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TU Women's Soccer Fall 2023

Even mid tier and upper tier P5 programs are not hiring established soccer coaches right now while the market adjusts. For reasons unimportant here the rate of pay for a women’s FBS soccer coach has tripled or increased by even five times over the last several years.

From that standpoint, someone with local ties makes sense until the market stabilizes, if it stabilizes. And none of those folks will have proven FBS recruiting experiences. For what TU can and will pay, an in demand FBS assistant with recruiting experience from outside the area will be looking elsewhere.

Just like recruiting the players, you have to recruit the coaches and that starts with relationships. One of our head coaches is at TU simply because their former next door neighbors is in the sports business and vouched for the program. Dickson can help with that.
 
Yo would be an interesting hire. She would almost certainly be able to land several of those elite 07 girls. She is exceptional good at creating and maintaining relationships. I would be willing to bet she has currently the phone number of every top 2006-2010 girl or parent of the girl in the state in her cell phone. Recruiting would definitely improve. Ability to run a D1 program would be the only question mark imo. Unless we hire a proven D1 coach that question will be there of anyone we hire.
I think if Yo could grasp the recruiting part, we know she can flat out coach the game. The program management is an easier solution as there has to be an assistant she could bring in to deal with some of the day to day minutiae. I think Tom's store and then the club relationships he had made it easier for him but he was extremely organized in his early days as TU coach and you could tell that by the way he ran his camps. This was a similar attribute that Ross Parmley had under Kragthorpe and Graham as Director of Football Ops. Yeah, you don't get one person solely focused on that for soccer, but you could get that type of person in an assistant coach.

I think Yo would be fine in that aspect.
 
If you are at a program that can run a $3 million deficit and not flinch, it’s pretty easy to build relationships and recruit. And that’s the reality at SEC schools like Arkansas and Oklahoma. I was listening to a parent complain about the lack of support they witnessed on a recent trip to Florida State. Not long ago the gold standard for women’s soccer facilities and competition. And then there’s programs like Arkansas State discovering you can throw money at facilities but the athletes they think they can attract still aren’t interested for location and curriculum reasons.

TU has strengths. First, the girls have a long history of academic achievement. The girls not only graduate, they are honors students. And in their chosen major. Look at the roster: it’s mostly nursing and computer science and business majors. Then flip over to the rosters of programs strong regionally you keep mentioning. Much high rates of exercise science, organizational studies, business environment majors, etc. They are recruited based on their willingness to pursue degree programs that fit the soccer teams calendar or travel schedule or being made to do that. The program is bigger than each of its young women. TU is the exact opposite, as it should be, if people have hard coin in the game. Once you weed out the insecure parents who only want their kid to go where it’s free or the best they can go, so that they can feel accomplished as parents or cushion their daughter from confronting feelings that she doesn’t always get the best even if she is “the best”, you are left of parents willing to pay so that’s there’s options after graduation. It takes time to find those parents but it can be done.

TU is an apple. You are talking about becoming an orange where TU has very limited resources and the other oranges have basically unlimited resources and different goals in mind.

Agree there needs to be substantial change in recruiting philosophy. One thing that has always hurt the Olympics is that TU wouldn’t tell the girls the full cost of attendance until very late in the game. Carson and Dickson have been working that from different angles, not necessarily with women’s soccer or Olympic sports in mind, but they will benefit.
Going to disagree with several statements:

A tank of gas to drive to south Tulsa, OKC, Dallas or St Louis isn’t expensive. It just takes effort. If we can’t afford to send our coaches to ECNL nationals or top showcases then we shouldn’t be playing D1 soccer. If our coaches decide not to go to events like nationals and the top showcases then we need new coaches.

Female soccer players typically are among the highest performing student athletes on the academic side at most colleges. Not sure TU girls doing well on the academic sides necessarily sets them apart from our competitors.

I dislike your comment about wanting parents to have “coin in the game”. Elite players aren’t going to come to TU if we’re throwing out “cheap” overall offers. We don’t currently have the caliber of program to justify a girl paying more to attend school here. The university is going to have to come up with some scholarship money if we’re going to compete with the likes of Arkansas, OSU, OU, SMU, TCU, etc.. for the best players in Oklahoma and Texas. It is what it is.
 
Even mid tier and upper tier P5 programs are not hiring established soccer coaches right now while the market adjusts. For reasons unimportant here the rate of pay for a women’s FBS soccer coach has tripled or increased by even five times over the last several years.

From that standpoint, someone with local ties makes sense until the market stabilizes, if it stabilizes. And none of those folks will have proven FBS recruiting experiences. For what TU can and will pay, an in demand FBS assistant with recruiting experience from outside the area will be looking elsewhere.

Just like recruiting the players, you have to recruit the coaches and that starts with relationships. One of our head coaches is at TU simply because their former next door neighbors is in the sports business and vouched for the program. Dickson can help with that.
OU just hired the Ole Miss coach. My guess is he’s making around $200k a year. Their last coach made $180k. Now I’m not expecting TU to have to have “OU money” but we are going to have to increase the budget if we want to complete imo. My guess is we good get an established assistant or someone like Yo for low to mid $100s if they are provided with a commitment from the school for women’s soccer. Facilities are nice and TU is a place a good coach can win. Finding someone with energy is a must.
 
