The college season doesn’t start until next fall, but North Carolina coach Anson Dorrance is keeping busy as the color commentator for both the Carolina Courage and the Atlanta Beat. INTERVIEW BY DEAN CAPARAZ SOCCER AMERICA: How has your TV work gone so far? ANSON DORRANCE: I can’t believe how much fun it is. There’s absolutely nothing about color commentary that I don’t enjoy. I enjoy getting to the game early and hanging out with former players and with colleagues and I love watching the game with a critical eye. That is a tremendous benefit to my continuing soccer education. These play by play people they give us to work with are pros. I enjoy postgame, seeing players, congratulating the who ones did well and commiserating with ones who lost. SA: When you resigned as coach of the U.S. national team job you said you wanted to spend more time with your family. Do you have enough time to spend with your family now? AD: So many of the Carolina games are home, I would be watching the games anyway. It impinges to some degree, but not to the same commitment as the national team, when I was two or three months away from home at a time. That was an overwhelming commitment and was taxing on my family life. SA: You had mentioned how you were going to see your daughter when you flew up to do the Carolina game at New York. AD: I wasn’t able to see her because she was finishing up at NYU. She skipped her graduation — that was what I was going to go up for — to dance. She’s a rhythm tap dancer. She skipped her graduation to go do the opening production at the Cannes Film Festival. She’s becoming as traveled as her old man now. SA: Is it ever difficult to stay objective as an announcer when talking about some of your former UNC players? AD: You’re always concerned about hurting anyone’s feeling. My biggest worry when I first resigned from the national team and became a color commentator was to criticize people who are your friends and who you really like. The function in the booth is to be positive but critical, to educate the public. To be a Pollyanna and look through rose-colored glasses is not what they want. You walk that line between critical and positive. You want to do both because you want to be honest. I think I’m doing okay. The league doesn’t have any problem with me being a homer. At the same time, there are players out there I didn’t coach who I genuinely respect. Hopefully I’ll do an honorable job. SA: What do you think of the quality of play so far? AD: As each week goes on I see the level improving. That’s to be expected. The longer coaches have and longer players have with each other, the level of play will have a never-ending ascension. Atlanta has improved dramatically since its first game. There are great things going on in Boston. What’s going to happen is starting to tell. We’re seeing goals. The Atlanta goal that beat Boston was world class. It looked like a World Cup. That’s what were starting to see now. We didn’t see that in the opener. Right now the coaches are wary of basically being beaten. The coaches early in the season were being conservative. The systems they used — numbers in the back or in midfield without really risking throwing players forward — initially it was a classical “We’ll take care of the defense first and use that as platform to attack from.” The easiest thing to construct early was defense. A lot of defenses were very well organized. Now that they’re secure in the back, that’s taken care of, now they’re working on how to create and score more goals. SA: Which of the founding players have played well so far? AD: In the preseason the one who really jumped out at me was Julie Foudy. She’s playing amazing soccer right now, probably the best I’ve seen her play. Briana Scurry’s got her game back. She’s fit and trim and looking very confident in goal. Obviously the ones who are always good — Mia [Hamm] continues to impress. She turned it on here [in a 2-1 win over Carolina], scored a goal and assist. And Kristine Lilly just doesn’t seem to get old, for Boston. She’s grinding it for 90. SA: Which of the non-founding American players have impressed you? AD: Keri Sanchez is very consistent. When they played down here, she was one of the best players on the field when they beat the Courage and, against Atlanta, she was very good when they played in Boston. SA: And the foreign players…? AD: Kelly Smith coming into the season was very underrated. Sports Illustrated quoted my opinion of her. Grant Wahl chose them finishing last, partly for picking a bad draft choice of Smith. [Philadelphia coach] Mark Krikorian called me because he read that, but I told him I thought she was a great player. She has a stress fracture now, but she’s going to be incredible player for the league in the future. [Homare] Sawa has played out of her mind for Atlanta. While they’re waiting for Sun Wen to get healthy, Sawa is all over the field. She’s a dominant player offensively and defensively. She’s played exceptionally well. Hege Riise is the driving force behind the Carolina team, and even though haven’t done very well in winning and losing, you can see her polish when she plays. (Dean Caparaz is an Associate Editor at Soccer America.)