Living in a three-bedroom townhouse 3,900-plus miles away from his birthplace of Hershey, Pennsylvania, Christian Pulisic, 17, is hardly by himself.



He's joined, at home, by his father Mark, at work, by his Borussia Dortmund teammates and at play, by as many as 81,359 fans.



As an American, though, Pulisic is thoroughly alone.



Every day when he steps onto the training pitch at Borussia Dormtund's practice facility, Pulisic proves it.



He is friendly with German national team stars Marco Reus and Mats Hummels, but peerless among a class of American prospects given an unprecedented amount of resources by U.S. Soccer to be the deepest and most technically refined the nation has ever produced. Though some are on pro contracts with team's comparable to Pulisic's, they're not allowed on the first team bench, much less the field. And to some extent, that's to be expected.



Pulisic is the most polished 17 year old in the history of American soccer.



He is the lone teenager on the U.S. national team's Copa America Centenario roster. Whichever players the U.S. sends out to face Colombia in the tournament opener on Friday, none of them - all at least three years Pulisic's senior - will come from clubs as good as Dortmund, the second-best in Germany and among the finest in the world.



And no player, from any place in the world, has scored two goals at as young of an age as Pulisic in the 53 years of the German Bundesliga.



"They don't grow on trees," said former U.S. men's national team assistant coach Martin Vasquez, of Pulisic. "They don't come in bunches."



On the field Pulisic exists where he's supposed to be, passes where teammates are going to be and plays the ball like he's decided where it is meant to be. He shows few signs of being manufactured.



Because Pulisic isn't a product. He happened. No institution gave him the instinct to run through two opponents with the second, third and fourth touches of his league debut, which he did.



He was born to two parents who played the sport, knew what to tell him about it but found themselves having to say very little. Kelley and Mark Pulisic's son was obsessed with soccer - sometimes defiantly so - and absorbed an understanding of its timing, spacing and artistry through an unusually high level of exposure to the game.



His path from that home, through Manheim-based PA Classics' Development Academy and U.S. Under-17 residency represents the best-case scenario for an American player waking up in 2016.



Pulisic can and is celebrated by U.S. Soccer. At the front of a generation of players reshaping American soccer at the youth, collegiate and professional levels, he is progress. But the fact that he sees, thinks about and simply plays the game so much better than the first generation of Americans who grew up knowing soccer as a career choice -- that's problematic.



"He's a perfect storm," former U.S. and D.C United midfielder and current D.C. United head coach Ben Olsen said. "And it's going to have to be perfect.



"Why we don't have more perfect storms, I don't know. Because there's enough dads that have played soccer, there's enough. That's what's mindblowing in this whole thing is that we're not producing more kids like him that are at least knocking on the door of some of these big teams."



They don't have time for fear or hesitation. Pulisic doesn't play with either.

Borussia Dortmund fans shown May 5, 2012 in Dortmund, Germany at their home Westfalenstadion, which boasts a capacity of 81,359 and contains the largest terraced stand in world soccer. It holds nearly 25,000.



Joining his parents at their kitchen table early in the summer of 2014, Pulisic was a little scared and somewhat unsure. Typically, their kitchen chats didn't last very long. Pulisic's attention span wouldn't allow it and the subject before them was familiar. For months, their phone was ringing daily with scouts and agents on the other end.



One of the best soccer teams in Europe - in this case Dortmund - wanted to sign Pulisic. This had been going on for two years. On most previous occasions Kelley and Mark had seen a telling look in their son's eyes telling them what they already knew.



"'I really don't want to go now, I'm not ready,'" Mark said.



Behind the look was Pulisic knowing he'd have to give up seeing much of his family and all of his friends to play professionally in Europe. As long as he held that dream, he had feared going to a country where he didn't speak the language, his mother said, even on week-long training stints.



His parents had been blunt about the facts of the situation. He would have no friends, no position in the team, run into his fear of the language barrier harder than ever and arrive with no guarantee of ever making the first team.



"The first year is going to be almost miserable," Kelley said she told him.



In addition, Mark was coming with him. "Christian thought 'Oh my parents have to live apart now because of me,'" Kelley said. "And we told him 'Don't worry about that. We'll work that out.'"



