Prior to Garth Lagerwey’s arrival in Seattle at the beginning of 2015, it’s not as though the city struggled to produce soccer talent. DeAndre Yedlin, the pride of O’Dea High, had been sold to Tottenham Hotspur of the English Premier League the year prior. Jordan Morris, who grew up on the other side of Lake Washington on Mercer Island, was then regarded as American soccer’s next big thing.



The history goes back much farther. Back in the day, a young midfielder named Brian Schmetzer signed with the NASL Sounders straight out of Nathan Hale high school in 1980. The region tended to churn out a handful of top-level pros every decade or so—Kasey Keller, Chris Henderson and Marcus Hahnemann among them.



But though the Sounders claimed both Yedlin and Morris as a homegrown player, neither Yedlin nor Morris had spent their most formative years in the club’s academy. They were more singular flukes than the result of a systemic assembly line...