PITTSBURGH -- The blinds are down in the Oakland office.
Very little light hits the wall that, partly covered in inspirational quotes from some of the most interesting minds to consider soccer, overlooks a similarly crowded desk, which holds on its far left-hand corner a binder.
The binder contains practice plans from Pep Guardiola's 2007-08 season in charge of Barcelona B -- his last before taking over a first team whose success went on to shape the next decade of play, player development, tactics and counter-tactics in the game at club and international level.
But in the summer of 2018, Guardiola's lessons instruct the man who sits behind the desk, Jay Vidovich's ongoing coaching education.
It's a process that began for Vidovich, the 58-year-old head coach of the University of Pittsburgh men's soccer team, in the 1980s, when the United States did things like struggle to qualify its men's national team for the tournament from which it could then try to qualify for the World Cup, or maintain a professional league. The national team's failure to qualify for the World Cup more than three decades later crashlanded longstanding concerns about youth development, access to the game and patterns of player selection to the front of the conversation.
They ripple into coaching in the U.S. at all levels, veering into the number, quality and licensing of coaches, but also how the grassroots coaches responsible for developing American players continue to learn themselves - and in many cases - struggle to afford to do so.
A trio of Pittsburgh coaches considered each and all from their careers in the game. They wrestled with structures within and outside of the U.S. Soccer Federation and made clear what they think makes for good coaches -- institutionally, and not.
They differed on plenty while largely agreeing that pressure on coaches to get and maintain coaching badges is increasing. Accountability matters, they said, and as much as U.S. Soccer purports to reform itself, some troubling patterns remain in how the country coaches up coaches.
"I don't know if it's changed a lot. U.S. Soccer, it's always been kind of 'What's the new flavor of the day?' So if the Dutch were successful, the U.S. would kind of mimic how the Dutch do their systems of play," said Mark Pulisic, assistant coach of the Pittsburgh Riverhounds. "And then the Germans start winning, you know, I think the U.S. was always looking over in Europe, even South America, for ideas and different ways. And they would bring over a lot of foreign coaches as well to kind of help with some lectures and things like that to give us some ideas about how they do it overseas coaching-wise.
"So, it's -- now it's similar. I think they're chasing the flavor."
As of July 2016, according to TopDrawerSoccer.com, there were about 6,000 players in the United States to every A-licensed coach and 3,000 players to every B-licensed coach.
In some circles of American soccer, comfort is taken in the idea that as the years pass each generation of talent will have more exposure for longer to more people in their lives who know the game better than the proverbial average child of the previous generation would have, and that with that ever-increasing volume of the sport the U.S. will reach a sort of critical mass from which it will have become a full-on soccer nation, however one conceives of such a thing.
That's not wrong, coaches say. Some of their starkest critiques are cultural.
Lilley notes that parents at American youth clubs can and in some cases do move their child onto another team when they're upset with the coach. The academy players Pulisic coached at Borussia Dortmund from 2015-17 were all so immersed in the game, he hardly had to worry about motivating them. Vidovich bemoans the number of games that strike him as "throwaway" in the U.S. Soccer Development Academy (USSDA) regular season. "And then there's just plenty of showcases," he said.
None of the present issues can justify waiting decades for American soccer - in a vacuum - to close gaps on the nations it's long been chasing.
A constant exposure to fresh ideas, is crucial to development, the coaches said, both for coaches themselves of any age and for coaches working with players of any age.
In addition to working for Borussia Dortmund for three years, Pulisic credits much of what makes him different from other American coaches with the experiences he got studying at England's national training center, Lilleshall, where he said the content of the courses - running and tapering training sessions, planning out the pacing of the season - didn't vary much from those he took in the U.S., but styles of play and scrutiny of the aspiring coaches did.
"A lot of English coaches there that were trying to get their license to coach, a lot of ex-pro players from England were there when I was there. So I was learning a lot from them and just kind of being put under the fire in a different setting," Pulisic said. "I was a bit out of my comfort zone, it was a bit stressful at times. So that in itself is going to make me become a better coach and a better player, just being in those pressure environments where you're being tested on the field about how you run a session and being the only American over there and kind of dealing with that a little bit."
Relative pressure aside, much of the power in any coaching clinic or course, coaches said, lies in getting to see and hear other coaches' ideas.
The federation and the pro leagues it oversees have emphasized completing pro-level such courses in recent years. Thirteen coaches made up the first class to take the U.S. Soccer Pro Course in December of 2016.
And while Riverhounds head coach Bob Lilley, 52, has heard fellow veteran coaches question the necessity of taking courses and having their badges audited, he figures an engaged coach can always learn something in such session.
"'Oh I spent all this money and didn't learn anything,'" Lilley said. "Then you weren't listening and you weren't watching."
Yet money - inevitably - strikes the coaches as a problem, trickling down the coaching pyramid and depriving soccer in the U.S. of talented and willing coaches.
Pulisic started getting his badges while he was coaching at Lebanon Valley College and finishing his indoor playing career with the Harrisburg Heat in the 1990s. He could do so, he said, because he used what otherwise would've been vacating time in his playing offseason to take his licensing courses.
He got his B license in a week-long session held at Lock Haven University and his A badge in another at Butler University. The latter cost him $1,500-$2,000, he estimated.
Each of the Senior A and Youth A courses offered by U.S. Soccer currently cost $4,000 with half of that total payment required up front and the second $2,000 due before the course's first meeting. Three week-long sessions at the given training site - Kansas City, Bradenton, Raleigh and San Diego, among others - are followed by an evaluation wherever the coach is working at the time.