Going to disagree with several statements:

A tank of gas to drive to south Tulsa, OKC, Dallas or St Louis isn’t expensive. It just takes effort. If we can’t afford to send our coaches to ECNL nationals or top showcases then we shouldn’t be playing D1 soccer. If our coaches decide not to go to events like nationals and the top showcases then we need new coaches.

Female soccer players typically are among the highest performing student athletes on the academic side at most colleges. Not sure TU girls doing well on the academic sides necessarily sets them apart from our competitors.

I dislike your comment about wanting parents to have “coin in the game”. Elite players aren’t going to come to TU if we’re throwing out “cheap” overall offers. We don’t currently have the caliber of program to justify a girl paying more to attend school here. The university is going to have to come up with some scholarship money if we’re going to compete with the likes of Arkansas, OSU, OU, SMU, TCU, etc.. for the best players in Oklahoma and Texas. It is what it is.
We are a private school. It’s a business. It’s not OU with a public mission and SEC money. Why give something to someone when another young woman of comparative talent and academic promise will pay for it and therefore help pay for the cost the program?
 
OU just hired the Ole Miss coach. My guess is he’s making around $200k a year. Their last coach made $180k. Now I’m not expecting TU to have to have “OU money” but we are going to have to increase the budget if we want to complete imo. My guess is we good get an established assistant or someone like Yo for low to mid $100s if they are provided with a commitment from the school for women’s soccer. Facilities are nice and TU is a place a good coach can win. Finding someone with energy is a must.
You got the funds to raise all the boats in the athletic department? That’s the trick, the value add. Finding ways to creatively budget to raise all Olympic coaching salaries to keep pace with the marketplace. My sense is women’s soccer staff is closer to industry competitive pay compared to some of the other sports where certain agencies won’t even deal with us anymore because the offers are so low. TU hasn’t seen a significant increase in revenue in 5 years but salaried have doubled. Offering a competitive salary regionally in 2008 to candidates now isn’t going to get you far. And you’ve got to do that in multiple sports. There’s a reason Rick is out there trying to sell every ticket he can to football and basketball.
 
Why give something to someone when another young woman of comparative talent and academic promise will pay for it and therefore help pay for the cost the program?
Because young women with comparative talent and academic promise aren’t currently taking the offers we’re throwing out. They are going to better programs with better offers….or our current recruiting efforts are very very poor.
 
Because young women with comparative talent and academic promise aren’t currently taking the offers we’re throwing out. They are going elsewhere.
Yep. Then you look for other options like culture change at existing budgetary levels. And you recruit girls who listen when you say go to OU and become a high school gym teacher at $29,000 or come to TU, pay a little, get a masters in nursing, and start at $80,000.

TU isn’t going to spend an extra $500,000 raising every salary in the Olympics. They just aren’t. Even if they had that money it would go elsewhere. Gonna have to win with what we’ve got.
 
Going to disagree with several statements:

A tank of gas to drive to south Tulsa, OKC, Dallas or St Louis isn’t expensive. It just takes effort. If we can’t afford to send our coaches to ECNL nationals or top showcases then we shouldn’t be playing D1 soccer. If our coaches decide not to go to events like nationals and the top showcases then we need new coaches.

Female soccer players typically are among the highest performing student athletes on the academic side at most colleges. Not sure TU girls doing well on the academic sides necessarily sets them apart from our competitors.

I dislike your comment about wanting parents to have “coin in the game”. Elite players aren’t going to come to TU if we’re throwing out “cheap” overall offers. We don’t currently have the caliber of program to justify a girl paying more to attend school here. The university is going to have to come up with some scholarship money if we’re going to compete with the likes of Arkansas, OSU, OU, SMU, TCU, etc.. for the best players in Oklahoma and Texas. It is what it is.
If you’ve spent some time around the players and their parents, you’ll learn quick that TU’s financial aid package and equivalent athletic scholarship often results in less financial hardship without loans than what parents have paid out of pocket for Catholic school and travel soccer in high school. Many are pleased at the financial relief TU has given them. The school isn’t for everyone. If someone thinks they can get a better deal up the road, they should probably do that.
 
Women take on UTSA tonight in the AAC conference opener. UTSA is coached by former TU men's goalkeeper Derek Pittman. They are off to a 5-2-1 start with their losses to Kansas State (0-2) and Grand Canyon (0-2). Comparable scores, UTSA beat A&M Commerce 4-1, beat UCA 5-1. They can obviously score goals in bunches. This will be a good test to see where TU is at or if the last 2 wins just came against some really bad teams.

Pittman would be on my short list of coaches to contact if TU wants to move in a different direction with the women's soccer program.
 
