Courtesy: Super F League


Exposing more youth to futsal a pipeline for future national teams

Keith Tozer doesn’t have a professional futsal league to feed his U.S. National Team, but he does have thousands of prospects learning the game through Super F League and other futsal organizations.

And that’s a start, Tozer said, since futsal is becoming more sophisticated as the game grows and countries develop professional leagues.

Tozer, a former national futsal team player and coach of the team since 1996, has traditionally recruited indoor soccer players and attempted to convert them to futsal with little training time.

“In 1992 when we finished second at the Futsal World Championships in Japan (Futsalplanet note: Hong Kong!), at that time you could take players from the MISL (Major Indoor Soccer League) and compete,” he said. “That was before there were professional futsal leagues in so many countries. (Now) we take players from indoor and it’s just difficult.”

For proof, Tozer can point to the team’s showing at the 2008 Futsal World Cup in Brazil, where he the U.S. uncharacteristically went winless.

Although professional futsal leagues were already in place in Brazil, Spain, Italy and Portugal ­-- all nations, incidentally, with traditionally strong reputations outdoors -- others such as Holland, Russia and Guatemala have now been added to the mix.

At the CONCACAF regional qualifier for the 2008 World Cup, Guatemala emerged as a new power, Tozer said, because its players played professionally in a domestic league and had much more game experience than the U.S. players.

“We were the top team and now Guatemala has started a professional league and they’re winning the region,” he said. “That’s why I’m so happy with Jon Parry and Peter Vermes and what they’ve done with the Super F League. That’s what’s going to help me as the national team coach, to have them develop players to feed into the program.”
Parry and Vermes, both former professional players and members of the national futsal team, helped found Super F several years ago with the goal of developing a well-organized network of futsal leagues.

Their model, Tozer said, can help develop a pipeline of futsal talent for the national team.

Also head coach of the Milwaukee Wave indoor franchise, Tozer is no stranger to international futsal. He was recently honored by being named a FIFA Futsal Instructor, and has been invited to an organizational summit in Zurich, Switzerland in May. He anticipates leading futsal clinics, in the CONCACAF region and perhaps around the world.

Tozer didn’t even know what futsal was in 1986, when the national team head coach asked him to come to a tryout. Tozer was in Kentucky, where he played for the Louisville Thunder, an indoor team.

“I got a call from John Kowalski, who later became the coach of the Tampa Bay Mutiny in Major League Soccer, and he said ’I want you to come on a trip to Hungary to play futsal,’ and I said, what’s futsal?” Tozer recalled.

The team, put together quickly with indoor players, played Holland, Brazil and Italy and held its own, despite its inexperience.

Then, in 1996, Kowalski asked Tozer to fill in for him as coach at a qualifier to Guatemala. The U.S. won the region, and although Kowalski came back for one more tournament (the 1996 Futsal World Cup in Spain), Tozer was made the team’s full-time coach after the world cup.

He’s led the U.S. through four CONCACAF tournaments and two world cups, “and basically been all around the world with the game, to Singapore, Holland, Belgium and Brazil 14 times.”

As a result, there are few -- if any -- Americans who know more about futsal than Tozer does. What he sees is a game that’s growing rapidly, not just in the United States, but internationally.

The growth has led to more sophisticated futsal tactics and year-round training that, for the moment, put the U.S. at a disadvantage. Tozer hopes to counter that on several fronts: the development of a U-23 national team, continued growth of youth leagues such as Super F’s and futsal-specific instruction for coaches.

This summer, a Tozer-led Futsal Academy in the Milwaukee area will offer instruction in agility; core and strength training; classroom training in futsal formations, runs and rotations; and on-court play. He hopes it will become the foundation for clinics that he can offer to Super F coaches and players.

“It’s something I want to do more of because I’d like to do classes for people with Super F leagues,” he said. “It’s a very, very technical game, and we need to get coaches running some of those patterns instead of just going out to play.”

Tozer will plans to share some coaching instruction in future issues of Super F’s Futsal World newsletter.
As futsal players and coaches learn the game’s nuances, prospects also improve for the outdoor game, Tozer said.
“I firmly believe that the growth of futsal isn’t only going to help futsal, but help develop the outdoor game,” he said.







Posted by Luca Ranocchiari --> luca.ranocchiari@futsalplanet.com