Aug 26, 2013
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -
Head coach Bob Warming and senior defenders Akil Howard (Queens, N.Y.) and Martin Seiler(Stuttgart, Germany) represented the Penn State men's soccer team Tuesday at Fall Sports Media Day. Below is the transcript:
Opening Statement:
Coach Warming: It is wonderful to have guys like this (Akil Howard and Martin Seiler) as the two center backs - the two guys that prevent goals from being scored against your team in this program. There's a great new book out, "Everything You Knew About Soccer is Wrong," and it's basically taking these 10,000 columns of analytical data that are being created on every match worldwide now. 10,000 columns of data through Prozone and other programs that are looking at what really helps your team win. The biggest factor in helping your team win is the goalkeeper and the center backs. Those are the guys that they should be spending millions of dollars on right now. It's great that right now we have in our program a fantastic goalkeeper in Andrew Wolverton- 6'5", athletic, tough, great in the air - and we have two exceptional center backs - brave, tough, hard - and they're going to help us go a long way this year. They are part of the core of the most important part of the team right now.
Q: Will you be a defensive-minded team?
CW: That's a great question, Gordon, because we want to win the ball back as quickly as possible. So to win the ball back as quickly as possible, you expose yourself by pressing more players forward in the field. To do that, you better have two great guys in the back who can cover a lot of ground and make sure that nothing is going to happen. So no, we're just the opposite. We want to have the ball and when we lose it, we want to win it back as quick as possible. But you've got to have great center backs to be able to do that. We've lost one game which was this weekend since November. We've played a spring exhibition season (6-0-2), we've played two very good opponents before [Navy] in the fall and I think a lot of it is a credit to these guys that we're not losing matches and still able to press people.
Q: What's it like having a veteran group that solidifies everything?
CW: I think it's more how they (Akil and Martin) feel about it. I think they feel good with each other. Go ahead, you guys jump in.
Akil Howard: I like it because I already have good chemistry with Martin [Seiler] and Andrew [Wolverton] so it makes everything a lot easier for me. And then gelling to get forward, it's really easy because we have a really good core in the middle with Grant [Warming] and Owen [Griffith], so moving the ball is a lot easier getting out of the back. So, it's great.
CW: Yeah, Akil played with Wolverton all summer on a professional development team down in Florida, so they lived together, they worked out together, they did extra training together and they played matches together. Martin went home this summer, but he's just a super, super smart center back and tough. So I think it's very easy for Martin to fit into the lineup because he has a very good brain for the game.
Q: How tough is the Big Ten going to be this year?
CW: Well Indiana won the national championship last year, but they finished fourth in our league. That's how good our league is. Indiana will be good. Every coach I've talked to in the league, I ask them where they put people and they're like, `we have no idea.' Just because they won the national championship [Big Ten coaches] voted Indiana number one in the league, but we think every single game is just going to be unbelievable this year. A lot of young players in the league last year, a lot of returning faces. I think every game is just going to be a terrific battle.
Q: Is it your plan to peak at the end of the season? You have a lot of young players as well.
CW: We do, we have good, talented young players. We lost a lot of seniors last year. So we have a lot of good young players that can really help us. I think the job of the center backs is not only to keep other teams from getting goals against us, but also to help those young players be more confident to go forward and go play. To know these guys have got it covered back there and they can delay the game long enough that our guys can go forward and try to attack with the ball.
Martin Seiler: We're just trying to get better every day in practice. We had three good preseason games and there's a lot that we can learn from these games and I think we've gone in the right direction. Like Coach said, our conference is pretty tough and it's awesome to play in a conference like that because we get challenged every game and I can see us on top of the conference again just like last year. We have a lot of young guys who joined us and they are doing a great job. I'm very confident this season is going to be a great season.
CW: Both these guys - I'm proud of them - they're both going to get their degrees at the end of this year. Both are going to do really, really well in life once they are out of here. But they are going to graduate before the spring, so I'm proud of them for that.
Q: Martin, did you play when you went back home (Germany)? Is there a difference in style of play?
MS: Yes, I did. Yes and no because our coaching staff has looked into the European style of the game. It's a hard question to answer, but I'll have to say it's different.
CW: It is different because there are so many different teams in Europe. Even in Germany, you have people that play different ways. You have everything from teams that play a 3-5-2 in a formation to teams that play a 4-2-3-1 depending on personnel. It's almost as diverse as it is in America where every game is so different. Style of play is determined by a lot of things - by the type of players, by the tactics, by the fields. We played a preseason game in Omaha on turf and things were different. We came home and our grass is so thick this year, the ball was slower. It was kind of tough for us to get things going at home. And then this weekend we played on the fastest surface I've ever seen on the planet. It was unbelievable. You could hit a ball to a guy 40 yards away and it wouldn't even start rolling for 30 yards.
Q: You played three exhibitions this year - what is your thinking behind that?
CW: I need more time to watch guys play before we settle in on things particularly with so many new guys in the program. I kind of felt like I'd like to have six preseason games to be honest with you, just to kind of sort things out with everybody. It just takes me longer and we'll still kind of moving things around a little bit. The staff met this morning about how we think we can do things a little bit better. But, the other part of it is we have new technology. So much more technology then we've ever had before in the game. So after the game was over with we already had the game downloaded to the laptop. We could start cutting out, slicing, editing - we have this tremendous volume of information. Starting tomorrow we can start bringing in guys individually and start showing them things we can do to improve their game. At the end of the day, our job is to be teachers. It just takes me longer to get my message across sometimes.
Q: Talk about holding No. 2 Maryland to just one goal.
AH: I think we did really well. Maryland is a very good attacking team. I think for me and Martin, it was a really good challenge for us. We have wingers in the back - one of which is new - so, the three preseason games was something I thought benefitted us because we got to gel with everyone. Knowing everyone's tendencies kind of helped everyone see what we need to do to get better. So keeping Maryland to just one goal especially with [Patrick] Mullins back, I think we did pretty well.
CW: [Patrick] Mullins is the first player in 20 years of college soccer that was National Player of the Year who decided to return for his senior year. Most of those guys are signing quarter million dollar contracts and he decided to come back. Maryland only lost one game last year and they've got just about everybody back so they're pretty good. And Mullins came back to win a national championship