At Fire tryouts, players take a shot at pro soccer dream
Every time he coached his U-11 club boys team in Naperville the past year and a half, Andrew Lichaj thought about how much he loved playing soccer.
So he decided to give a pro career one last chance.
“Every time you coach you wish you could be on the pitch playing with your friends,” the Downers Grove native said. “It's just hard always coaching, so I just figured I'd give it a last go, call it if that's how it works out.”
Lichaj was one of 210 players from 19 countries to attend last weekend's Chicago Fire open tryouts, hoping the club's player development staff would see a glimmer of promise in them and secure a spot on the team roster.
It's not exactly the route his brother Eric has taken to a pro career — Eric Lichaj is an up-and-coming right back with Aston Villa in the English Premier League and with the U.S. national team — but Andrew Lichaj figured he had nothing to risk but the $150 registration fee.
Though he played up front at Illinois Tech, Lichaj tried out for the Fire at defense.
“I had a talk with my brother and he said it would be harder for me to play at the next level as an offensive player because there's a lot more players,” Lichaj said. “He said defense would probably be a better fit for me, and I've played defense in the past.”
Make no mistake, the odds are against any of these players wearing the red in Toyota Park.
“We've had guys come through this and get into the preseason camp or bits of the preseason camp, but no one's actually hooked on with the team out of this,” Fire assistant coach Larry Sunderland said. “As I look at it this year ... do I see anybody that's going to jump out and say, yes, he's a first-team player? Not yet, but there may be a couple of guys that we might want to look at in camp and see how they stack up against that level. It's an awful different level.”
It helps that MLS is expanding rosters to 30 players this season from 24, with an emphasis on homegrown youngsters.
“When you're talking about guys like this, the opportunity out there is greater than it's ever been before,” Sunderland added.
Goalkeeper Steve Purdy played with the Fire's youth teams the past couple of years and knows many of the coaches who evaluated him at the tryouts.
“My goal today is to get noticed by the Fire,” said Purdy, a St. Charles North High School graduate who just used up his college eligibility at UIC. “I played with them for four years during the summer, so they kind of know me pretty well on a personal basis. I just want to let them know that I'm here and I want to be on the first team. I want to see how I measure up.”
And if things don't work out with the Fire, there's always the Jay DeMerit route, said Purdy, who started playing at age 7 with the Carol Stream Centipedes. DeMerit, also a former UIC player, went to England without a contract and worked his way up from its lowest leagues to a spot as a starter for the United States in last summer's World Cup.
“We're going to go to Europe and try to get on a team there,” Purdy said. “And if we don't get on a team there, then we went to Europe, you know?”
Purdy might not be the only goalkeeper heading from the Fire tryouts to Europe. Larkin High School and Judson University graduate Alex Tyton said he might go to Poland, where he has relatives, and try to catch on with a club — if things don't work out with the Fire.
At 21 he's too young to stop playing.
“I'd like to play competitive soccer,” the Elgin native said. “I've played my whole life, I don't want to stop. This sounded good, especially being so close to home.”
If nothing else, the tryouts were a chance to play soccer against good competition at least one more day, though Lichaj admitted to being a little more anxious than for an average game.
“I couldn't really even eat anything this morning, I was so nervous, but now I'm starting to relax a little bit,” Lichaj said before taking the field for his one-hour session. “But it's just soccer, you know? I've played this my whole life. It shouldn't be too bad.”