The same eyes that his mom said she saw holding back tears when he was just 5 and she was just telling him to come inside and put the ball away did not have the look of uncertainty anymore.

Christian Pulisic, then 15, of Hershey, at Harrisburg City Islanders practice a few weeks after deciding to move to Germany and play for Borussia Dortmund. Mark Pynes | mpynes@pennlive.com





He had seriously considered an offer from Dutch club PSV Eindhoven, but then, decided to sign with Dortmund. Later that Summer, he moved to Dortmund. And in February of 2015, after obtaining a Croatian passport that allowed him to play, he officially joined the team on a five-year contract.



As cold as the facts laid before Pulisic at his kitchen table were, his decision spoke to even harsher ones for American soccer. Coaches, former players and academy directors from around the country agreed that every young player's situation should be considered individually. But the most game-ready American prospects, looking at a true chance of professional playing time and wanting to, are better off leaving their home country.



"As he gets older, there's not going to be enough here for him," said Steve Klein, PA Classics academy director and Pulisic's U-16 coach at the club. "He would've had to make that jump into the MLS and then it's a matter of whether that setup is better than what Dortmund is. And there's very good MLS programs that would be able to bring young players along, but they don't have the history and the proof of doing it like Dortmund does.



"So for him to have that opportunity, a top-flight club, it was a no-brainer. It was a no brainer for him at his stage."

The first hour-plus of the U.S.' Copa America tuneup match against Ecuador last Thursday was barely watchable. It was a wandering game void of both American scoring chances and ideas.



After Pulisic entered in the 64th minute, his teammates - averaging nine years his senior - came to the collective conclusion that their best chance of breaking a scoreless tie was to get the ball to Pulisic and see what he could set up for them.



They hit long diagonal passes over Ecuador's midfield, Pulisic ran onto them and went for the throat of his defenders, setting up scoring chances and opening up the game as a whole.



Without the ball, he dropped off his opponents, drawing them forward until he could pounce on an anticipated pass or a loose touch. His game was smarter, but it was the conviction with which he made all his plays that changed the contest, a 1-0 U.S. victory, as a whole.



Gregg Berhalter, a former U.S national team center back and current manager of the Columbus Crew was talking with the youth coaches at Borussia Dortmund when they explained how they handle their best young talents, using Mario Gotze as an example.



Gotze, 23, is an attacking midfielder with Bayern Munich and the German national team, for which he scored the game-winning goal in the 2014 World Cup final. Dortmund had him in its academy from age 8 until he signed a professional contract at 17. Their plan for his development was simple.



"They didn't want to mess him up," Berrhalter said. "When they identify a top talent they're not overbearing. They want to give him freedom to express himself."



This was one of the underlying principles of Pulisic's upbringing in the game. Despite being what his mother called "one of those 25th percentile [height] kids," his parents always played him at least one, often two years up in age group, with a balance of difficulty and creativity in mind.



Bob Lilley, a Pulisic family friend and the head coach of the Rochester Rhinos, remembers Mark talking to him about wanting his son to have the opportunity to play better players without changing his game. Pulisic's parents wanted him to face players twice his size and figure out ways around them, besides being fast, without withdrawing as an attacker.



"We can push you higher to challenge you but that means you still have to dribble at players and take risks," Lilley said he remembers Mark telling Pulisic.



Last Thursday, after diving in to strip the ball off an Ecuadorean opponent, he muscled off the 6-foot defender, turned away from his own goal and down the left sideline, cut the ball back against the defender's scrambling teammate and swam around the original defender to pin him on his own back -- all with seven touches of the ball, before turning inside to lay off to a U.S. teammate who was rooted, watching as Pulisic left two international opponents a combined 24 years older than him with zero chance of the ball.

***

There is an age when it's too late for a player.



When, if his first touch isn't established, he's not comfortable with both feet or isn't weighing his passes properly, he won't ever do so consistently. A ceiling is placed on the player's career.



While he can still improve his technical skills marginally and be an accomplished professional, his technical development is largely complete.



"I think at 16, 17 years old you're going to have a pretty good idea of where a kid's going to be at," said Klein, who is also a U.S. U-15 assistant coach. "And if they've got excellent technical ability then, they're probably going to keep it."



