Why I Started Coaching: From Intramural to Legia Warsaw

At 9 years old, my son Jeremiah was intramural. By 14, he was at Red Bull and starting for the U.S. U15 National Team. That leap didn’t happen by accident and it didn’t happen the way most people think development works.

Jeremiah was young when he got to watch me play professionally. We lived in Denmark (AGF Aarhus), Saudi Arabia (Al Ettifaq), Poland (GKS Bełchatów), and eventually came back to the States when I joined the New England Revolution. Being around the game that early, he caught the itch almost by default. But at that age, he was still just a kid, silly, good-hearted, full of personality. A little gangly. A little Bambi.

When we settled back in the States, he wanted to play, so I put him on a local team. His first year, he didn’t make the travel roster and played intramural instead. Honestly, it was a good thing. He was with friends, part of a community, and he was happy. He stayed intramural for about two years.

By U-10, he made the travel team but he was inconsistent. He had moments, but he wasn’t yet a difference-maker, and in tough games he didn’t get much time. The coaches weren’t rotating for the sake of it. They were making decisions based on who gave them the best chance to compete, and I respected that. He needed to feel that. He needed to understand that being on a roster and earning minutes are two very different things.

When we talked about it, the gap was clear: it wasn’t talent. It was the work outside of practice. The kids playing the most were putting in time on their own. He wasn’t. So he asked me to train him.

I said yes, but I had to be careful about how I approached it.

I didn’t want to bring a harsh pro mentality into our relationship. He was still a sweet kid figuring out who he was, and I didn’t want to damage that or turn something he loved into something he dreaded. So I started with something simple and I used it as a test. Not of skill, but of attitude.

Our early sessions were built around one challenge: take the ball from me. Over and over. Sometimes he couldn’t win it once. The point wasn’t to teach a move. I was watching for his willingness to stay in the fight, to keep going when he wasn’t winning. Then we flipped it: now he had to keep the ball from me. Real resistance. I paid attention to how he responded when he lost it. Did he shrug it off, or did it bother him? Did he want it badly enough to fight back?

Once losing the ball actually bothered him, once keeping it genuinely mattered to him, I knew we had something to build on.

The first requirement wasn’t technical. It was consistency. I needed to know he wouldn’t start and quit after three weeks. A few months in, it was clear he was committed. That’s when the real work began.

He was behind technically. Not because he couldn’t learn, but because foundational things had never been trained. I needed a way to accelerate development without turning every session into a grind.

That’s where my background helped. I’m systems-oriented, and I’d spent years thinking in terms of problem-solving on the field. I realized we needed exercises that combined multiple developmental needs at once: technique, balance, movement patterns, first touch, passing, so we could compress real progress into a smaller window of time.

That’s how I built the box.

The box is simple in design: roughly shoulder-width, about the height of a soccer ball, turf on top. But what I built around it was a full curriculum… specific movement and balance patterns, technical repetitions, passing and first touch sequences that mimicked real game situations. The variations were almost endless, and every one of them was tied to something that would show up in a match.

We did it for hours. And he improved fast. Really fast.

Within a few months, he went from a third-tier travel environment to getting called into the Union Juniors. People who saw it were surprised. I wasn’t. The box worked because it was soccer-specific. People don’t realize that when you pass a ball, you have to lift your foot to the exact height of the ball’s center. Ladder drills can build general coordination, but they don’t train the specific mechanics and muscle memory of passing, receiving, and moving in soccer. The box did. In terms of efficiency, it gave us more real return than almost anything else we could have done.

I also built a small turf field in our backyard with goals so we always had a reliable place to work. That was a little extreme, I’ll admit but it removed every excuse. No facility? Doesn’t matter. It’s right outside.

The second accelerator was environment. At the time, I was coaching an older youth team, and I started bringing Jeremiah into sessions. He’d join rondos and possession work, anything that forced him to think faster, play cleaner, and adjust to a pace he wasn’t ready for yet. Playing up did what playing up always does: it compressed his development on the mental side the same way the box compressed it on the technical side.

Around that same period, I noticed something else: his engine.

On conditioning days with the older team, he just didn’t fade. I kept testing it. It kept showing up. In elementary school, on Olympic Day, he ran the 100m and 400m against middle school kids  and won the 400m. Against older kids. That kind of endurance, at that age, is not normal. And it became an asset we could always lean on. If you can consistently out-run and out-work people at a high level, that becomes a superpower over time.

His first year in the Union Juniors, he didn’t make the Union Academy. He was disappointed. But I reminded him how far he’d come, and how quickly, and why. The rate of growth mattered more than any single result. We had a process. He had the work ethic. The disappointment became fuel.

He joined a strong club team made up of players who’d been cut from the Union. Heavy tournament schedule. Good development environment. From there, he moved to the Ukrainian Nationals and played a year up, which gave him another real challenge level. I coached him during that stretch and put him in midfield deliberately to force touches, decision-making, spacing, distribution, and awareness all at once.

That team eventually went to nationals, and it was an unusually talented group. One of his teammates, now at Anderlecht, was on that squad. Jeremiah is now at Legia Warsaw. His teammate went on to represent Belgium. Jeremiah went on to represent the United States. For that age group, in that environment, it was a rare concentration of players.

After that, Jeremiah moved to Red Bull. He was U14 but trained with U15s, spent time with U17s, and was eventually exposed to U23-level competition. He was consistently playing up, established himself as a top prospect, and earned his first U.S. Youth National Team call-up around 14 or 15.

I watched him play in that first international tournament vs Portugal, Italy, Belgium, Slovenia. I thought about where we started. A 9-year-old in intramural, a little Bambi who couldn’t win a tackle off me, training in the backyard on a box I built myself.

After Red Bull, he returned to the Union and played with the U17s, winning the GA Cup with a talented group. From there, he went to Carolina Core, trained in an environment that included Eddie Pope, and continued to develop. Eventually, he signed and earned a move to Legia Warsaw, where he is 

When I zoom out, the timeline still surprises people. At 9, intramural. At 10, local travel. At 14, Red Bull and U.S. Youth National Team.

The biggest difference-maker was the box, because it compressed development. It trained technical patterns, balance, mechanics, and coordination in a way that transferred directly to what the game actually demands. Combined with training in older environments and a kid who refused to stop competing, it changed what was possible.