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My sense, not based on any evidence, is that TU isn’t going to pay a multi year buy out on an Olympic sport. UTSA is in our conference with a larger budget and larger recruiting pool. He or his family would have to want and need the work to come back.
 
If you’ve spent some time around the players and their parents, you’ll learn quick that TU’s financial aid package and equivalent athletic scholarship often results in less financial hardship without loans than what parents have paid out of pocket for Catholic school and travel soccer in high school. Many are pleased at the financial relief TU has given them. The school isn’t for everyone. If someone thinks they can get a better deal up the road, they should probably do that.
My experience at this point is being friends of parents whose daughters are going through the recruiting process. The perception in the more costs the school is offering to cover the more the school wants the player. This is a difficult perception to overcome for the school offering to cover 35% of the cost of admission versus the school offering 65%. School offers are vastly different based on the player and school.
 
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My experience at this point is being friends of parents whose daughters are going through the recruiting process. The perception in the more costs the school is offering to cover the more the school wants the player. This is a difficult perception to overcome for the school offering to cover 35% of the cost of admission versus the school offering 65%. School offers are vastly different based on the player and school.
But a school like TU covering 65% of the cost vs a school like OSU covering 65% of the cost still might mean parents forking over $10-15k a year to TU vs maybe $3k at OSU
 
But a school like TU covering 65% of the cost vs a school like OSU covering 65% of the cost still might mean parents forking over $10-15k a year to TU vs maybe $3k at OSU
Correct. From most the parents I’ve talked to an offer from TU to cover 65% would be viewed more favorably from a commitment standpoint than an offer from OSU of 30% even if the out of pocket was roughly the same.
 
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Fair play all around by both of you for sure. And that’s the rub, right? TU has to thread the needle of offering an exceptional experience but not appearing exclusive. That it is both elite - and affordable. That it is better and private but costs the same as OU. We’ve lost that game too much lately.

TU doesn’t lose a recruiting battle if a Broken Arrow girl has a 24 ACT and was all state winger if they go play at Arkansas. TU shouldn’t be losing recruiting battles to Denver if a Union girl has a 31 and ODP. But choosing Denver versus 10 miles from Dad is forgivable for TU. We’ve turned a corner if we win them against coastal schools like Davidson or Santa Clara.

It’s tempting to see a talented girl go elsewhere and hear that TU didn’t offer her the free lunch and be frustrated. There’s often reasons why and it sometimes is the girl has good grades and is a good player but not quite the test score or playing potential within the Tulsa style that Mom thinks she has. And then there’s the small town factor. Local coaches sometimes know through the grapevine that local parents or players are just going to be a pain. So they low ball the offer or pass out right. There’s a difference between TG trying to recruit every kid in town and telling most of them no when nobody else is interested and PM recruiting only in Texas and at camps ignoring Tulsa. My sense is a lot of parents don’t want to admit that they would like their kid to go to TU, but the kid wasn’t quite up to TU standards or TU identity and that turns into frustration that is expressed as saying TU should be lucky to have my son and why aren’t they giving him a free ride? Or they approach the recruiting process with TU as a safety school. “We expect TU and OU to offer but we will wait until after Dallas or Phoenix to make any decisions” comments like that get around and those parents shouldn’t be surprised if coaches move on.

And that’s before we discuss issues related to the desirability of TU offering geographically diverse students who are similarly skilled. A first gen student from Las Vegas who shows great promise as an engineer and a goal keeper might get the full ride. While the goal keeper from Bixby, unbeknownst to her parents and the local soccer community, might have a few holes in her game, a test score lower than what she is sharing with peers, little on her resume besides soccer and is undecided as a major, despite living in a million dollar home, two parents who went to TU and a test score coach. All they hear is that OSU and NSU offered great deals and TU said she was welcome to full price walk on. Think less on the reasons why TU isn’t competitive from your perspective and analyze decisions from a different standpoint and it’s possible, but not always true, that TU is doing a pretty good job at what it is trying to do. It’s not always what I, or you, would do or want, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t achieving their goals. We just have different goals for them. But we don’t get to decide. And as the decades go by, I see that TU is often right and I was wrong in hindsight, typically based on data points they had at the time I didn’t but they didn’t share with me. Of course, you’ve still got to win, and we ain’t seen that lately. Philosophy counts for little in a results measured business. But it does explain what a school expects from a coach trying to recruit locally.
 
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Fair pair all around by both of you for sure. And that’s the rub, right? TU has to thread the needle of offering an exceptional experience but not appearing exclusive. That it is both elite - and affordable. That it is better and private but costs the same as OU. We’ve lost that game too much lately.

TU doesn’t lose a recruiting battle if a Broken Arrow girl has a 24 ACT and was all state winger if they go play at Arkansas. TU shouldn’t be losing recruiting battles to Denver if a Union girl has a 31 and ODP. But choosing Denver versus 10 miles from Dad is forgivable for TU. We’ve turned a corner if we win them against coastal schools like Davidson or Santa Clara.