Pulisic already has it.



He has been measuring out and landing the weight of his passes at least since he was 8, going back and forth from turf to grass and adjusting accordingly.



In 2007, U.S. Soccer launched its nationwide Development Academy following a review of the top levels of youth competition in the country. USSDA strove to produce more players with, among other refining, more technical ability to hold onto.



PA Classics, Pulisic's youth club from age 11-15 was among the original 64 clubs - since expanded to 96 total with 74 competing at both U-16 and U-18 level, as of the 2015-16 season - in the system. USSDA helped him, but it wasn't for Pulisic. There weren't many kids coming out like him. That was the point.



In U.S. Soccer's assessment, the best players had been on too many different teams playing too many games in a fractured youth soccer landscape that diluted competition. The Super-Y League, U.S. Club Soccer and other organizations tore at the same players. Coaching was inconsistent and teams playing as many as five games in a weekend left little time or energy for players to hone skills during the week.



They tried out for and played on local, state and regional Olympic Development Program teams, but they practiced and played together infrequently.



The USSDA system, which brought the top pre-existing clubs in the country into a national league with regional divisions, mandates a minimum of four practices and one rest day per week, a maximum of one game per weekend and only allows up to two consecutive game days at showcases and playoffs. Each club in the system is subject to 10 evaluations per year by a member of U.S. Soccer's men's scouting network staff, meant to ensure a certain standard and focus of coaching.



"There's a level of accountability now that didn't used to exist," Bethlehem Steel FC head coach Brendan Burke said. "So you can't have as much of a discrepancy between academies."



In the ODP-or-bust era of American soccer, both Berhalter and Olsen were lucky to be born where they were.



Berhalter lived in the hotbed of Northern New Jersey. U.S. nation team standout Tab Ramos had gone to Berhalter's high school and fellow then-future national teamers John Harkes and Richie Williams came out of the same area.



The father of the then-rising star of the U.S. national team, Claudio Reyna, happened to be Berhalter's coach at Union County Sport Club, which fielded just one team that happened to fit his birth year, 1973.



For Olsen, taking the game seriously in 1990 Middletown meant getting onto ODP teams and making the two to three hour trek to Philadelphia two or three times a week with FC Delco.

Middletown native Ben Olsen (14), shown here with the U.S. national team against Guatemala in 2006, was decidedly the best soccer prospect to come out of Dauphin County before Pulisic.





What Berhalter considered his team's formal training amounted to once-a-week hourlong sessions between two garbage cans on a dirt field. The players were each other's best competition - they would win state cup finals, 8-0, Berhalter said - and coached each other.



This was some of the best preparation to be found anywhere in America and remained as much until U.S. Soccer put 20 of the country's best U-17s in residency at Bradenton in 1999. The group included future national team mainstays Landon Donovan, DaMarcus Beasley, Oguchi Onyewu and Kyle Beckerman, who is joined by Pulisic on the current U.S. roster.



"There was nowhere to go," said Beasley, an Indiana native. "Basically if you didn't play ODP and you didn't join the national team there was nowhere else to be seen."



These, largely, were the paths to national and professional relevancy, taken by the players of modern-era American soccer history. They were selected from scattered regional teams composed of players whose names became familiar to one another but barely played together. And grateful for it.



"[ODP] was just what we had," Olsen said. "It was the only opportunity, the only avenue to play with better players and evolve or develop. It was just logical, right?"



It was practical. But the pragmatism was reflected in the players it produced.



By Olsen's own admission, Pulisic at age 17 is a more skilled player than he ever was. The teenager's understanding of space in the field is what allows him to make use of the danger he presents with a ball at this feet.



Though Olsen was one of the top young players of his generation, it's still shocking to him, albeit pleasantly, to see prospects who do have a such an internalized feel for the game.



"I didn't figure it out until I had about 10 surgeries under my belt and I was 28 years old and, that's when I figured it out, or started to see the game in the way I see some of these kids nowadays like Christian. Because I just wasn't - I didn't understand that stuff," Olsen said. "I didn't."



Pulisic has answers to defenders and the problems they present that were not options for Olsen.



