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If you are interested in what forces have inspired and shaped my web site, please read
on.
First came the roster analysis spreadsheet, which I had assembled from the 1998 women's soccer team rosters as a personal tool to help me learn more about how women's college soccer functioned. While the project started by studying the Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana teams, it quickly expanded when I adjusted my thinking to:
"Which schools would my daughter Britt likely consider a soccer scholarship offer from?"
This widened the area west to Arizona, north to include Indiana (Britt is Roman Catholic, and her high school team mate Amanda Guertin was considering Notre Dame), and east to the Atlantic. The West Coast wasn't included simply because I didn't want Britt going to school where I'd not be able to watch her play college soccer, plus it might tempt her to stay on the West Coast after college, where I'd likely not see as much of her down the road. Bottom line here, eventually I'm likely to be heading to the east coast, not the west coast.
Back in 1998, a large portion of the college soccer coaches didn't publish their rosters on the school's web site. So I spent a great deal of effort requesting that coaches mail or e-mail me a copy of their team rosters. Even finding the e-mail address of many coaches was an adventure, since many coaches didn't list an e-mail address on the "soccer team" site, or even the school's athletic staff directory. So I often had to go into the school's site and search the "faculty and staff" e-mail directory, and once there, would often go ahead and add the assistant coaches and even graduate assistants to my e-mail list. After having 2 or 3 requests ignored by the head coaches, I would usually send an e-mail out to the assistants, or the athletic director.
Concurrently, I was sifting through U.S. News and World Report's college rankings web pages to learn about the other more important aspects of the college world. I took this information, and manually merged it with the roster analysis information which I'd collected. It contained not only the cost of both in-state and out-of-state tuition and room and board for each school, but other detail such as academic rating, freshman retention ratings, graduation ratings, and student-faculty ratios.
Finally, after the conclusion of the fall 1998 season, I realized that I had a large collection of e-mail addresses, I sent out a broadcast e-mail to the coaches with my spreadsheet "kimbro.xls" included as an attachment. Embracing the philosophy: "God helps those who help themselves", I used this opportunity to generate interest in my daughter's soccer teams, by adding the following not so subtle promotion to the bottom of each of the spreadsheet's 5 pages:
| Grapevine (TX) High |
| School's Lady Mustang |
| Soccer Team Includes |
| The Following Seniors: |
| Angela Gravley |
| Tracey Powers |
| Stephanie Hagood |
| Natalie Nardecchia |
| Laura Kamp |
| Erin Caulk |
| Alli MacDowell |
| A Junior, Who Is On Her |
| Age Group National Team: |
| Amanda Guertin |
| And of course, a group |
| of quality underclassmen |
| including my daughter Britt |
| 5'6", 130 lbs, Left Footed, FW-LMF-GK, |
| Sophomore, 4.365 GPA, |
| Offensive Captain of Her Club Team, '82 Flame West |
| Britt's '99 Stats thru 20 High School Games: |
| 3 Goals / 1 Assist in 11 Halves at FW & LMF |
| 29 Halves Played at Goalkeeper |
| Grapevine's Coach is: |
| Lezli Graham |
I received a great deal of positive (or at least puzzled!) feedback, including a reply from then NCAA Champion Florida's Coach Becky Burleigh! I was stoked!
Encouraged, I felt that I had to expand the effort for the following year yet I couldn't just do the same thing. The problem was that some coaches were afraid to open the attachment, as even then the concern about viruses was very real. One prominent coach replied with a request that I print everything out and mail it to him. Of course I didn't...mainly because it was just too big to print out. Another factor in my decision to move to the web was the fact that it was very difficult to share my spreadsheet with other parents. Back in 1999, many didn't know how to open an e-mail attachment, and some parents seemed put off when I'd hand them a floppy disk with the spreadsheet on it. So I created the web site as an easier and safer way to share the information with a much larger audience. An audience which seemed to appreciate both the soccer related pages and the college rankings and statistics pages as well.
