How much do college coaches value technicality when recruiting center backs?

Cesar Miranda (Columbia) in action for Noble & Greenough. (Brian Kelly/NESJ)

Scott Atherley is about to begin his 34th season as a head soccer coach at Maine, and yet he talks like a student of the modern game. He’s awestruck by Liverpool’s counter-pressing under Jürgen Klopp in the late 2010s and is a long-time admirer of Italian manager Roberto De Zerbi’s tactics. He may be from a different time, but Atherley is attuned to all the ways soccer has changed since the 1990s.

As such, the Maine women’s coach provides a worthwhile perspective on plenty in the amateur soccer world, including the traits and skills he values when recruiting center backs, a position that’s changed about as much as any over the last half-century. Some coaches, including a few featured in this story, will argue the development of modern center backs focuses too much on ball-playing attributes. Others will pound the table for the position’s importance in possession.

Atherley, who led the Black Bears to three consecutive America East titles from 2023 to 2025, is among the latter. When asked for the key traits he looks for when recruiting center backs, Atherley spends the first minute discussing a recruit’s ability with the ball at their feet.

“It’s essential,” he said.

Atherley acknowledged the answer is case-dependent, not indicative of a common tactical thread in America East or college soccer writ large. Still, the significance of a center back’s technical ability was the most prevalent topic discussed in the reporting of this story, which is part of a position-by-position series New England Soccer Journal is releasing over the next few weeks.

While a central defender’s ability to, well, defend is of course important, several of the coaches interviewed for this story (eight in total, across all three NCAA divisions on the men’s and women’s side) seemed to value ball-playing ability even more.

“Of course, they have to be able to defend individually, they have to be good at winning balls, they have to be good at clearing the ball when it’s required,” Southern Connecticut State (D2) women’s coach Adam Cohen said. “But for us, they can’t just be that. They have to be good with the ball. They have to be good attacking players.”