Olsen speaks reverently of former national team teammates who could see the game similarly, Claudio Reyna and John O'Brien, when pressed. Games seemed to move at a much more gradual pace for them, Reyna had a "special awareness," Olsen said.



It's not that there weren't some American players who saw the game through better eyes than Olsen's in his time. Just that there weren't enough.



When Reyna, the U.S.' captain at the 2006 World Cup, went down injured in the first half of the team's must-win final group stage game against Ghana, head coach Bruce Arena saw no better option than Olsen to replace him with. The U.S. had 50 minutes to score two goals to salvage its World Cup and was replacing its most visionary player with one who admittedly compensated for a relative lack of understanding of the game, with raw effort.



"The game was never slow for me," Olsen said. "And that's what you see, as you get older ironically, you become 32, 33, 34 where you become a coach and you're like 'Whoa, the game is so simple,' but that's about when the legs go.



"It's the ultimate tragedy and torture."



Ghana won 2-1.

Claudio Reyna lies on a stretcher after getting injured on the play that gave Ghana the initial 1-0 lead during the USA vs Ghana World Cup Group E soccer match at the Franken Stadium in Nuremberg, Germany, Thursday, June 22, 2006. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)



During one of his greatest struggles as a player, Pulisic decided on a role for himself that's at the heart of sparing the U.S. the same future pain.



He wants to be the U.S. No. 10 -- a central attacking midfielder around whom his team's offense and, ideally, the entire game, revolves. But at 13, 14 years old, his body lagged behind the on-field problem solving ability that had otherwise rendered his size irrelevant.



"He would get really hard on himself and get down if he didn't have the game he wanted or he felt like he was in a rut," said Klein, who also coached Pulisic with the U.S. U-16s.



Though this wasn't enough of an issue to keep him from becoming the youngest player in residency with the U.S U-17s in Bradenton, Florida, he was pressing, Klein said. Relaxing enough to simply play as himself and a sharpened emphasis on defense were the largest improvements Klein said he saw in Pulisic in his five-plus years of working with him.



On Dec. 12, 2013, they placed him at the center of the final game of the annual Nike U-17 friendlies against Brazil. By the end of the first half he had staked out at least five yards of space, and respect, between himself and the nearest opponent when he received the ball in midfield. Every Brazilian seemed hesitant to step to him. Pulisic was still one of the smallest players on the field, but he surged through the space with ease. The match was his to dictate.



Coasting into the 18-yard box in the 56th minute, Pulisic one-touched a cross with his left foot into the upper left of the goal to give the U.S. a 3-1 lead. He had already assisted on the team's second goal and, clattering him with a late tackle in the 86th minute, Brazil would go on to draw a second red card,



But Pulisic in his No. 10 spot had already decided the game, 4-1, to the U.S. He was named the MVP of the Nike Friendlies. His parents hired an agent.



"He really matured correctly and decided the person he wanted to be and the player he wanted to be," Klein said.

***

There's a stereotype of the American player. Olsen, who embodied it, knows it as a sort of England-lite - hardworking, not particularly skilled or artistic, coachable - and lite.



Though fading, it's real.



"I notice it less and less, is what I would say, each couple of years," Burke said.



Stereotypical American players do not become No. 10s. Systematically and directly, the country has insisted on it.



Pre-USSDA, the imbalance of games instead of practices made it too easy for coaches to emphasize winning what were relatively meaningless youth tournaments in the short term, over longterm player development. Trophy chasing incentivized excessively direct soccer, leaving even less of a place for vision or vibrant passing.



An overmatched and underprepared team drops players deeper in defense, launches passes to the two or three attackers it leaves upfield and, tactically speaking, just hopes for the best.



The lengthened game leaves a void for the undersized-but-sly player. His knack for gliding into space unseen loses utility when his teammates, out of habit, don't bother to look at it. He's not sure his legs - three games deep into the weekend- can make the run anyway, though it hardly matters.



His coach loses reason to keep him on the field. Optimistic-at-best passes continue to be launched by his teammates, and with each, the game slogs closer to an end, the player of skill but little size comes out of it. Eventually, a team wins, but no player does.



"That's what I mean when I say sacrifice for winning and don't screw up the environment of those kids," said FC Dallas technical director Fernando Clavijo.



