Standing under a big, white inflated dome, he watches about 40 teenage boys trickle inside for two hours of drills and scrimmages in what by day is a suburban Chicago driving range.

The players are members of the Chicago Fire's Youth Development Academy, unpaid apprentices dedicated to the slim hope that someday they'll be pros in a country known more for its football than its futbol.

"To be honest with you," the 44-year-old coach says, shaking his head and laughing, "I didn't think I probably would see it in my lifetime."

Mateus is the director of the academy, one of 63 U.S. Soccer Development Academy programs set up over the past year by the U.S. Soccer Federation to train the 2,500 or so best American players. Six of the academies are affiliated with Major League Soccer teams such as the Fire, others with lower-level pro teams or elite youth clubs, including Raleigh's Capital Area Soccer League. Another dozen academies, including three set up by MLS teams, are planned.

The USSF is trying to create an version of the academies that produce the best players in Europe and South America.

In the process, it hopes to transform the national soccer culture.

John Hackworth, technical director of the national academies, is trying to bridge what he sees as a vast gap between the kind of training U.S. players receive and the no-nonsense grooming players get in the rest of the soccer world.

U.S. players, Hackworth says, tend to develop bad habits playing for club teams that often emphasize winning over developing skills and games -- even against weak opponents -- over practice.

"It's not a matter of whether little Johnny can handle a soccer ball, it's a matter of whether little Johnny can get a result," says Hackworth, also an assistant coach for the men's national team. "That is a problem, and it's always been a problem for national team coaches like myself."

Coaches and fans have wished for years that MLS teams would set up their own academies to develop pros and deepen the talent pool for the national team. MLS has talked for several years about creating academies, but the USSF went ahead, Hackworth says, because it has the reach to build them across the country. He expects more MLS teams to help.

The U.S. player pool has improved over the past two decades, in part because of a residency program in Bradenton, Fla., for the under-17 national team.

The U.S. has qualified for every World Cup since 1990. It advanced to the quarterfinals in 2002, then got knocked out in the first round two years ago. Still, no U.S. men's or boy's team has ever won a major FIFA tournament.

Hackworth notes that top U.S. players often still lack technical expertise. They get by on stamina and speed rather than dribbling and touch, and they sometimes take breaks during games. The latter, he says, is a product of playing so many youth-club matches that they habitually take a few minutes off here and there to save energy.

And even the coach who led the 2002 team to the high point in U.S. soccer history said at the time that the talent pool was far too shallow.

"We can slap 11 on the field and do pretty well," Bruce Arena, now a commentator on soccer broadcasts, said in a 2002 interview. "But we don't have the numbers behind it."

At the Fire Academy, Mateus and his assistants stop practice frequently, trying to correct simple mistakes that Americans are sometimes criticized for, such as dribbling when a pass will more effectively move the ball up field or bunching up in tight groups rather than moving into open space.

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