Hello,

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Total Soccer Show. My name is Taylor Rockwell. With me today, I think this is an apt description for my guest, who I believe is making his debut appearance. I'm going to say The Man, the Myth, The Legend. It's Heath. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you for having me, first of all. Second of all, I was waiting to say, like,

the app description, I was going to be like, oh, man, like, what's he going to say? Like, I was waiting for this whole thing. I was going to be like, you know, loser, you know, poser, whatever. So the fact that you went in in a positive light, I appreciate that. How are you? Yeah, I'm doing, I'm doing well or as good as I guess

anybody can be in the present world we live in, but it's always nice to talk soccer with a former national team player who can still ball. I learned that last time we were in Orlando together. I think that's the thing that made me sort of like, you stand out as being the mythical figure, because he just showed up to a pickup game and

is very, very good. And then I think

Stu Holden showed up at the very, very end to, I feel like wait for everybody to be tired and then try to run the game. But even then, you held your own. So that was, that was a credit to you. But it's always nice to see you at different events. Obviously, we haven't been able to do as much of that lately. So it's nice to be able to talk to you about the national team, Champions League, your podcast, many, many different topics we're going to get to today. Yeah, can I just say also, it is really hard, like, the pickup soccer world or the amateur sports world is a really difficult world to navigate in terms of like, how hard is everyone going to try? like I know Bobby Warshall is going to try as hard as you can in every game, no matter what if it's a pickup game. I don't have like I'm probably the same in the fact that like I don't have like a middle ground of like let's compete. And I'm getting better at it now in my in my post life, post playing career life. It's like, you know, I'm getting better at like being like, okay, this is a situation where I can compete in. This is one where I'm just going to have fun. And like getting better at like understanding because there's some other sports that I'm, I'm learning to play now where I'm like, you know, kill, kill, kill. And then I like take a step and go, like, was this the right environment for me to be this intense? And so, yeah, it's, it's, you know, going back to that game in Orlando, I was like, you know, you feel it out, especially when there's a bunch of people you never played with, you're like, how serious is this? Yeah, it's always, it's why pickup can be a challenge because I usually like Richmond has some pretty good

leagues. That's where we're based. That's where I tend to play. And those are pretty organized. Some

are indoor, some are outdoor, but you've got officials. You've got kind of like the normal rules.

With pickup, you never know who's going to show up. How many people are going to be cherry picking and all that

type of thing. So it can be a, it's a a difficult balance to strike especially if you like go hard on those first five minutes and score a goal or two and then you're like maybe maybe i've gone too far with this one and then you back off too much it's it's a difficult balance to walk i feel like you walked it well at least in that one pickup performance yeah and then there's the second part is like, I don't want to get injured either.

Like I'm here for a workout. I'm here for work. I'm here to hang out. Everybody's having a good time. Shouldn't take the edge off. But at the same time, like, you know, if someone runs past you, you're like, well, that's not going to happen again. Like, I'm going to, I'm going to not let that person go past me. And it's a really hard, it's just a really hard thing to navigate at any time,

like not just from my background, from anybody's of like feeling out a new group and, you know, trying to mix like, we're here to have a good time, we're here to have fun, you know, and then here to get a workout, but also, like, you don't want to lose to the other team. Absolutely not. And never. Did you say other sports had filled the competitive way and have you started picking up other sports? Yeah. Just in the last year, obviously, you know, I used to play in a pickup game with Stu Holden. When I was in New York, I was playing in the Bowery League with a bunch of, you know, X, ex pro players that worked at MLS or other capacities that lived around, around the city. And that sort of, that sort of checked the boxes that I need once or twice a week. One of them was a training session, one of where you could sort of do all the fun things from training and none of the bad things that we had during our careers. And then the second one was like just the game on the weekend or something like that

with those guys.

And then when I moved to California, same sort of thing.

Like, you know, Stu Holden, Steve Nash, a bunch of these guys that live out here,

Mario Melchia, a bunch of just like former pros that would get together and play kind

of small-sided on small goals, like a little tiki-taki.

That was fine.

And then obviously, pandemic starts. And I just, you know,

there were still some of those games happening occasionally. I was, I had a wife that was pregnant

with our third. Now we have our third during that period. I just wasn't comfortable being in those,

still not really comfortable in those environments. So I was like, what can I do? And I actually

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