The last player to consistently be deployed as a No. 10 in defiance of this mold for the national team, with any regularity, was the Uruguay-born Ramos. Standing 10 yards behind Ramos, Clavijo was a witness for one of Ramos' last best moments with the national team, followed by his absolute worst.



Settling a bouncing ball inside the right sideline just inside of midfield at Stanford Stadium, Ramos held off his defender, Leonardo, took two hop-steps toward going out of bounds, and with the second left the ball behind his trailing right foot before dinking it behind his own left heel and between Leonardo's legs.



Leonardo stuffed Ramos' dribble and followed through by breaking his skull with an elbow to his left temple. That was in the 1994 World Cup.

Tab Ramos, the last American No. 10, driven off the field after Leonardo fractured his skull in a 1-0 Brazilian victory that knocked the U.S. out of the 1994 World Cup. (AP Photo/Lois Bernstein)

So much of soccer's mythological aura is concentrated in No. 10s. The title itself is a relic of a time when uniform numbers only went from 1-11 and each indicated a given position. When international tournaments provided the stage of discovery for players truly unknown a world away. They are the game's ancient heroes, crafting their stories with the clashes they win, but writing them into lore by the expression they leave on the field to gain them.



"It's a special gift and a special position and I think you are born with it or you develop it through your formational years," said Vasquez, who assistant coached the U.S. from 2011-14. "It's not your coaches say 'OK you're going to be a No. 10.



"If you don't have it you're going to struggle. If you have it, it's within you."



There, American teams, and especially the national team, have gone without.



The U.S. has continually fielded teams built on positional discipline, sometimes with creative players, but always saddling them with heavy defensive duties, either out wide or deep in central midfield. Pulisic is well-rounded enough to get shoehorned, play in these ways and pull it off.



"But I hope he doesn't," Burke said. "But that's my hope for our country, that we can have a 10 -- that we can have a 10 or an inverted winger that can destroy another team on his own at times."



Seventeen years after Ramos' hospitalization, he was coaching his own academy, NJSCA '04's U-14 team against PA Classics at the Potomack Lake Sportsplex in Sterling, Virginia in March of 2011, when he first noticed Pulisic, then 13. Afterward, he called then-U.S. U-14 head coach Manny Schellscheidt, who brought Pulisic in for a national identification camp with kids in the birth year above him that summer.



By the following fall, he was in residency with the U.S. U-17s and -16s.

***

Though Pulisic was born gifted, he isn't a transcendent, once-in-a-generation talent.



"There's a lot of other guys like Christian that didn't get there for one reason or another," said Burke, who coached a predecessor of the Union's academy teams.



For some, the struggle is getting into training with a serious and structured-enough team's system.



There are more than 1,700 miles between USSDAs from Minneapolis to Portland, about 800 miles between those in Atlanta and Dallas and heading West from PA Classics, the nearest USSDA is approximately 400 miles away in Cleveland.



Like the best American players of more than a generation ago, Pulisic has to consider himself fortunate to be born where he was: Within 30 miles of an elite youth soccer academy that would be founded when he was 6 and welcomed him when he moved back to the area from Detroit at age 11. That, and on the Eastern seaboard.



His referral to the national team setup was as much a product of good scheduling and geography as it was about any structural reform working for anyone.



Pulisic was on U.S. Soccer's list of players to be scouted for youth national team consideration prior to facing Ramos' side, Klein said. But the 12-year-old American in the middle of three training stints at FC Barcelona's La Masia was just that to U.S. Soccer in early 2011 -- a name on a list.



At the time, USSDA didn't have a U-14 league. Many of the clubs that fielded a U-16 and/or U-18 team also had U-14s that played non-USSDA affiliated clubs and each other, which is how Ramos saw Pulisic.



USSDA began running a U-14 system in 2013 that last season included 94 clubs. It is expanding to U-12 this fall, when 134 clubs - more teams, less travel for the youngest players - will compete at the new level and the U-14 league will split into separate U-14 and U-13 age groups.



"So now going younger they'll get a better handle on younger kids before it comes time to start selecting kids for the 14s national team," Klein said.



