Through three weeks of the MLS season, FC Dallas has stormed out to the best record in the league, providing fans with excitement and expectations. And few of those fans have knowledge of the team quite like local high school soccer coach Nathan Nipper.
While guiding the Colleyville Covenant boys soccer team to a pair of TAPPS Division III state titles, Nipper also found time to pen a memoir-style book about FC Dallas, “Dallas 'Til I Cry: Learning to Love Major League Soccer.” The book was released last summer, and though it never spent time on the New York Times Bestsellers list, it has received favorable reviews and even won an award.
Nipper started the Covenant program back in 2010. By 2013, he had the Cougars hoisting a state championship trophy. They repeated in 2014. It was during that time Nipper decided to act on an urge that had been building for a while. A former screenwriter, he had done some blogging and digital writing about soccer, but always knew he wanted to author a book.
“Over the past six or seven years, I’ve been doing a lot of reading about soccer and reading a lot of soccer books,” he said. “I had an itch for a long time to write something myself. This idea came along just out of being a soccer fan.”
Raised initially in Arkansas, Nipper is the son of missionary parents. As such, he spent portions of his youth in France and Senegal. It was primarily there his passion for European and especially English soccer – or football there, of course – was born. Like many soccer fans, Nipper was slow to warm to MLS.
“There’s a lot of soccer fans in the U.S. who have turned their nose up at MLS. I honestly had been one of them,” he explained. “This idea that it’s an inferior league and not worth my time, I wanted to explore that. I wanted to know was it a good product. Is it ultimately a fun league to support?”
So Nipper turned to his local MLS club and became a dedicated season ticket holder. Similar to some of his favorite soccer books like “Fever Pitch,” he decided to write it from his first-person point of view.
“I just wanted to approach it as a fan, so it’s written in memoir style. Just what was my experience.”
Or, as the Amazon.com description explains: “… explores American soccer fandom in all its joys, agonies, and quirks through personal accounts filled with humor, insight, and heart.”
Nipper won’t be able to retire on the book’s sales, but clearly that was never his expectation or ambition.
“I was very realistic going in,” Nipper said. “I know that even though I like to read soccer books it’s still a very niche market in the States. So having dollar signs in my eyes was definitely not part of the equation.”
“It was just a labor of love. It’s a cliché, but that’s a good way to put it for me,” he added. “I wanted to see if I could write this particular book.”
Those who read the book typically had positive things to say about it, and in fact, the book won a readers award from the popular website World Soccer Talk. It was voted MLS Book of the Year, impressively beating out “The Keeper,” an autobiography by Tim Howard, who was coming off a heralded performance in the 2014 World Cup.
“I joked to my players that this is the only time I would ever get something past Tim Howard,” Nipper said.
At least one of those players, junior Cameron Mabey, grabbed a copy of the book.
“I just thought it would be a cool book to read because it talks about how he grew up around soccer moving around [the world],” Mabey said.
Mabey and other players didn’t even know their coach was working on a book, and found out through an assistant coach.
“He didn’t tell us, ‘Hey guys, I’m going out to write this book,’” Mabey said, adding that he respected how modest Nipper was about the accomplishment.
Nipper would like to continue coaching the Cougars to TAPPS dominance; Covenant advanced to the regional round of this year’s Division II playoffs. He’d also like to continuing writing about his favorite sport and says the early frontrunners for his next book idea are a travelogue-style MLS book or a biography about ‘70s NASL star Kyle Rote, Jr.
“This is hopefully a launching pad to let me do it again,” he said. “I just thoroughly enjoy it. I want to write more soccer-specific type books. I love non-fictions sports books. I read a bunch every year. I just enjoy that kind of writing. I like to read it; I like to do it. It’s a big hope that I can do more of it going forward.”
from Copy of Amazon Book Reviews Alerts http://ift.tt/1CSG5JA
Sourced by "The typist writer". The place where writers, bloggers, and publicists come to expand their knowledge in the field content production and publication.
0 comments:
Post a Comment