Soccer Down Here

Soccer Down Here is less a single show than a feed of several soccer programs gathered under the SDH Network name. Georgia is home base. From there, the coverage reaches a long way. The local end is the Red Clay Soccer Report, which covers high school soccer around the state. It sets out rankings, brackets and schedules while playoff classifications are still settling, and one edition's title names Clarke Central and ChattCo. Chris Aiken, boys head coach at Clarke Central, joins that edition. Then there is the UPSL. In a Soccer Down Here 1v1, Jason Longshore talks with Nick Webster, the league's new executive vice president, as part of a partnership with ASMG covering UPSL in Georgia. Webster traces his path through the league as a player and a coach before he applied for the executive role, and the two find common ground in a shared Atlanta Silverbacks past. SDH AM is the morning show, with plenty of friendly back-and-forth. Its episodes carry labels such as Friday Free Kick and Opposition Research. Greg Garza of Beyond Goals Mentoring argues that development has no peak and that a player who stops learning gets passed by. After some ribbing about Central Time, Lucas Panzica of 104.5 The Zone talks through what Nashville pulled off against Club America at the Azteca, a ground where, in his view, MLS teams are not expected to win. One episode title explains itself: Thursdays With Niko on a Friday, pushed back a day while Niko Moreno was in Pullman. From there he runs through the MLS weekend, including the Sounders in the Shield race, which players are getting minutes, and a midweek in which LAFC made it look easy at times. Then the feed leaves North America entirely. On The Soccermetrics Copa Libertadores Show, Howard Hamilton, founder of Soccermetrics, previews group-stage match days and calls it the only English-language show on South America's top club competition. His previews combine current form with head-to-head history, such as Estudiantes de La Plata's earlier meetings with Cusco back when that club was known as Real Garcilaso. The Libertadores previews are tighter and more structured than the morning banter, which gives the feed a real change of pace. What ties it together is people inside the game talking plainly, from a Georgia high school bracket to a continental group stage.