One of the best academies in the country, Real Salt Lake's is run out of Casa Grande, Arizona and has all of the states of Utah and Arizona to itself, Vasquez said. Competing as the only non-Southern California team in the USSDA league's Southwest Division, though, he is pressed for local talent.



His academy scouts tournaments, hosts tryouts and works through a network of local coaches, but still depends on much of the same word of mouth through which Berhalter remembers hearing the names of his fellow top prospects in the late 1980s.



The club makes up for it by housing its U-16 and U-18 teams in a residency program, complete with in-house schooling, and by recruiting players from areas where a player wouldn't be in a pro team's academy's designated territory.



"If we didn't have a residential program I don't think we would be as successful as we have been," Vasquez said.



The vast majority of USSDAs are not residential. Some, like the Los Angeles Galaxy and FC Dallas' among others, provide classes. But only four house players.



While Vasquez doesn't think U-14s and U-13s should be in residency, ideally, he said, he would get to work with players in the academy at those ages, giving him more time with them before their technical development is complete. Though Real Salt lake has fielded a U-12 and U-13 team out of Utah and is trying to get approved for a U-14 USSDA team, as is, Vasquez depends on working with whatever the club coaches of their earlier youth give him.



In some cases, it's just what players learned suiting up in local men's leagues, he said.



"If we're able to have a kid that comes in at 13 and leaves at 18 to go to the first team, I mean, that's real," Vasquez said. "That's what the rest of the world is doing and some of the clubs I'm talking about. And for us, would be a perfect world."



For others, access is not the problem. They are born, play, excel, but then stumble -- on something as simple as a bad social environment, Burke said, or being on a poorly coached academy team.



Some just don't adjust to a higher level of play or living away from home, Vasquez said. That's not an American problem though, Vasquez said, "That's everywhere."

Martin Vasquez, left, served as an assistant under current U.S. national team manager Jurgen Klinsmann at Bayern Munich, where he is shown here in 2008, before rejoining Klinsmann in the same role with the U.S. from 2011-14. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)





Klein said he sees parents signing them up for too many teams and tournaments, failing to teach them life lessons or insisting their child be moved up in age bracket when he's only marginally better than his teammates. Those kids burn out from very good 9-11 year olds into dulled, passion-less players.



"And lots of times you'll hear -- 'Ah, well my kid, this is all he wants to do,'" Klein said. "Well, he's 9 years old. He doesn't really know what he wants to do."



More troublingly, he sees a collective breakdown in the psyche of American players.



"At 16, 17 18 years old seems to be where a lot of the European players are jumping ahead of a lot of our players," Klein said. "And my gut tells me that a lot of that is just a lot of our kids - I don't want to say bad character - but they're not always mentally tough enough to make those jumps."

***

The earliest leaps up in the level Pulisic's game were treated as such, a game.



Pulisic was 10 going on 11, his family was offered to have him train at La Masia.

Mark was worried about the trip putting too much pressure on his son, though, said Lilley, the family friend.



But Pulisic's birthday is Sept. 18 and Mark's is Sept. 20, setting up a believable-enough parental understatement.



"'Aww, your dad's always wanted to go to Barcelona. You're going to get to go to Barcelona. It's kind of like a birthday present for your dad,'" Lilley said. "'You're going to be able to train with the kids while you're over there."



Mark and Kelley told their son that, yes, the players he'd be training with were called Barcelona, but that they were kids his age he could just play with. So Pulisic didn't think he was on trial, Mark said.



The first time Pulisic went, Lilley said, only the son of then-Barcelona forward Eidur Gudjohnson spoke much English. Pulisic, then 11, didn't need to talk to the other children for them to realize passing him the ball was a good idea.



"Soccer's international man," Mark said. "You put the ball out there, the kids figure it out."



Pulisic wasn't naive though, Kelley said. After the first Barcelona trip, he realized there was some gravity to those that came afterward. He was invited back for week-long stays at the club in each of the next two years.



Plenty of training stints followed: at Arsenal, Chelsea, FC Porto and PSV Eindhoven. But Pulisic went on each with some feeling that they were sort of soccer vacations with his dad, ones at which he just happened to perform very well. His parents told him to treat them like camps, Kelley said.