It’s tempting to see a talented girl go elsewhere and hear that TU didn’t offer her the free lunch and be frustrated. There’s often reasons why and it sometimes is the girl has good grades and is a good player but not quite the test score or playing potential within the Tulsa style that Mom thinks she has. And then there’s the small town factor. Local coaches sometimes know through the grapevine that local parents or players are just going to be a pain. So they low ball the offer or pass out right. There’s a difference between TG trying to recruit every kid in town and telling most of them no when nobody else is interested and PM recruiting only in Texas and at camps ignoring Tulsa. My sense is a lot of parents don’t want to admit that they would like their kid to go to TU, but the kid wasn’t quite up to TU standards or TU identity and that turns into frustration that is expressed as saying TU should be lucky to have my son and why aren’t they giving him a free ride? Or they approach the recruiting process with TU as a safety school. “We expect TU and OU to offer but we will wait until after Dallas or Phoenix to make any decisions” comments like that get around and those parents shouldn’t be surprised if coaches move on.

And that’s before we discuss issues related to the desirability of TU offering geographically diverse students who are similarly skilled. A first gen student from Las Vegas who shows great promise as an engineer and a goal keeper might get the full ride. While the goal keeper from Bixby, unbeknownst to her parents and the local soccer community, might have a few holes in her game, a test score lower than what she is sharing with peers, little on her resume besides soccer and is undecided as a major, despite living in a million dollar home, two parents who went to TU and a test score coach. All they hear is that OSU and NSU offered great deals and TU said she was welcome to full price walk on. Think less on the reasons why TU isn’t competitive from your perspective and analyze decisions from a different standpoint and it’s possible, but not always true, that TU is doing a pretty good job at what it is trying to do. It’s not always what I, or you, would do or want, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t achieving their goals. We just have different goals for them. But we don’t get to decide. And as the decades go by, I see that TU is often right and I was wrong in hindsight, typically based on data points they had at the time I didn’t but they didn’t share with me. Of course, you’ve still got to win, and we ain’t seen that lately. Philosophy counts for little in a results measured business. But it does explain what a school expects from a coach trying to recruit locally.
So I think both LawPoke and I have a little insight to the girls not coming to TU in terms of the people they are, the students they are, and the quality of soccer players they are. The 2024 and 2025 classes locally have tremendous soccer talent. There will be a number of girls going D1 at various levels. Knowing the lack of quality depth at TU, they could be tremendous additions to the program. The girl I mentioned who went to Wyoming was an NHS student and honor's student at Union. The Fleeker girls from Jenks are good students as well but are high D1 level talents. We should be able to land some of the top local talent but I'm not sure we have the coach or system in place to appeal to higher level talents to go along with offering a top notch education and job placement post-graduation. If you watch our games right now, we're boot the crap out of the ball up the field and hope that Jordan Frederick or Kaylynn Simmons are able to beat the defender to it and take it to goal. There's actually very little "soccer" being played and it's a really unattractive style for higher level recruits. It basically screams we are technically deficient and can't keep possession. To me that's on the coaching staff.
 
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I'm not suggesting you dont know the talent pool, or that your comments and suggestions aren't well placed -- from one perspective. Because they are. More than you know and realize, I agree with you.

What I am saying is either you compete with OU and Arkansas or you dont. And if you do, where is the money coming from? If you get that money -- is it better spent on academics or football or putting back together our basketball team which right now is even more embarrassing than the girls losing 4 - nil to Texas-Brazos River or wherever? We know the answer to that. And at a certain point, from a culture perspective, even with an unlimited budget, TU just isn't the place from a philosophy standpoint that it wants to spend $25 million on infrastructure and $3 million on recurring expenses on a woman's sport that benefits 24 girls, 3 coaches, and about 100 fans. They dont even want to do that for the revenue sport, and there is only one especially at TU, that could otherwise provide the money for women's soccer we are talking about and be a community amenity. We have had major donors step forward and be very very generous with other women's sports. Thank God for them. We would be in a place I dont want to think about without them. But what TU asked of them, and what they agreed to give, had limits. Many of those major donors have given us even more money for non-athletic purposes. And we agree upon those limits because athletics has a prominent place on campus, it is even arguably, a core purpose of the university. But you can't build something you can't sustain. And if you sustain it at one level for one sport, you have to sustain it at that level for all Olympic sports.

So now that we've got that out of the way. We aren't going to have the facilities, the travel, the clothing benefit, mystique, etc of OU or Arkansas. Fine. We are always going to lose those players to elsewhere except in rare instances. And that's been true in every sport since before Waymon Tisdale. It hasn't been true since before World War II. And even then we attracted those players because people were moving to Tulsa because it was in the midst of the largest regional economic expansion in world history up until that time. Either that or we offered a way for the players to escape fighting in a war.

We are talking about your second and third tier local players who have offers comparable to Tulsa. Are we losing them? Are we not offering them? If so, why. Because often that's two different questions and many different answers. And the truth versus what you hear from parents in the bleachers can be quite different.

