Page 14 • June 2019
Breaking Down
WALLS By Jody Norwood
Photos Courtesy Kentucky Youth Soccer
Paducah Tilghman coach, local players take part in Olympic Development training at Die Gelbe Wand
It was a learning experience for players and coaches alike, looking to break down preconceptions about the sport for young Americans and build up new ideas for seasoned coaches. There’s some poetry in that experience coming at a place called Die Gelbe Wand (The Yellow Wall).
Guell, known as coach Tico to most of his players, is part of the Kentucky Olympic Development coaching staff. Now in his third year with the program, Guell stays busy with teaching the sport, both at club level and as head coach for Paducah Tilghman High School’s girls soccer team. With ODP, he served as an assistant coach his first two years, picking up additional roles along the way and eventually becoming head coach for the 2001 boys team. This year he was named head coach for the 2006 boys and served as an assistant on the 2003 team’s recent trip abroad.
Several weeks removed from bratwurst and Brussels sprouts on a cool rainy day in May closer to home, he still smiles talking about the trip. There are a handful of other reasons for him to be jovial as earlier in the day
Pumas Futbol Club — the program he and friend Gerardo “Chile” Herrera have built up in recent years — earned a slew of wins at Kentucky’s Village Cup, one of the highest levels of organized competition for U11 and U12 club teams in the state. The event brings together clubs from across the Commonwealth, hundreds of players with different skills and styles working together. In many ways — Guell says — it’s much like ODP, which mixes When you together kids who may have never get thrown played on the same team and asks them to take on the best in their age into the cage group.
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“It’s really fun to see how differwith lions and ent kids from different clubs can get together and play so well,” Guell said. have to figure “But it’s funny how club is different out how to than ODP. You have a player who is center forward for his club team — get out, that’s getting all the scores — and all the sudden for ODP he’s playing center good. back because that’s how it fits for his characteristics, his level, his blueprint —Armando Guell as a player. That’s why we have all the training: to get players comfortable playing positions they may never have before. It’s a learning experience for them as much as for us.”
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There are 4,502 miles of Bluegrass, rolling countryside and ocean between Paducah, Kentucky and Dortmund, Germany. It’s nearly a day-long journey by bus, escalator and plane from the Commonwealth’s rural western corner to Germany’s eighth largest city. Armando Guell — along with a handful of local players — made the trek to represent Kentucky in international youth soccer games against teams from Germany and Holland in April.
Originally, Herrera was also supposed to make the trek.