My late wife, Debra Kimbro, was the driving force behind our children's participation in youth soccer. While I had coached both Britt and Marshall in the local City of Colleyville basketball leagues, Debra was often 'team mom' for the soccer teams, and did way more than her share to insure that they made it to the soccer practices, soccer camps, soccer tryouts, and soccer games. In her mid-30's Debra was treated for breast cancer. It resurfaced again in the fall of 1998.
During this time I felt that my son was especially effected by his mother's health problems. So I sent out an inquiry to the French goalkeeper Fabien Barthez via e-mail, explaining that like himself my son was a goalkeeper, and that I was looking for something to pick up Marshall's spirits, and counter the negative effects of his mother's failing health. I asked where I could buy a poster of his collision with Ronaldo from the final of World Cup '98. He immediately responded - in English - that he didn't know of such a poster, but he'd be happy to send Marshall autographed pictures and an e-mail. This exceptional thoughtfulness is why I have chosen to use Fabian's pictures throughout my web site. Scans of the pictures are at the bottom of this page, and the originals are proudly displayed on Marshall's bedroom wall.
As a means of coping, I threw myself into the project of creating the web site, working weekend nights into the wee hours, expanding the ladies coverage, and adding the men's pages as well. I used my AOL provided disk space as a hosting service, then e-mailed the coaches with word of it's creation after the Fall 1999 campaign. Again, more feedback, but I have to admit that one negative reply was received.
During this time, I read with interest the entries into the various soccer forums on the web. Weeks and months went by, and while there was much complaining about the politics of soccer at the various levels from recreation to professional level, and a few discussions of boring topics like unsportsmanlike behavior ("...blah, blah, blah, I can't believe that the girls on the other team spit in their hands before they shook hands with our girls, blah, blah, blah..."), I don't remember a single posting which encouraged the discussion as to why there were so damn many 1-0 games, or even any discussion as to why professional soccer wasn't doing better here in America. Noting what I considered a total lack of imagination on the part of the vast majority of the contributors, featuring such non-sensical garbage as:
"Well you know that if it was easy then it wouldn't be soccer!!"
I finally started to challenge the contributors to think outside the box and consider how soccer could be higher scoring and more entertaining.
During this time I was receiving an awful lot of responses to my postings which generally stated:
"Mike, understand that no one has ever complained about this before you came along, so how bad can it be?"
Well that did it. I knew full well that I was on soccer's lunatic fringe, but I was amazed that these guys and gals were right...nobody who really cared about the game of soccer had ever complained in the direct way and analytical fashion which I was employing. So I put together a broadcast e-mail to the big dogs at FIFA, the MLS, as well as the officers of the various state soccer associations across the nation, encouraging them to consider ways to encourage offensive oriented, higher scoring soccer. I just didn't want the higher ups to be able to state that "nobody's ever complained" about soccer's low scoring reality ever again. Not one single reply was received by me on this e-mail, but for years the good folks at West Virginia Soccer posted much of my e-mail as a "letter to the editor" on their site. They were even good enough to include direct links to two of my web pages when I requested that they do so a year or so later. This posting by the folks in West Virginia was the first inspiration for my "Visualize Higher Scoring Outdoor Soccer" page.
During 1999, I'd post 4 or 5 entries a week in a few of the various soccer web forums. This was a very small number, since many contributors would be posting 6 or 8 entries per day, feeling the need to offer feedback on even the most obvious and mundane issues. Another inspiration for the "Visualize Higher Scoring Outdoor Soccer" page came when I noticed that someone at the Colorado Soccer Net Forum was placing HTML 'tags' on my postings which allowed these small web pages to be used more effectively by the big search engines such as yahoo, lycos, altavista and google. This meant that when one went to google and typed in "higher scoring soccer" or "soccer rules changes", my CSN postings were coming up, directing traffic to the CSN site.
Interestingly, this wasn't being done to the postings of most other contributors to the CSN site. Unfortunately, I initially regarded my expanded exposure with a sort of paranoia. But then I realized that this wasn't some sort of personal attack on me, but simply that my ideas were being used to pull traffic to the CSN site. Well I now had a new college soccer site of my own, so the light came on upstairs that I needed to use my ideas to attract interest to my site.
