At long last, Houston Dynamo reforms its approach to a lackluster academy (2024)

Just about four hours in the car, depending on traffic. 280 miles. That’s all that separates the Houston Dynamo academy from the youth setup at FC Dallas. It may seem like a long way to some, but in Texas, the land of big highways and bigger trucks, that kind of distance makes the Dynamo and FCD neighbors.

In the world of player development, though, Houston and Dallas couldn’t be farther apart.

FCD’s academy is the crown jewel of MLS, with the club signing a league-high 28 homegrown players since the roster designation was created in 2008. They’re more committed to playing academy products than any other club in the league, and, though they’ve yet to produce a bonafide MLS star, they currently have a few emerging talents in Reggie Cannon, Paxton Pomykal, Jesus Ferreira and Jesse Gonzalez. That list doesn’t even account for 21-year-old U.S. men’s national team midfielder Weston McKennie, who developed in the FCD academy but left for German Bundesliga club Schalke without signing an MLS deal, or 19-year-old defender Chris Richards, who was sold by Dallas to Bayern Munich before he played a first team match.

Houston’s academy, on the other hand, has been one of the least productive in the league. Despite being located in a talent-rich city with a climate that allows for year-round outdoor play; one which sits at the core of the fifth largest metropolitan area in the U.S., the Dynamo has produced exactly one homegrown field player of note in its history. That player, Memo Rodriguez, enjoyed a solid 2019, but he’s not even a full-time starter.

The lack of a functioning academy has been a killer for the club, which has spent at or near the bottom of MLS in recent years. To consistently compete at the level the team currently spends in an increasingly expensive MLS, Houston, which has missed the playoffs each of the last two seasons and lost 4-0 at Kansas City on Saturday, simply has to get contributors out of its academy.

“For us, that’s the key,” Houston general manager Matt Jordan told The Athletic last month at the club’s preseason camp in Tucson, Arizona. “With our type of club, with our plan, the academy is just vital.”

It took the Dynamo a long time to come to that realization. For years, the club lagged behind on academy basics — full-time coaches and staffers, facilities, things like that. That has begun to change over the last 18 months. The team has staffed up, expanded its footprint in Houston and, just this winter, hired a head coach with extensive experience at the youth level in Tab Ramos.

For the first time, Houston is making a real effort with its academy. The club knows it has to get more out of it. Whether or not it actually does will determine a lot about its long-term direction.

To understand why the Dynamo academy has struggled, it helps to understand the geography of Houston. The metropolitan area is remarkably spread out; according to the U.S. Census Bureau, it takes up 10,062 square miles. That’s larger than six entire states.

Paul Holocher is well aware of that sprawl. The Dynamo academy director, Holocher came to the club in July 2018 following a stint with the San Jose Earthquakes. He knew there was plenty of youth talent in Houston — the region, one of the most ethnically diverse in the U.S., is home to almost 7 million people — but he wasn’t quite aware just how hard it would be to get that talent into the club.

“For years, we’ve underperformed as a region,” he said. “We’ve got more than 6.5 million people, we’re the most diverse area in the United States. There’s a huge opportunity here if we can create a culture of development.”

When he arrived, the Dynamo were ill-equipped to do that. The club didn’t have full-time coaches at every age group in their academy and only trained at one location: Houston Sports Park. The facility, which also serves as the training home for the Dynamo and the NWSL’s Houston Dash, is more than nice enough for the academy, but its location is a challenge.

The Sports Park is located just off the southern edge of Beltway 8, one of three main ring roads that encircle Houston. That location greatly affected where the Dynamo academy drew players from. According to Holocher, when he arrived, 90 percent of Dynamo academy players lived south of Beltway, an area that he said comprises just one-third of the region’s total population.

That made sense. After all, it’s a lot easier to get to the Sports Park from Pearland, a town just off the southern edge of the Beltway, than it is from The Woodlands, a large suburb that’s miles from the highway’s northern edge. A one-way trip from The Woodlands to the Sports Park is about 90 minutes during rush hour traffic.

The Dynamo was missing out on a huge pool of potential academy players just because of the location of its facility. The club might be able to ask a 16-year-old to commute up to 90 minutes each direction to get to training, but it’s hard to justify that sort of commitment to the parent of a 10-, 11- or 12-year-old. They needed to find a way to get to more of those kids at those ages.

“We had to find a solution,” said Holocher.

The club moved forward with a pretty simple one: Instead of making those young kids come to Houston Sports Park, the Dynamo is now going to them. Over the past year, the club has opened five “centers of excellence” all over the Houston area. Two more are scheduled to open in 2020. The centers are open to U-10, U-11 and U-12 players, who compete on teams in the Texas pre-academy U-12 league and in the South Texas Youth Soccer Association. The best players will be funnelled into the Dynamo’s U.S. Soccer Development Academy U-13 team.

Unlike the club’s fully-funded DA teams, the teams run out of the centers of excellence do charge to play (though the Dynamo does offer need-based scholarships).

