Dan Gaspar at a press conference during the 2014 FIFA World Cup. (Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images)
Dan Gaspar (South Glastonbury, Conn.), naturally, has a lot of stories to tell. That will happen when you’ve worked for Portuguese clubs such as Sporting, Benfica and Porto, or in World Cups with Portugal (2010, South Africa) and Iran (2014, Brazil).
But one that gets the longtime goalkeeper coach especially excited is from his childhood in Hartford, Conn. As a young boy, he’d train with his father at the site of what’s now Dillon Stadium, home of USL Championship side Hartford Athletic. Confident, and maybe with a bit of hubris, he told his father that he can’t score unless he wanted him to.
So, his father packed up the balls, drove home and left Gaspar to walk back. He’d never train him again.
