Nor can a coach such as Nazari, who also works in the U.S. Olympic Development Program, wink and promise to use his connections as an enticement.
Huy Nguyen / DMN
In May, Hassan Nazari's Dallas Texans teams won an unprecedented eight Texas State Cup age-group championships.
Nazari says he doesn't have to recruit. The Texans record speaks for itself. The club's expansion into Lewisville and Arlington was a result of demand for his product.
"It's like in the NBA, everyone wants to play for the Lakers," he says.
Not quite everyone. Kyle Brown, a standout at Southlake Carroll High and now a star at Tulsa University, played for years with the American Eagles.
Jana McKean, Brown's mother, says Nazari began calling her home one June to recruit her son. "He didn't call once, he called many times," she says. "Once he got a sense that Kyle might be looking to move to a more competitive team that attended more big-name tournaments, the calls really started coming.
"Once, Kyle told him he might come out to a workout but then decided not to go. Hassan got very angry. The friendly calls stopped and the angry calls started to come."
McKean says other coaches called, as well. But none with Nazari's fervor.
In the end, Brown left the American Eagles and signed with Kevin Smith's Solar Club.
McKean says Kerlin, the American Eagles coaching director, told her it would be over his "dead body" that he would lose such a gifted player to the Texans.
Knowing he was going to lose Brown anyway, Kerlin steered Brown to a Solar team that would win the under-19 state championship.
Nazari denies that he was anything but professional in trying to sell Brown on the Texans.
"He would have been good for us and we would have been good for him," Nazari says. "It just didn't work out."
Nazari says plans are in the works for the Texans to build their own training facility. When that is running smoothly, he will hand off his organization to someone else and embark on a new venture – an academy with the express purpose of developing World Cup- and Olympic-quality players.
"Soccer and this country have given me everything," he says. "It has given me friends, a family, money and fame.
"I want to give something back."