So let's focus on what we are really talking about. Are we losing players/not offering an option to local players that fit the TU identity and are otherwise academically competitive? The sad part of this story is that you can go to Jenks, Union, Owasso, or Bixby, and be NHS and simply not have the academic horsepower to be a good academic risk for a student-athlete. Those are just facts. TPS is even more risky. TU has admitted local kids who were just a classmate or two short of number one in their class who lacked basic reading skills. Sentence composition was at the junior high level. We didn't know that until they were already admitted because they were test optional. This is a problem for a school that isn't sitting on a pile of tax revenue to pay for remedial classwork/tutoring, as well the administrative costs that go with forgiving loans and other headaches when the student inevitably can't keep up. And that's before we talk about the loss of revenue spent developing a player for two years who isn't there for the pay off junior and senior years on the pitch. You can have a 22 on the ACT, straight As and be a member of NHS, that doesn't mean you are ready for TU. So sitting in the bleachers, without seeing the test report, some of the great students you are talking about, very intelligent no doubt, either aren't good risks, aren't as qualified as you think they are/they are telling people, or there are equal or better academic prospects outside of Tulsa interested in TU that have higher test scores. Those are just facts.

So what you say. We should be giving local girls a chance and we should be trying to win. Well, is that really what TU is trying to accomplish? Is that the goal of women's soccer at TU?

We remember the 1991 probation right? The three of us were around for that right? What happened there and how did we get into trouble? Our budget and oversight was irregular and we were competing in a sport that we otherwise would not have been eligible to participate in if certain facts were disclosed to compliance authorities. Right? What we were really doing was trying to spend as little as possible on sports other than football and basketball to give us extra funds to gain a competitive edge in football and basketball. And of course there were rumors at the time that they couldn't pin other things on us due to lack of evidence so they came up with that. Either way, TU was doing as little as possible in those sports. They needed to compete in them to maintain Division I status, so we did that and nothing more.

Well, thanks to increased Title IX awareness and enforcement, and other factors, the same is basically true at TU but without the mismanagement and wrong doing. What I mean by that is FBS sports at TU has a defined purpose. You either support it if you are a fan or you dont. Its nice to dream otherwise, but by culture, by identity, (and perhaps by practical consequence due to financing), by necessity, TU views major sports competition as a key piece of vocalizing the unique educational experience you can gain at TU. That's it. We aren't trying to win. Its an infomercial for the school. It is a mark of credibility and excellence relied upon by parents and applicants. Its a campus amenity for students and faculty. If we win, people enjoy the amenity more. If we win, we get a greater return on the marketing investment. But we aren't trying to win and in some ways we dont really want to win, because then we would have real problems. You would have pressure to expand a competitive edge and TU doesn't have the donor base or local support to sustain that.

To effectuate that purpose, we have to compete in a bunch of different sports, including women's soccer. So the purpose of women's soccer on campus is really threefold: 1) ensure we can continue to compete in football and basketball on the national stage in a major conference at the highest classification, 2) provide high quality academic opportunities to elite students who wish to compete in sports as part of their studies and not the other way around, and 3) improve the diversity of the student body in terms of geography, life experience, varied academic interests, and other factors, including in some cases, race. TU isn't just looking for the best players who can study. TU is looking for the best students who can play and want to play. So TU in some ways is playing an entirely different sport than OU. And what they are purchasing through fin aid and incentives is totally different. If your goal is for your daughter to get a free education and a try out at the NWSL, then you probably need to go someplace else that wants to train you up to a point that they look good and discards you when your eligibility is done. If your goal is to have your daughter get a nursing degree or MBA and then if she wants to try out for soccer after school and has developed those skills, then the Tulsa name is recognizable enough that she will get those opportunities. Jordan O'Brien ending up in the USWNT pool is a great example of this experience.

If a local player gets a short changed offer by TU, may sense is that they dont fit that identity. Or if they do, and some probably do, they either play a position that isn't a position of need for the roster that year but room could be made for them, or the coach doesn't rate them as high as their parents/peers, or TU has the ability to attract other players that fit the identity better -- specifically bringing players from around the country and around the world to enrich the academic environment of all the students on campus. And in some cases, part of that TU identity is a collective commitment to the idea that parents that can pay, should pay, so players that can't pay can play. If you live in the richest part of Tulsa and you think your son is good enough to play for free or should even be paid to play soccer nobody is watching, you probably need to go up the road. That isn't the purpose of TU sports and TU doesn't have the money or interest in becoming something different or giving you a product that someone else will pay for. I dont personally know if Mac has passed on a local kid because he didn't like the attitude of the parents or the kid, but it wouldn't surprise me and I wouldn't blame him if deep down when deciding whether to offer or pass, he said to himself, the kid wont be happy here, he wont study, he will spend his practice time complaining he isn't playing in MLS and his Uncle Rico Dad will be calling me six times a semester.

TU got into short term financial trouble in part because it discounted its tuition to compete with OU and OSU and kids still wanted to go to a big school, felt they wouldn't fit in at a rich private school, felt they were better than a small school or just wanted to get away from Mom and Dad. So we discounted the price until it was basically free trying to be a good local partner and we were left with kids who couldn't compete and many didn't value the experience. Trying to do the same thing with local soccer talent is a similar analogous mistake.
 