“We’ve started in those five strategic locations throughout the city of Houston, and really the focus is that we want to provide an opportunity for every kid to have, regardless of their economic situation, to have that opportunity,” said Jordan. “And the other big challenge we have in Houston is that we really want to reduce travel time. When you have less travel time at those ages, for the parents, there’s more of a willingness to work within the program… I mean, Houston is just so spread out. How realistic is it to ask for a parent to have an hour and a half trip each way at such a young age? We’re confident that the centers solve for that.”

Once they reach the U-13 level, players do have to travel to Houston Sports Park for training. The club has ramped up its programming on site, however, making it easier on the kids who do make it to the DA. Last fall, the club began offering online courses for its players who are in high school. Players in the program no longer attend physical schools, meaning they can now stay at the facility all day, more than doubling the club’s contact time with them and allowing them to spend more hours on the training field.

The Dynamo is far from the first MLS club to institute such a program. Real Salt Lake, the LA Galaxy and the Philadelphia Union are among the clubs that have physical schools at their academies. RSL and Philly even allow their academy kids to live on site. That the Dynamo is now offering online classes to its academy players isn’t special; it’s the club clearing the lowest bar to have a successful academy in Houston.

Still, it’s a positive step, as are the centers for excellence. The new initiatives will allow Houston to cast a wider, more thorough net when searching for academy players. With time, the club is betting that the bigger, better net will pay dividends in MLS.

Of course, having a strong youth setup can only take a club so far. The difference between a good academy and a productive one can often rest on one person: The first-team head coach. A team can sign all the homegrown players it wants. If the manager doesn’t actually put them on the field, their academy will be effectively useless.

It’s safe to say Houston won’t run into that problem with Ramos, who was hired a couple of weeks after the end of the 2019 season. The longtime U.S. Under-20 national team manager and USSF youth technical director, who also spent years helping run a Development Academy program in his native New Jersey, is a true believer. He’s only coached one game in MLS, but he’s already done more to integrate the academy with the Dynamo first-team than either of the club’s two previous head coaches, Wilmer Cabrera and Owen Coyle.

“It’s obvious that the academy is really important to me, and really important to us as a club,” said Ramos. “I’ve had that experience of the identification of younger players, and I see that there’s a lot of talent starting to come through. In a city like Houston, with how big it is, just through scouting alone, you’re going to be able to find talent that’s close to the level where you know you’re just a couple of steps away from the first-team. I really liked that about this opportunity, and I’m really trying to make myself as available as I can to the academy.”

Ramos brought a slew of academy players to Houston’s preseason camps, playing several in their matches against MLS opponents in the annual training camp tournament in Tucson, Arizona. He met with the club’s U-17s before their successful Generation Adidas Cup qualifying campaign last month, and had the U-19s scrimmage the first-team in the buildup to the club’s MLS opener against the LA Galaxy last Saturday. He’s also engaged with Rio Grande Valley FC, the club’s southern Texas USL affiliate located at which Houston has full technical control.

Those shows of commitment are a big part of the reason the Dynamo hired Ramos.

“He’s got a passion for working with young players,” said Jordan. “For us, that’s a critical part of what we’re implementing, and it really was a factor in what made Tab an ideal fit for what we’re working towards.”

It’s also not lost on the current first-team players, only three of whom — Rodriguez, defender Erik McCue and rookie midfielder Marcelo Palomino — are homegrowns. Rodriguez is by far the most senior member of that group. The 24-year-old midfielder grew up an hour and 15 minutes outside of Houston in El Campo, Texas, but he knows the city’s soccer scene. He came up playing for what he called an “inner-city” club, Houstonians SC, before he moved to the Dynamo at age 15.

His teammates at Houstonians were talented. They were also exactly the kinds of kids that might fall through the cracks: Outside of the big youth clubs, Latino and, in some cases, from low-income backgrounds. Not in the system, in other words. Rodriguez thinks some of them were just as talented as he was. A few of them may have even had more talent. Memo made it. For one reason or another, most of his former teammates didn’t even get a shot. With Ramos on board and the club’s increased emphasis on its youth system, he thinks that will change.

“I think over the next few years with Tab and what he’s doing with the academy and first-team, there’s going to be a lot more players coming through,” said Rodriguez. “Houston’s so big, there’s talent everywhere. It’s just a matter of where and when they’re gonna pick these players to come in and play for the academy.”

Building a proper academy is a long-term project, though. Even if everything goes right, Houston is still years away from its youth system reaching full capacity.

No one really knows the ceiling, but the Dynamo have a clear goal. Holocher thinks Houston “should be at the top.” Jordan feels the club is “putting in the infrastructure to compete with any academy in the U.S.” As for Ramos, well, he sees no reason why the Dynamo academy shouldn’t be at the level of its rival 280 miles up the road.

“Is there any reason we shouldn’t be at that level? No. There’s no reason whatsoever,” he said. “At this moment, there are some challenges… but the potential for Houston Dynamo is huge. Down the road, there’s no reason why Houston can’t be what Dallas is. There’s no reason why Houston can’t be more.”

(Photo by Kyle Ross/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)