The courses are more difficult and time-consuming now, Pulisic said. They're also still problematically expensive, he said, costing the sport good coaches across player age groups.
"I don't know if even all the coaches that potentially could be very strong in that field whether it be coaching kids or young adults, I don't know if they can all really afford to put that much money in a licensing course," Pulisic said. "So I think it's important now that U.S. Soccer puts some things up online and can help coaches in other ways that can't afford or maybe offers some scholarships to different soccer clubs or different areas of the country to help some coaches get these scholarships and to get these licenses.
"It's a tough one because obviously everyone needs to make money and everyone wants to run a business the way they want to run a business. But unfortunately when you start to get into the costs of three to four thousand dollars for licensing, there's some stages of people's lives that they can't afford to do that."
The result, Lilley said, can be coaches with plenty of potential never getting to do much more than help out in a local rec league. On a broader scale, it limits inclusion in American soccer.
"There's a lot of people with soccer backgrounds and culture that wouldn't always be able to afford to work. Sure they can work in a house league but they may not be able to afford to work in the academy system or whatever team you have where you have certain licenses," Lilley said.
Vidovich echoes Lilley in a similar, blunter vein.
His coaching education began in the era of "Soccer Made in Germany" - one of the only ways to see the sport on American TV in the 1970s and 80s. And at the time, it was (West) German soccer getting imported directly into the United States' early rumblings of revival in the sport.
German manager and former player Dettmar Cramer taught some of the first coaching courses for the American soccer federation. Vidovich took his C course in the 80s and hung around Walt Chyzowych and his staff, who passed lessons onto the following generation of coaches as the federation's director of coaching.
Modern American soccer as we understand it is not so removed from these roots. Former U.S. men's national team head coach Bob Bradley is descended from the same, Vidovich said, along with Manny Schellscheidt, who brought Christian Pulisic into his first youth national team camp.
Vidovich credits much of his personal development to learning on the job. They all do. And Vidovich considers himself especially fortunate that he happened to coach Ilija Zlatar at Wake Forest. Because Zlatar's dad, also instructed by Cramer, was an assistant with the New York Cosmos.
"I'm still figuring out what he had to show me," Vidovich said.
The branches of the American soccer coaching tree simply haven't grown that wide. And structurally, it shortchanges plenty who want to teach children the game.
"I'm sure you're missing out on some coaches who could benefit tremendously from the educational coaching process," Vidovich said, "and therefore players are as well."
The coaches see this void sucked up through every level. They see progress, too. Lilley notes that USL coaches and their staffs are miles better than they were 20 years ago. He points to the USSDA clubs and the licensing expected of their coaches as cause for optimism.
In games between those teams, Vidovich, who spends a lot of time recruiting academy products, sees the already-formed cracks in the American player.
Vidovich recalls a 10-day trip he took to Spain with one of his assistants in which he watched 7 year olds at Villarreal practice. In a scrimmage, one of the children gets fouled off the dribble. He goes down, his coach asks him if he needs to leave the field. The dribbler says he does not. Play resumes.
Twenty seconds later, the player who committed the foul gets the ball. A teammate of the dribbler intentionally takes him out.
"Because, 'Hey, paybacks,'" Vidovich said. "So it was like they know this at 7 years old. They don't know that in college. Around here they don't know that as a college player, those inside parts of the game."
Lilley bemoans that too many American players don't fulfill elements of the game like shielding the ball and lingering a leg in front of it an area of space likely to be kicked anyway, drawing a foul.
This deficit extends beyond retribution and into basic tactics, like holding down assignments on restarts from set pieces, Vidovich said. Ten year olds in Spain know this, he said, whereas his players do not.
He has to teach them as much. And it takes away from stamping out other bad habits, technical and tactical.
There are professional wide players in the USL who can't cross well consistently, Lilley said. He has central midfielders addicted to running to the ball, closing out their own team's space.
One of too few youth coach's problem becomes a college coach's problem, which can get addressed in a limited time, but leaves a player's skill and mindset wide open to becoming a pro coach's problem.
"One thing we got to look at is that the same thing that's happening to Bob or MLS coaches is that they're receiving players there who are underdeveloped one way or another," Vidovich said. "Their perception of the game, the way they read the game is underdeveloped, especially when you compare to same age group overseas. But a lot of that is that that's what we're getting as well."
Neither Vidovich nor Lilley is coaching at the highest levels of the sport in the country. Both believe and have to believe these longstanding flaws can be corrected.
Vidovich knows he can't apply all that Guardiola put to Barcelona B as his players can't do all that their Catalan and Spanish age peers did and do, so he adapts lessons to time and talent restraints.
Still, when they do make strides with players, they aren't erasing the years that player spent providing such flawed competition to talents that were never likely to play college or second-tier soccer, but could've been sharpened by a sharper group of players who would.
And it's there that the flawed conflations of national team or prominent American club team performance start to add up, or divide out, to something diagnosable.
These and other coaches are playing a game of developmental catch-up. It is their life's work and it has gotten better. But games of catch-up can only end in so many victories.
"How to win," Vidovich said of the deficiencies in academy products. "How to play to win. How to manage a game. The intangibles that make up a player."
How's it manifest?
"Maybe it manifested itself in the last World Cup Qualifier," he said. "Who knows?"