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I understand what you are saying. And nothing I have mentioned is saying we throw more money at the student athletes. I believe the charge to the Olympic coaches was bring in more student athletes to the squads. It's why the men's team has some 36 members right now, 10 of which that don't even dress out on game days. I believe the girls have even more. The coaches are brining in players to be walk-ons who do qualify for some of the competitive merit dollars. Women's soccer has something like 13.5 scholarships to distribute. Even if you divide that amongst just 26 players, this is still going to leave parents trying to make up the other half or roughly $25k for the remainder of the cost of attendance. Some will get need based aid, some will get merit aid. IMO, this is a major hindrance to recruiting to TU. Some of the girls we've been discussing are easily TU quality students and could really help the soccer team. I think the combo of us not having a direction within the program right now (Sorry, Jim is not the most dynamic or charismatic guy when it comes to recruiting) and no perceivable style.

I think modest investment and upgrade to the coach's salary and bringing in someone with those qualities would go a long way at perhaps convincing some of that top local talent as well as getting the Dallas and St. Louis players to come to TU. I am not advocating that we dumb things down for women's soccer...it's not needed at all, but like in softball, we need to bring in a coach that doesn't view those things as a hindrance.
 
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The expansion of the walk-on program, across all sports, has netted over a million dollars to TU over the last three years. Net, after cost of practice and competition, not gross. Money in the bank. That pays for things like new scoreboards we wouldn't otherwise enjoy. When I said coin in the game, that was exactly what I meant. That doesn't really factor into how equivalency scholarships are divvied up, but the ability of a student to pay something if they otherwise would be asked to pay if they weren't an athlete is a factor. TU isn't in the business of upper middle class welfare.

I dont know the man so I can't speak to charisma or style with recruits. He seems fine to me casually talking to him, but Im not a 16 year old girl or her helicopter Mom. You cannot deny he has local connections and probably had the least salary demands of the available candidates. We saw where that got us with BB.

There is clearly no discernible identity on the field. That needs to be tidied up, one way or the other, as soon as possible.
 
The expansion of the walk-on program, across all sports, has netted over a million dollars to TU over the last three years. Net, after cost of practice and competition, not gross. Money in the bank. That pays for things like new scoreboards we wouldn't otherwise enjoy. When I said coin in the game, that was exactly what I meant. That doesn't really factor into how equivalency scholarships are divvied up, but the ability of a student to pay something if they otherwise would be asked to pay if they weren't an athlete is a factor. TU isn't in the business of upper middle class welfare.

I dont know the man so I can't speak to charisma or style with recruits. He seems fine to me casually talking to him, but Im not a 16 year old girl or her helicopter Mom. You cannot deny he has local connections and probably had the least salary demands of the available candidates. We saw where that got us with BB.
I think Jim was hired because he was an asst. coach with the team and Kyle left rather late in the game (mid-June) and so he was a stop gap. Last year he did fine, the team seemed to be improving some but early season this year it just doesn't seem like there is a direction to the program. Maybe I'm wrong and they were working out some kinks but I'm not a bad alum for thinking TU needs to do better. The same they did for volleyball...and I know Ryan and Evyn pretty well. They're really likeable people but the program stalled and wasn't going anywhere and if you're paying for a program you should demand it be successful. And yes, I understand that success in college athletics can be measured in many different ways.
 
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I'm not suggesting you dont know the talent pool, or that your comments and suggestions aren't well placed -- from one perspective. Because they are. More than you know and realize, I agree with you.

What I am saying is either you compete with OU and Arkansas or you dont. And if you do, where is the money coming from? If you get that money -- is it better spent on academics or football or putting back together our basketball team which right now is even more embarrassing than the girls losing 4 - nil to Texas-Brazos River or wherever? We know the answer to that. And at a certain point, from a culture perspective, even with an unlimited budget, TU just isn't the place from a philosophy standpoint that it wants to spend $25 million on infrastructure and $3 million on recurring expenses on a woman's sport that benefits 24 girls, 3 coaches, and about 100 fans. They dont even want to do that for the revenue sport, and there is only one especially at TU, that could otherwise provide the money for women's soccer we are talking about and be a community amenity. We have had major donors step forward and be very very generous with other women's sports. Thank God for them. We would be in a place I dont want to think about without them. But what TU asked of them, and what they agreed to give, had limits. Many of those major donors have given us even more money for non-athletic purposes. And we agree upon those limits because athletics has a prominent place on campus, it is even arguably, a core purpose of the university. But you can't build something you can't sustain. And if you sustain it at one level for one sport, you have to sustain it at that level for all Olympic sports.

So now that we've got that out of the way. We aren't going to have the facilities, the travel, the clothing benefit, mystique, etc of OU or Arkansas. Fine. We are always going to lose those players to elsewhere except in rare instances. And that's been true in every sport since before Waymon Tisdale. It hasn't been true since before World War II. And even then we attracted those players because people were moving to Tulsa because it was in the midst of the largest regional economic expansion in world history up until that time. Either that or we offered a way for the players to escape fighting in a war.

