This thinking has led U.S. Soccer officials to an unconventional idea: that a teaching expert they first read about in The New York Times Magazine—a man with no professional soccer expertise—might help them advance the sport.

Among teachers, Doug Lemov is a sort of celebrity. He’s spent years studying great educators, creating a taxonomy of techniques they use to manage common challenges (like defiant kids or tired kids or kids who need a lot of time to learn something that other kids learn quickly). Each year, he trains thousands of teachers around the world to use these tactics. He’s also written a popular book called Teach Like a Champion and co-founded a chain of public charter schools in the Northeast.

When U.S. Soccer first reached out to Lemov, in 2010, the organization was already in the midst of a wholesale reformation. Four years earlier, soccer executives had toured the world, studying what other countries did differently. They had learned, among other things, that kids in other nations spent less time playing soccer games than did their American counterparts, and more time practicing. In response, the federation created its own youth league, called the U.S. Soccer Development Academy, modeled after international best practices. Top youth-soccer clubs could apply to join, if their coaches agreed to get licensed and follow a new model for training. The academy now comprises 152 soccer clubs across the U.S., which have produced more than 180 professional players.

Still, officials felt that more could be done. “For 20 years, we had focused almost exclusively on closing our global gap in the technical and tactical components of the game,” says Dave Chesler, U.S. Soccer’s director of coaching development. “In doing this, perhaps we had lost perspective on the quality of our delivery—a k a the essential mechanics of teaching. ” Chesler, who had himself spent 15 years as a high-school chemistry and physics teacher before becoming a full-time soccer coach, realized after reading about Lemov in The Times Magazine that he had never transferred some of his own best teaching techniques to the field. He made immediate modifications to his coaching—for example, slowing down practices and focusing more on watching the players, making sure each one demonstrated every step in a drill before moving on—and he sent copies of Lemov’s book to his national staff. And then he asked Lemov for help.

Lemov was thrilled to hear from U.S. Soccer. But he was nervous, too, like a fanboy unexpectedly pulled up onstage. He understood teaching, and it so happened that he loved soccer, but he didn’t know whether his work would translate for coaches—or whether they would listen.

Lemov started playing soccer when he was about 7 and still has the build of an athlete, tall and broad-shouldered. He was never a star, but he managed to win a spot on the Hamilton College soccer team through constant, solitary practice. It was a highly inefficient process, he now realizes, akin to learning French by sitting in a room, alone, with a French-English dictionary. Like many American soccer players, he was largely coached by people who lacked expert knowledge of the game. Once, at a friend’s house during his senior year in college, he found a dusty videotape on defensive tactics, which demonstrated how best to bend your knees and angle your body when confronting an opponent. Lemov felt blindsided. The advice made sense, but he’d played defense for 14 years, and he’d never heard it. “All my life I’d been yelled at to ‘defend,’ ” he says, “but no one had ever told me how to do it.”