RIP Tony DiCicco, friend and storyteller

I (along with the entire U.S. soccer community, I imagine) was blindsided by news Tuesday that Tony DiCicco, coach of the U.S. women's national team that won the 1999 Women’s World Cup, passed away. I am stunned and sad right now. It’s a crushing personal loss for anybody who knew him.

I’d known Tony for less than 3 years and even then only in a work context, yet he was somebody I unfailingly looked forward to seeing, to greeting, to catching up with, regardless of the soccer or the broadcast. I loved working with him and talking soccer, of course, but the pre-game lunch or dinner (or both!) together was just fun. He could listen and find a way to relate to almost anything, he could be both positive and realistic at the same time, and he was a heck of a storyteller.

In my experience (again, a small sample size compared to many), a meal with Tony meant some serious entertainment. Whether it was the restaurant in the hotel or a chain in whatever small town we were in or a fancy Italian place in Chapel Hill, he had stories. They could be funny and/or insightful, eyebrow-raising and/or sobering. They involved a lot of recognizable names, too, but it wasn’t overt name-dropping, just Tony talking. Stories about the 1999 World Cup team flowed just as easily as those about his family or his goalkeeping days or other teams he coached.

He was confident in his views and opinions – anyone who has heard him second-guessing other coaches as a game or studio analyst can attest to that – but it never felt arrogant or disrespectful to me. He was just sharing his take and could not help but think about soccer and coaching in terms of what his approach would have been, as if he could visualize just how things might play out.

It felt like almost every coach we came across had a connection to Tony's coaching tree. Some were, as I was at first, intimidated by the heights of his success. Others wanted Tony to do them a favor. He was happy to meet, greet, and help each however he could.

Courtesy Ben Solomon

We called a number of college games together, which typically meant a conference call with each coach to get a little background on that team, a guess at the lineup, and an anecdote or two. I would let Tony take the lead, and he would say to the coach, “Tell me about …” whatever the immediate topic was, and away we went. He asked the right questions and knew what to take from the answers, how to read between the lines, and how to work that information into a broadcast. We would always compare notes, and I couldn’t help my bemusement that he always listed formations as 1-4-4-2 or 1-4-3-3 instead of just 4-4-2 or 4-3-3 – he wasn’t about to take the goalkeeper for granted!

On game days, you would never have known the heights he scaled as a coach, watching him interact with the production crew and the locals. “Hi, I’m Tony,” sufficed as an introduction. We got some good games and some crap games together (if I’m honest, our last working together was pretty blah), but we always had fun and we were always in it together. We would eat together, drive to games together, approach coaches together, and leave together afterward … it seems obvious, but it made an incredibly positive difference in our on-air chemistry.

I have to believe that focus on togetherness and connection and unity was something that set him apart as a broadcaster, as a coach, and, far more importantly, as a man.

I was looking forward to comparing notes with and hearing more stories from Tony this fall, and it hasn’t quite sunk in yet that I won’t have that chance. But it was a privilege to know and work with him for the last few years, and I feel terrible for his family, close friends, former players and colleagues, and everybody who knew him better and longer than I.

Joy and unity, caring and storytelling. We will all miss Tony DiCicco.

All Chinese to me: Preparing for players whose names you can't read

I take the preparation and research for my broadcasts very seriously, and I got some special help this week.

This summer brought me a terrific opportunity, as I was asked to call games at the FIFA U-20 Women's World Cup for ESPN

That meant learning how to pronounce a ton of names, many of them in languages unfamiliar to me. We've already covered some of my French background with this #HumbleBrag post, but the Asian teams … that's another story. Is pronouncing the transliterated versions of Chinese and Korean phonetically really the best way? With the US drawn against China in the group stage, I had to find a solution.

Thankfully, my family came to the rescue again. My older brother happens to have married a Chinese-American woman and has learned plenty of Chinese himself. So I spent a good 30 minutes on Skype listening to him make sounds I never thought he could. (He actually looked online for a roster in Chinese characters to make sure he was giving me good advice, but he never could find one.)

After repeating his pronunciation of player after player, I then wrote them out phonetically for myself (Lyu Siqi became lyew suh-chee, for example) and began practicing. When watching China's first two games, I said the names out loud as players passed the ball around, constantly reminding myself to use only the family name (the first name listed) on second reference. So if I wanted to use what we think of as Lyu Siqi's "last" name, I would say, 'lyew.'

Between the first and second group games, I got my sister-in-law on the phone for a test run, and she only corrected one of my 22 pronunciations, so I felt ready to go for the US-China game on Tuesday.

When preparing my scoresheet, instead of writing out the players' names as listed by FIFA (LYU Siqi) or what appeared on their jerseys (LYU S Q), I went with a combination of accuracy and phonetics. Since I had most of the last names down and wanted those to be used more often, I wrote the last names in all caps in their proper spelling (LYU). Then I wrote a small-caps, phonetic version of their individual names (SUH CHEE). So if I had forgotten No. 5's name, I would look down and quickly get LYU; suh-chee might only be used if I had time to get into any of the (minimal) background information I had come up with.

I went over the names with my partner, former World Cup- and U-20 World Cup-winning coach Tony DiCicco, who has been great to work with for all the US games. Plenty familiar with Chinese national teams from facing them over the years, he also focused on getting the last names correct. Since there were only a few duplicates in the lineup, that mostly sufficed.

The broadcast went off without a hitch, at least from a Chinese names perspective, and the time we put into our preparation was well worth it. How else could we quickly be able to correctly identify and pronounce TAN and TANG, LYU and LIU, LI and LEI, ZHONG and ZHANG? For that I am very, very grateful to my brother and my sister-in-law.

Now for Saturday ... anybody know Korean?