We are talking about your second and third tier local players who have offers comparable to Tulsa. Are we losing them? Are we not offering them? If so, why. Because often that's two different questions and many different answers. And the truth versus what you hear from parents in the bleachers can be quite different.

So let's focus on what we are really talking about. Are we losing players/not offering an option to local players that fit the TU identity and are otherwise academically competitive? The sad part of this story is that you can go to Jenks, Union, Owasso, or Bixby, and be NHS and simply not have the academic horsepower to be a good academic risk for a student-athlete. Those are just facts. TPS is even more risky. TU has admitted local kids who were just a classmate or two short of number one in their class who lacked basic reading skills. Sentence composition was at the junior high level. We didn't know that until they were already admitted because they were test optional. This is a problem for a school that isn't sitting on a pile of tax revenue to pay for remedial classwork/tutoring, as well the administrative costs that go with forgiving loans and other headaches when the student inevitably can't keep up. And that's before we talk about the loss of revenue spent developing a player for two years who isn't there for the pay off junior and senior years on the pitch. You can have a 22 on the ACT, straight As and be a member of NHS, that doesn't mean you are ready for TU. So sitting in the bleachers, without seeing the test report, some of the great students you are talking about, very intelligent no doubt, either aren't good risks, aren't as qualified as you think they are/they are telling people, or there are equal or better academic prospects outside of Tulsa interested in TU that have higher test scores. Those are just facts.

So what you say. We should be giving local girls a chance and we should be trying to win. Well, is that really what TU is trying to accomplish? Is that the goal of women's soccer at TU?

We remember the 1991 probation right? The three of us were around for that right? What happened there and how did we get into trouble? Our budget and oversight was irregular and we were competing in a sport that we otherwise would not have been eligible to participate in if certain facts were disclosed to compliance authorities. Right? What we were really doing was trying to spend as little as possible on sports other than football and basketball to give us extra funds to gain a competitive edge in football and basketball. And of course there were rumors at the time that they couldn't pin other things on us due to lack of evidence so they came up with that. Either way, TU was doing as little as possible in those sports. They needed to compete in them to maintain Division I status, so we did that and nothing more.

Well, thanks to increased Title IX awareness and enforcement, and other factors, the same is basically true at TU but without the mismanagement and wrong doing. What I mean by that is FBS sports at TU has a defined purpose. You either support it if you are a fan or you dont. Its nice to dream otherwise, but by culture, by identity, (and perhaps by practical consequence due to financing), by necessity, TU views major sports competition as a key piece of vocalizing the unique educational experience you can gain at TU. That's it. We aren't trying to win. Its an infomercial for the school. It is a mark of credibility and excellence relied upon by parents and applicants. Its a campus amenity for students and faculty. If we win, people enjoy the amenity more. If we win, we get a greater return on the marketing investment. But we aren't trying to win and in some ways we dont really want to win, because then we would have real problems. You would have pressure to expand a competitive edge and TU doesn't have the donor base or local support to sustain that.
Reading this post made me want to pull my eyeballs out of my head. If this is actually how decisionmaking works at TU, it's easy to see why we have so many problems. Each idea starts at the Department of No, then moves to the Department of I Don't Think So, then the Department of It's Too Impractical, then the Department of Maybe in 10 Years and finally the Department of Rewrite the Proposal and Start Over. That's a system designed to kill all good ideas and force anyone with any gumption and creativity to quit in frustration.
 
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The ladies draw UTSA 0-0. Not an awful result but you would like to get the win on your home pitch. We really struggled in the midfield. Resulting in a lot of UTSA possession in our defensive half. We need an upgrade athletically in the midfield.

I have a personal interest in TU women’s soccer as I would like nothing better than to see my kid wearing the gold and blue down the road. Huffy’s comments don’t give me that warm and fuzzy feeling about the university’s commitment to the program. Suppose it is what it is. Hopefully things will improve in the coming years.
 
The school is committed to the program, just not the way most people imagine or at a scale they would desire. It most definitely is what it is. And it won’t ever be anything different.
 
The ladies draw UTSA 0-0. Not an awful result but you would like to get the win on your home pitch. We really struggled in the midfield. Resulting in a lot of UTSA possession in our defensive half. We need an upgrade athletically in the midfield.

I have a personal interest in TU women’s soccer as I would like nothing better than to see my kid wearing the gold and blue down the road. Huffy’s comments don’t give me that warm and fuzzy feeling about the university’s commitment to the program. Suppose it is what it is. Hopefully things will improve in the coming years.
You're right on about the MF. The D is very organized but way too willing to just kick the crap out of the ball instead of working it out. I was really frustrated by the lack of technical skill. First touch for most of the players was about as good as a 10 year old touching a ball for the first time. the passing skill was mostly non-existent and the number of attacks that could have easily developed into one of promise went by the wayside because the player receiving the pass wasn't able to control it or the person passing the ball didn't pass it to anyone in particular.

