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 Rafa Wiki, head coach of the U.S. U17 Men's National Team.

The boys will kick off a camp Thursday in Carson, California, where they'll play friendlies

against the LA Galaxy second team and Orange County SC, both the U.S.L.

Championship sides, and the

the roster for that camp should be out by the time you listen to this.

After that they'll have one more camp in September

before the U17 World Cup starts in October.

Rafa, thanks for coming on the podcast, really appreciate your time.

Sure, thanks for having me.

Let's start with World Cup qualifying.

Your team, the U17s progressed quickly in that tournament the Kincaf

Championship in May and by the final in my opinion they were playing some really

lovely soccer how did you get them to play so well so quickly?

Yeah, I agree with you. I think the team became better and better as long as the tournament went on, which is normal, normally.

As well, it was my almost first time being together with them.

We have never played with each other or we never really had a real game together.

So, never really game together. So it's obviously being together every day watching videos,

training sessions and then just getting to know each other better, which makes normally a team better, more comfortable with the style of play, the head coach wants, knowing their own roles on the field, off the field,

better.

That makes normally a team progress and that's what we saw at Concordav.

And yet, I was pretty happy with what I saw during the whole tournament. I didn't think that we played really bad or bad in the first game because even we were 2-0 down against Canada in halftime, before they scored the opening goal after

...