The U.S. Soccer Federation today announced Bruce Arena, the LA Galaxy coach and former U.S. national team coach, as winner of the annual Werner Fricker Award — given to “an individual who has worked tirelessly on furthering the interest of the sport of soccer without regard to personal recognition or advancement”.

I am not quite sure about the “without regard to personal recognition or advancement” part of that, but it seems quite clear Arena has been a major figure in the growth of soccer in the U.S. during his career.

As U.S. national team coach, he won more games (71) than anyone and was the only man in modern soccer history to take the U.S. to the quarter-finals of the World Cup, in 2002. And he has won more Major League Soccer titles (5) than anyone.

He deserves this award. He clearly was a major influence in the advance of the game, during his four decades as a head coach, including his 18 seasons at the University of Virginia.

His career has been interesting on several fronts.

–With little practical experience coaching the game, he turned Virginia into a soccer power, winning five NCAA titles, back when college soccer was the only feasible route for good young American players to further their careers. This was during a period when the professional game was all but dead in the U.S.  Among those he coached: Claudio Reyna, John Harkes, Tony Meola and Jeff Agoos.

–He got that 2002 World Cup team to do things no one expected from a U.S. side. A victory over Portugal when they had Luis Figo; a draw with hosts South Korea, enough to put them in the last 16. The 2-0 victory over Mexico that put them in the final eight, where Germany finally stopped them, 1-0.

–He was the coach on the scene on 2008 (having replaced the dopey Ruud Gullit) when the Galaxy really absorbed David Beckham into their side and became the first MLS team with any sort of global name recognition. Arena got Landon Donovan and Beckham pulling on the same end of the rope, which led to two championships and the establishment of the MLS’s reputation as a nice place for elite (albeit aging) English Premier League players to end their careers. And also helped firm up the Galaxy’s place as the elite American soccer club.

I spent more than a little time with Bruce Arena. He was the national coach from October 1998 through 2006, and I saw his teams a lot.

He had a reputation for being prickly, and he often demonstrated it. His New York accent could be grating, but mostly it was the content of what he said — verbalizing his exasperation with idiot reporters.

I remember several exchanges with him during the 2003 Confederations Cup, in France, which I covered from start to finish. Even questions I thought were innocent or safe were likely to set him off. I ultimately came to believe it was a cultural thing — NYC combativeness. And, if a person persevered, Arena would give good and thoughtful answers.

He also was a firm believer in the competence of the American soccer player, which his assistant and successor Bob Bradley also embraced, but which is lacking in the current coach, Jurgen Klinsmann. Arena has called for the U.S. team to be coached by Americans, and I think that is the right approach.

Two more points.

1. Werner Fricker probably is someone most American soccer fans have never heard of. He was president of the USSF in 1988 when the 1994 World Cup was awarded to the U.S., and Fricker deserves credit for that. He had soccer in his bones, going back to his birth as an ethnic German (and future refugee) in Yugoslavia in 1936, but nearly the whole of his playing and coaching and administrative career, most of it based on ethnic club football in Pennsylvania, came during the dark days of “soccer is an un-American sport.”

Fricker was considered a guy perhaps not up to staging a successful 1994 World Cup, and the U.S. might have lost that World Cup if the 1990 team had not qualified for Italia 1990 under Bob Gansler, an ethnic German from Hungary and “someone from the same neck of the woods”, as Gansler put it.

Fricker was succeeded by the polished and worldly Alan Rothenberg, who had played a key role in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. The 1994 World Cup was a big success.

Fricker almost immediately disappeared out of U.S. soccer history, aside from this award.

2. In some ways, Bruce Arena, even born in America, was part of that hardscrabble era of limited interest in the game and not much money in it. He didn’t really play the game himself; he appears to have been a better lacrosse player. He was an occasional goalkeeper at a junior college and at Cornell, and his U.S. national team career consisted of one half of one game. It looked like he was going to have a career teaching and maybe coaching college teams. Until MLS came along, in 1996, and he led DC United to the first title.

Those under the age of 30 probably have a hard time grasping how marginal American soccer was, for much of Bruce Arena’s life.

It seems fairly clear he was largely a self-taught coach, most of that happening while at Virginia. He didn’t play the game at an elite level, but that did not stop him from identifying talent, organizing and getting results from it, and he won four successive NCAA titles through 1994, near the end of his career there.

He is 63, and probably part of the last generation (Bob Bradley is part of it) of coaches who learned the game from books and video, not from thousands of hours on the pitch.

He did it the hard way, but that was the only way it was going to be done.

In many ways, Arena’s soccer career is more distinguished, more important, more influential, than that of the man whose name is on the trophy.

I like Bruce Arena. I believe he has even more to give to the game. I hope he sticks around for as long as he feels up to it.