"It was never, 'Hey we want to go move here,'" Mark said. "He was a U.S. kid and we wanted him to go to school in the U.S.."

***

On mornings when Pulisic didn't have school from ages 8-10, he went to work with his dad.



Work meant soccer at High Velocity Sports outside of Detroit, as Mark was the head coach of the Detroit Ignition of the Major Indoor Soccer League in 2006, then its director of soccer operations from 2007-08. While the Ignition practiced, Pulisic practiced too - on days off from school - by himself, off to the side, then trained on the main field for an hour-plus afterward.



During unstructured time on game days, Josh Rife, a former Ignition defender, said he would look across the field and see Mark tossing a ball to Pulisic calling out "left" or "right" head, chest, thigh or foot before seeing the child settle the on command. If the team was a man short for 5 v. 2 possession drills or having a kick-around before pregame warmups, Pulisic would make up the numbers.



"And he was more than capable of holding his own," Rife said.



At the time, said Lilley, who took over for Mark as head coach in 2007, the MISL was a haven for flair players. And Pulisic naturally gravitated toward the best of those on the team, Ricardinho and Hewerton Moreira.



His parents had gifted him a genetic foundation for the game. His mother was a centerback at George Mason who came up for corner kicks and his father was a grinding and a poaching forward for the Harrisburg Heat whose right foot was decidedly better than his left, Lilley said. Pulisic's infatuation with the Ignition's Brazilians added flash in the touches he was already practicing on his own.



The players were amused by Pulisic and gave him showy tricks to try, like juggling the ball with one foot tucked behind the other, Matt Johnson, a former Ignition player, said. A day or two later, Johnson said, Pulisic would come back to the team with the latest move all but mastered.



Mark would later tell the players his son had put in three hours in the backyard getting it down.



Rife remembers watching Pulisic take the tricks out on kids two years older than him in weekend futsal games in the same building, often before laying off to an open teammate for an easy finish.



"Even then he was the best player on the floor," Rife said.



As much as the Ignition players enjoyed Pulisic, what most impressed them was a drive in the small child that seemed to have only so much to do with soccer.



In the spring of 2008, when Pulisic was 9, the Ignition sponsored a golf outing for local youth club Canton Celtic at Pheasant Run Golf Club in nearby Canton, Michigan.



Pulisic played, but afterward as he hung out by the practice green, Lilley picked out three spots that he challenged Pulisic to chip in from. The golf itself had been finished for hours, with players, coaches and other participants long inside the country club when, Johnson said, he looked out and saw Pulisic still around the green, insisting on holing out of Lilley's chip-in challenge.



"That's just the kind of kid he was," Johnson said. "... That was the kid of thing that got him going."





Christian Pulisic, again at 15, of Hershey, practicing with the Harrisburg City Islanders ahead of joining Borussia Dortmund in the summer of 2014. Mark Pynes | mpynes@pennlive.com



Mark coaches a Dortmund U-10 team. He works with players up through the U-19s, too, but speaking during the first half of the Liverpool-Sevilla Europa League final on May 18, he knew what every one of his youngest players was doing.



Watching the game.



He always thought doing the same helped his son, but it's never been clearer after living and working in Germany for two years. Watching how German children moved on and off the ball, there were elements of the game he didn't need to teach them.



They have teams they follow and players for heroes. Mark estimates each of his U-10s watches at least one full 90-minute match per week, plus highlights. There's no way kids back in the U.S. do the same, he said.



"Yeah, U.S. Soccer spends a lot of money and they also make a lot of money. I think their intentions are good," Mark said. "Educating coaches is very important, continuing to, as a federation try and get better."



"They want the best for our country as far as development, but we can't force kids to sit in front of a television. I don't care how much money you spend, one of the most important parts of learning the game, you can't do as a federation."



It's what makes Pulisic's immersion in the game so exceptional and invaluable. He was physically and emotionally surrounded by soccer.



Living in England for a year when he was 7 while his mother worked on a teaching exchange, Pulisic joined all the other children in the village of Tackley to play on a hard court with basketball hoops on either baseline and goals beneath them. They played the same hours on end that Pulisic was left to by himself in the U.S.



