SPINNING SOCCER STRAW INTO (ROUGE AND) GOLD
Detroit City FC’s open tryout subverts a cash-grab standard to grow club’s community, talent base | By SEAN SPENCE
If you’re around soccer in America for long – say, long enough for Google to sniff this interest out of your search profile – you’ll become familiar with a certain kind of advertisement that creeps in the margins, ghosting in on the side, always in your peripheral vision:
SOCCER PLAYERS – FUTBOL ARTISTS – GET SEEN
The details usually involve Professional! Coaches! and a fee, which – this being the world it is – is generally the point. Show up ready to play with $150 and we promise, really promise, to watch you play. Maybe. But bring the money. At the end, the player gets a clap on the back and a vaguely-worded assessment; the coaches melt into the dark of night, never to be seen again, while the ads continue to haunt the player, just off the edge of the page – hope, dangling just out of reach, asking for just another $150: GET SEEN.
Sometimes it seems that Detroit City Football Club exists just to throw the long and short cons of American soccer into sharp relief. Take Le Rouge’s approach to open tryouts: For your $50, you get a limited-edition t-shirt and a DCFC season ticket. “The perception is oftentimes with high-level or minor-league [professional] teams that it’s kind of a money grab, and we really want to avoid that,” DCFC co-owner David Dwaihy said. “By offering a season ticket, a good opportunity to play some nice competitive soccer and a nice t-shirt, we feel like, if nothing else … at least you’ve got some tangible things that will allow you to remain connected to the club.”
For City manager Ben Pirmann, the open tryout is a drawing-together of several strands of the club’s scouting effort. “Every year we pull four, five, maybe up to 10 players out from the tryout and ask them back for an extended trial,” Pirmann said. “We’ve got maybe 12 to 15 players we’ve specifically asked to come out; maybe half a dozen or so are flying in for this.” The tireless networking of technical director Klaas de Boer provides the raw material which the staff will pore over for the three hours of tryouts, including players from as far away as Seattle and New Jersey who had flown in specifically for the outing. “We structure it so the guys can showcase themselves,” Pirmann said. “It comes at you fast, and guys have to be aggressive with their chances. We are looking for guys who can seize the opportunity.”
The most striking difference between the usual open-tryout dynamic and that enjoyed by Le Rouge could be best illustrated with an audio recording – most tryouts take place in a weird ear-space, with the shouts of the keepers and the thwack of balls well-struck echoing about a concrete-and-plastic space, the bouncing sound communicating emptiness and isolation. Not so Detroit City’s – the 50-plus players were dwarfed in attendance by members of the Northern Guard, who hung banners on the nets protecting the off-field areas before launching into songs praising City, their drums filling the canyon spaces of the soccer dome with messages of praise and belief and welcome.
At long last, the mirage-invocations of those advertisements is made real: GET SEEN, truly.
It works. “I just feel a calling to do this,” Drew Chattaway said. “It’s just an opportunity to … feel as close as I can to what it would feel like to play in front of the Northern Guard.
“I don’t have the time or the ability at this stage of my life to really give it a good go, so this the closest it’s ever going to feel for me. So that’s all I want, is just to feel what it’s like.”
He wasn’t alone. Andre Carrizales, recently transplanted from Dewitt to Novi, showed up nearly 90 minutes early for a chance to play in the Rouge and Gold, warming up slowly on his own as the other players trickled in. After an impressive couple of shifts, Carrizales emphasized that he’d come to show up, not show off: “I just want to show that I’m here to work hard, show what I can do on and off the field,” the 23-year-old said. “I want to be a good teammate. A hard worker is what I’d like to be known as.”
Even those unfortunates on whom fate frowns don’t leave the evening empty-handed. Take Barbaros Serter, whose hopes of playing for City in 2018 were scuttled by an ankle injury in the first 40 minutes of tryouts. “It’s not what I wanted, but it’s an experience, it’s a good story to tell at least,” Serter said, shifting two ice-packs around his ankle. “Would I do it again? Sure, why not?”
Sean Spence writes about soccer and everything connected to it (which means everything). He and his wife Sarah have been Detroit City season-ticket holders since 2015, and live in Flint, Michigan. Follow Sean on Twitter here.
