On May 26, 2018 we were very fortunate to have been invited to meet with a soccer friend of ours, Dennis Te Kloese who now serves as the Mexican National Teams Director. Dennis was in the Los Angeles area ahead of the Mexico vs Wales game scheduled for Monday, May 28, 2018 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.
Just a little bit of history of our friendship with Dennnis. We first met Dennis in the early 2000’s when he was serving as the Academy Director for all official Chivas USA affiliated soccer academies. At the time he had just left Chivas Guadalajara and had been hired to spear head the Chivas academy system here in the states. While at Chivas USA we were in constant dialogue with Dennis being that we were always recommending players to the main Chivas academy in Carson. A couple years later Dennis would leave Chivas USA and would take up a position in Monterrey, Mexico with Tigres UANL of the Mexican first division. During his time in Tigres UANL, we had a number of academy players who would tryout for their fuerza basicas teams and we would also host a couple of tryouts here in the states for Tigres UANL. In the next couple of years Dennis would eventually get hired to head the Mexican Federation Youth National Teams and would later return to Chivas Guadalajara in a more administrative position as Sporting Director where he spent a season until coming back to the Mexican Federation as Mexican National Team Director.
Back to us meeting with Dennis. While waiting for Dennis to finish up with a prior engagement at the Beverly Hills luxury hotel where the Mexican National team was staying, we were very fortunate to see a number of the Mexican National Team players roaming the hotel lobby. Just to name a few Hector Moreno, Diego Reyes and Jesus Corona.
Being that Dennis is a very busy person we were very fortunate to have spent close to an hour talking to him of many soccer related topics and issues which we are faced with here in the US. That same evening Dennis was scheduled to appear on the Mens In Blazers show (a English sports show which was touring the US) and because of it was unable to accompany us to the “closed session” practice which the Mexican National Team was scheduled to have that evening on the UCLA campus. As it turned out there were only a handful of people invited to watch the practice and a group of special needs children and their parents.
Mexican National coach Juan Carlos Osorio used the training session to work on team tactical movements with and without the ball and worked a lot on building out from the back. In all the training session lasted close to 1 hour and 45 minutes.
In ending we would like to personally thank Dennis for taking away from his busy schedule to meet with us and for allowing us to attend the close session practice at UCLA.
South Valley Chivas Academy Directors
Esmaldo and Gilbert Hernandez
The following are a number of images from our meeting with Dennis Te Kloese and the Mexican National Team practice at UCLA.