I will say, if Tatum Sanders was not injured to start the season and Rhein was just going with the bigger GK, he should be fired for that alone. This team is so much better with Sanders back there. It's night and day. She's got good instincts, good hands, distributes the ball well, makes good decisions. She's a way more complete GK than the 5'9" girl they were running out there.

And I'm not sure what that lineup was for TU. Frederick didn't seem to be playing up top but more of a defensive mid role and I can't imagine that helps TU at all. Kalyn Simmons is going to be a handful but people need to get the ball to her feet. No one is taking her off the ball once she has it but I don't think she's the type of player you want to hammer the ball over the top and let her chase it down.

BTW, IMO, the referee was a compete clown last night. I wouldn't let him ref a U12 rec game let alone a D1 women's game. The game had zero flow to it because of all the little touch fouls he whistled, most of which weren't actual fouls. The yellow card on Frederick was a complete joke. Only time I've ever seen a yellow shown to a player who gets absolutely blown up with a legal shoulder to shoulder tackle. It was just poor. My guess is they played maybe 40 minutes with the ball actually moving last night versus all the subs and restarts.

All in all, this was a good result for TU against a very good team.
 
On another note, one of those highly touted TSC 07G we were discussing, just committed to play at Army.
 
You're right on about the MF. The D is very organized but way too willing to just kick the crap out of the ball instead of working it out. I was really frustrated by the lack of technical skill. First touch for most of the players was about as good as a 10 year old touching a ball for the first time. the passing skill was mostly non-existent and the number of attacks that could have easily developed into one of promise went by the wayside because the player receiving the pass wasn't able to control it or the person passing the ball didn't pass it to anyone in particular.

I will say, if Tatum Sanders was not injured to start the season and Rhein was just going with the bigger GK, he should be fired for that alone. This team is so much better with Sanders back there. It's night and day. She's got good instincts, good hands, distributes the ball well, makes good decisions. She's a way more complete GK than the 5'9" girl they were running out there.

And I'm not sure what that lineup was for TU. Frederick didn't seem to be playing up top but more of a defensive mid role and I can't imagine that helps TU at all. Kalyn Simmons is going to be a handful but people need to get the ball to her feet. No one is taking her off the ball once she has it but I don't think she's the type of player you want to hammer the ball over the top and let her chase it down.

BTW, IMO, the referee was a compete clown last night. I wouldn't let him ref a U12 rec game let alone a D1 women's game. The game had zero flow to it because of all the little touch fouls he whistled, most of which weren't actual fouls. The yellow card on Frederick was a complete joke. Only time I've ever seen a yellow shown to a player who gets absolutely blown up with a legal shoulder to shoulder tackle. It was just poor. My guess is they played maybe 40 minutes with the ball actually moving last night versus all the subs and restarts.

All in all, this was a good result for TU against a very good team.
I went through and watched some highlights. Woof. The the first one was wildly bad. The second one was like 40% bad.

He missed a PK when the girl appeared to be pulled down with both hands. Not good. Not good at all.

It is really great we can watch stuff on ESPN+ right on your phone. You can go right to these controversial moments. Technology really is the bees knees sometimes.
 
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The women tied UMKC 3-3 over the weekend. Huge conference game this Thursday against a very good SMU side. Rice comes to town this weekend.
 
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The women tied UMKC 3-3 over the weekend. Huge conference game this Thursday against a very good SMU side. Rice comes to town this weekend.
This team is either feast or famine and they can't figure out how to score goals AND defend in the same game.
 
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TU fought to a scoreless draw with SMU. That's a really really good result for TU on the road in Dallas. SMU was 5-2 coming into the game with their losses being 1-0 to TCU and 6-0 to Texas. They've beaten Tennessee, Baylor, and OkState, and thumped Rice 6-3.

Our defense seems to have sorted out their early season issues. Now if we could find some scoring.
 
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The women are playing much better. There was really no reason for the poor results early on. We have too much talent to lose to some of those sides. Hopefully we can find some goals and get some wins now conference play as started.
 
In just the first 20 minutes, TU is looking dangerous and looks committed to attacking...they are giving up some counters but only one has been really scary so far
 
In just the first 20 minutes, TU is looking dangerous and looks committed to attacking...they are giving up some counters but only one has been really scary so far
Rice plays the ole kick and chase style. Can see why they’re 2-8-1. Good to see TU get that late first half goal. Ball movement thru the midfield looks better. Not sure how much of that is true improvement or the opponent. In any event it’s encouraging.
 
TU 1-0 at half. TU scored with just under 3 minutes left in the half on a miscue by a Rice defender led to a 2 on 1 break. Jordan Frederick played an early ball across to Jadyn Chee who walked in on goal, and past the GK who came off her line like a freight train but never slowed down or delayed Chee.

TU had the better of the play for all but about 10 minutes where Rice was able to put some pressure on and had a few good chances, most of which got blocked or missed the target.
 
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