WASHINGTON, DC (Mar 12, 2008) USSoccerPlayers -- On Monday, the National Soccer Hall of Fame announced the 2008 induction class. National Team great Hugo Perez being elected as a Veteran, and legendary women's college and National Team coach Anson Dorrance voted in as a Builder. Despite a field containing such notable names as Preki, Joy Fawcett, Jeff Agoos and Earnie Stewart, no player received the necessary 75% of the 128 votes cast.
Jack Huckel is the Director of Museum and Archives for the National Soccer Hall Of Fame and Museum. Arriving at the Hall in May 2000, he had previously spent 20 years as a soccer coach at Skidmore College and the Maine Maritime Academy. While at Skidmore, which is located in Saratoga Springs, New York, Huckel began his involvement with the Hall Of Fame, which has led to the position he currently holds.
The day after the results of the voting were announced, we spoke with Huckel about the 2008 election.
USSoccerPlayers: Let's talk about the Class Of 2008. Did it surprise you that no player got 75% of the vote?
Huckel:
The two people that got elected are wonderful and richly deserved
elections, and we're happy to have them join in the Hall Of Fame.
Yeah, it was kind of surprising. When we were sending the ballot, we
thought we might have three players selected.
USSoccerPlayers: It seems like there were so many deserving players that it wound up splitting everybody's votes.
Huckel: But the voters are given ten choices among the 35 names on the ballot, so it's not like you can only pick two of them, and you might have a hard time deciding among the top five which to select. The other way it's surprising is that, the Hall Of Fame, to give you some history, was given the responsibility to conduct the elections in 1999.
Over the course of the last eight years, we've made a progression on how that election should be held. We've had an ultimate goal in involving these groups and have moved our way to that way that we wanted to get elections done. We weren't sure if that ultimate goal would work, so we would take it one step at a time and evaluate that step and say, "OK, we're ready for the next one."
In 2004, we had come full circle from 1999 on how we wanted to conduct elections. Since then, we've had 9 players elected to the Hall Of Fame with 75% of the ballot. So we anticipated that the players who got the top votes – Jeff Agoos, Joy Fawcett and Preki, at least one of those, if not all three of them would receive enough votes.
USSoccerPlayers: What are those groups that you mentioned?
Huckel: There are four groups that are involved in the voting. There's a relatively small group of administrators – about 12 to 15. These are the MLS owners, US Soccer and the MLS Commissioner. All past and present national team coaches have the opportunity to vote, as well as all MLS coaches who have four years or more experience as a head coach in the league, because they have an understanding of the players. All the Hall Of Famers are eligible to vote. I also have a list that I've worked with US Soccer, MLS and originally WUSA to develop a list of 100-120 media people – not just writers, but broadcasters and photographers as well – people whose primary job in the media is to cover soccer in one form or another.
The vote is based on how many ballots we received, and on what percentage of those ballots you've been mentioned. So if someone failed to vote, that doesn't count against you.
USSoccerPlayers: Would the Hall consider changing its eligibility requirements to prevent this from happening again? It seems like now the 20 games for the national team requirement should be an automatic, and Criteria 3 (in which a player has to have spent five years in an American first-division professional league, and been an All-Star or a champion) isn't as relevant now because we've had a professional league for so long.
Huckel: We've talked this about the requirements, and we've adjusted the national team requirement based on history. That is, if we were to find someone now who played five international games in the 1920s that we've never heard of before, and there's not much chance of that, it's enough to qualify him, because so few internationals were played in that era. So we've kept that in mind. We’ve tried to keep that in mind.
My personal philosophy is that getting on the ballot does not have to be hard. It's getting off the ballot and onto the wall that should be the challenging part. I can't say our Board or the Eligibility and Awards Committee agrees with me, but that's my personal philosophy that I've expressed to others as we've talked about these issues.
The Eligibility and Awards Committee is made up of some Board members, some Hall Of Famers and some media members. They look at the policies and procedures for all the elections for all the awards, and try to make them make some sense. Those decisions are ongoing in that every year, we evaluate what happened and what we've learned. Is it a trend or a one-time thing? This is the first time this has happened, so I wouldn't say it's a trend, but if it happens two or three years in a row, then we may be thinking that we need to do something.
USSoccerPlayers: I think it was interesting that Dominic Kinnear only got 15 votes as a player, but one day he may have more votes than that as a coach.
Huckel: That's a possibility, and at some future date if he continues his success as a coach, he might join the Builder's ballot.
USSoccerPlayers:
I guess also that emphasizing the national team requirement would hurt
the chances of the great international players who have played here.
Huckel: Right. Franz Beckenbauer is a Hall Of Famer based on his play in the NASL. Before 2000, both the eligibility for election and method of election were very different from how they are today, and ere not controlled by the Hall Of Fame.
USSoccerPlayers: How long have these requirements been there?
Huckel:
We established the current eligibility requirements in 2000. The
Builder one has evolved a little bit, but the Player eligibility, for
the most part, has been unchanged. One of the changes we made over
this time period was that once you were on the ballot, you stayed on
the ballot. But we began a process last year where those who received
less than five percent of the total ballots cast will drop off the
Player ballot and be placed into the pipeline to go on the Veterans
Eligibility List when they are ten years past their retirement.
USSoccerPlayers:
What about splitting up the men and women? Because of the differences
in their respective histories, the criteria maybe doesn't give as
accurate a portrayal of what it means to be great for the women.
Huckel: That idea has been discussed, but right now, nobody has felt the need to make that change. It has been discussed in the Eligibility and Awards Committee, and is part of an ongoing evaluation of what the elections are telling us. It's not like an idea that hasn't been thought about. It's just that we don't think the history of the balloting indicates that we need to do that to this point.
Dave Lifton writes weekly for USSoccerPlayers. Visit his blogs at BookedForDissent and WingsForWheels. You can contact him at: dslifton@wingsforwheels.net