These were the forces which encouraged me to combine that original broadcast e-mail with many of my soccer forum postings, into a few pages which made up the core of "Visualize Higher Scoring Outdoor Soccer."
And the all important 'ideas' portion of my page took shape over the following stages:
I continued to publish updated roster analysis spreadsheets for 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2003. But during this time, I not only had to maintain my web site, but I also had to maintain my database of e-mail addresses for all of the head coaches, assistant coaches, and graduate assistants at all the colleges on the spreadsheet. When you consider that includes both men's and women's soccer programs, plus the fact that many coaches moved around each year, keeping these e-mail lists updated was quite a job in and of itself. But it was a labor of love as I looked forward to that one October day each year when I could notify the coaches that my 'roster analysis tool' was updated. Naturally, I used the opportunity to further promote my children's club soccer and high school soccer teams, in e-mails such as the following which went out during October 2000:
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To: Esteemed Women's Soccer Coaches
From: Mike Kimbro
Ref: Roster Analysis Pages for 2000-2001 Womens Programs are Now Updated
Just a quick note to make you aware that I've brought my web site up to date for the current year, and have even added a few additional programs. Just as last year, my site affords the chance to COMPARE your programs with about 150 others, and ask yourself such question as:
1. How can this team do so well with only 16 players on the roster?
2. Why do so many programs have only 1 goalkeeper on the roster, while others have 5?
3. How can every team in that conference have a loosing overall record?
4. How do the size of the junior classes compare (indicating the size of next year's senior class?)
5. Does a freshman class of 15 for an established program indicate that some programs have an easier time recruiting than others, or simply that some coaches will place anyone with a pulse on their roster?
If you see any errors, send me an e-mail setting me straight. Don't waste your time with negative feedback, because I really don't care. This is "art for art's sake", something I do to fill the empty hours.
For a personal update, here's the highs and lows of the last couple of weeks:
Highs: Britt's club team, the '83 Texas Image, beat arch rival '83 Sting 2-1, while Marshall was chosen "prince" for the freshman class for the school's homecoming activities.
Lows: Britt's Texas Image Soccer team lost 2-1 to the dreaded '83 D'Feeters, and Marshall had to participate in the homecoming with his jaw wired shut due to a fracture sustained in his last club game.
It's never a dull moment at Casa Kimbro.
Take care,
Mike (Brittany and Marshall's Dad) Kimbro
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Finally and thankfully, I don't see a need to go further with the roster analysis thing since Britt's finishing her last year of college soccer, and Marshall's at a college where there is no men's team at all. Furthermore, the most important page in my mind, the "Class Loss or Gain" pages for both Men's Teams and Women's Teams, is now complete enough to begin to draw some conclusions from. Built around the philosophy that I'd rather my children participate in a program where the student/athletes tend to stay in soccer for all four years, rather than be involved in a program which burns most of the players out during the freshman year. In other words, when considering different college programs, request copies of the team rosters from the previous 3 or 4 years. The coaches will have them, and if they don't, check with the school's "sports information department", and finally the school's athletic director. Then do your own little "Class Loss or Gain" analysis.
But rest assured that my "Visualize Higher Scoring Outdoor Soccer" page and it's supporting pages will continue to evolve, for the battle to make professional soccer truly marketable in America is far from over.
Thanks for your interest.
Mike "Soccer's Spreadsheet Freak" Kimbro
To return, best to hit your BACK ARROW button
or go to: Visualize Higher Scoring Soccer or Kimbro's Home Page
Above are the two autographed pictures sent by Fabien Barthez in response to my request for something to lift my son Marshall's spirits as his mother's heath was failing from breast cancer. So how do I repay Fabian's generosity? By making his the primary male soccer image of my web site, bringing to mind the quote from the movie The Tailor of Panama: "No good deed goes unpunished!"