One of the best things about coaching is being proud of the players you coach.  This morning I have the pleasure to announce how proud I am of Dean Abdehou!  Dean is one of my campers and current Online Soccer Academy members and just recently told me that he has been selected for the REGIONAL ODP TEAM!

ODP stands for the Olympic Development Program.  This is US Soccer’s way of discovering America’s talent and grooming them for the full National team.  Being apart of this program is a great opportunity and it helps being recruited for college and professional soccer.

Dean is from Shreveport, Louisiana and is currently living in Bradenton, Florida.  He left home recently and is in his first year at the famous IMG Academy.  Hopefully soon Dean will be doing an interview with me or writing a guest post about how is young soccer career is going.  For now please enjoy this excerpt from Dean’s Regional ODP Team announcement letter.

Dear Region III 94 Player,

Congratulations, you have been selected by your Region III head coach to attend the interregional event scheduled for December 26, 2009 through December 30, 2009 to be held at the Disney Wide World of Sports (DWWS) in Orlando, Florida. Regional Teams from all four regions are scheduled to compete. The US National Team coaches will be attending this event to select the top players for National Team participation in further events. Our Region III coaches will be selecting players to attend the foreign trip scheduled for this spring. There will also be an estimated 75 Division I college coaches attending. This is one of the major recruiting events on their schedules. You will have the opportunity to play against the top male athletes in your sport from all over the United States.

Congrats again Dean and keep up the great work!!  Believing in it and hard work pays off!  Keep pushing it!

JM

P.S. Below is a skill video Dean and I did together this winter in Shreveport, Louisiana.  If you haven’t seen it yet check it out.  Dean has been making awesome skills videos for a while now so it was cool he let me guest appear in one of them!

Tags: Dean Abdehou, IMG Academy, ODP

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 7:10 am and is filed under My Players. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.