He watched the 2004 European Championships, surrounded by members of the Harrisburg City Islanders his dad was assistant coaching and impressed the team's head coach, Bill Becher, by rattling off the names of the players on screen.



It's why, as shocking as it was for Becher see a six year old pick up his head to break open an entire defense with a pass that he could and did beat without teammates, it made sense.



This was the child who Kelley remembers parents of opposing players referring to as "that poor little kid" when they watched him warm up. Their children would be two years his senior and twice his size.



Kelley would giggle to herself "just watch" before Pulisic ran through, around and in between any of the once-concerned parents' children, who were usually two years his senior and twice his size.



"And then they'd go 'Oh my god, look at that little kid,'" she said.



They didn't know Pulisic had been a two-footed player since he was 3.

***

Five years after coaching a 12-year-old Pulisic on a team comprised of U-14s and U-16s from five of the top youth clubs in Eastern Pennsylvania, plus New Jersey's PDA, he is talking with a Union first-team coach about missing out on the country's best youth player.



He tried to bring Burke into the the club's youth setup. Burke spoke with Mark regularly and knew Pulisic would have more opportunities. They both did.



Burke credits PA Classics for molding Pulisic and takes none for himself or the Union. He sees MLS-affiliated teams like the one he coaches as a step forward for transitioning the country's most promising prospects into the professional ranks.



Coaches agree USSDA has improved the American player pool as a whole. Players that made the original PA Classics academy teams in 2007, wouldn't today, Klein said. And coaches at the college level, like Maryland's Sasho Cirovski and Duke's John Kerr Jr, said their teams talent levels have improved too.



USSDA clubs are a platform in Burke's eyes -- the part of player development that can be improved through coaching requirements and resources, before success falls solely to the player and the part of his childhood that's already finished.



That's where the first team coach offers Burke some consolation on Pulisic.



"'You know, nobody developed him," the coach said. "The game developed him.'"

***

Though she still wears his jersey while she watches on TV, it's never been harder for Kelley to pick out her son on the field. He didn't hit his latest growth spurt until after moving to Germany, and while he's slight compared to his adult opponents, he no longer physically sticks out of place.



Pulisic fit at Dortmund and Dortmund got to sign him, ultimately, because the club is built around developing and playing its own youth players.



"They're a selling club really. They're not a buying club," Mark said.



The team also routinely fields as many as three attacking midfielders. Dortmund doesn't allow Pulisic to be one of them. He is one.



Dortmund is the finishing piece for Pulisic's development, where the passes he sees, his teammates get on the end of, the runs he anticipates, get rewarded by passes back that he's earned. There is nothing systemic left to hold him back.



"You also can't underestimate the fact that he's playing, with who he's playing with, right," Olsen said. "If you understand space and you're willing to work off the ball and you're technically sound and your IQ is high and you put him around good players, he's going to have success. And his team's nasty.



"His team is just -- they're [expletive] awesome," Olsen said. "So I think that's going to help him too."



At the Copa America Centenario this summer, Pulisic's age will be a tiresomely spoken number that will also happened to be printed on the back of his uniform. Yet his play shows a promise that, if realized, would be unprecedented for an American player.



His mere inclusion on the roster means the national team manager, Jurgen Klinsmann, who has promised revolution while delivering regression, is at least leaving open the possibility of a team that can illustrate on top of its labors.



In short, Pulisic is the player Americans think they deserve, called up to a team struggling for an identity. But crafting one at any level is hard without a pool of players in the same mode and caliber of soccer, said Vasquez, the former U.S. assistant.



"The system you're playing, the style of play, the depth in your depth chart, you want to have two or three players in every position that are suited for your style of play or the system you want to play," he said. "I think that's the way you build your team, you put together your team. When you have a one or two or three players to choose from and you have those special players that you have then I think it's important you choose those players."



On the best team the U.S. can muster for the summer of 2016, those players in that volume don't exist.

***

Mark is a parent and a coach, and in both roles, he knows. His son's form will hit dips and the teenager will get widely blasted for that inevitable.



He wants his country to realize the natural fact this his son is just 17, that there are holes in American soccer and that the child he remembers as a five year old sitting next to him, watching games in a very baggy white Luis Figo No. 7 shirt cannot fix them alone.



But his country has no one better to realize.