Welcome to the Scuffed Podcast. I'm Adam Bells in Minneapolis. With me is Greg Velasquez and

Des Moines. We talk about U.S. men's soccer. Our guest today is Ted Creighton, the founder of Joy of the People, an organization

in Minnesota that takes a novel approach to youth soccer development. Ted's a former

player, a longtime youth coach, and a soccer parent. Now he's spearheading a concept

that I think will be interesting to people who care about soccer in America and

we're going to take a little step back from the dawn of the Berhalzer era, the

speculation on how he'll set up his midfield in the

gold cup and all that, though we can talk about it if you want Ted. And then,

but we're mostly going to talk about how young players get better.

So hey, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks a lot, Adam.

Thanks for having me.

First of all, what is Joy of the People?

Joy of the People is kind of an idea and the first thing I always have to remember is I'm kind of the

spearhead guy but there's a lot of people behind me. It's an idea that a group of friends had perhaps 20 years ago as we were playing and our careers were kind of winding down and we're in the adult leagues and starting to get into coaching, we thought, God, soccer is just taking a trip towards Americanized as a sport. It's not really the way we see it. And we saw it more as a community sport but the

community was the pathway to expertise. There's a group of us that we get

together and that's it's like that's all we talk about is development that's just all we talk

about it everywhere and we thought hey free, this idea of like street basketball,

pan hockey is really missing.

And could we institute that into our current club we tried?

We couldn't pull people around. So then we said, hey, let's see if we can

form our own nonprofit at the time. St. Paul was kind of going through this

...