The Laredo Heat introduced Eleazar "E.J." Jepsen as their head coach
BY NINO CARDENAS
Times sports writer
The Laredo Heat introduced Eleazar "E.J." Jepsen as their head coach and
assistant general manager for their inaugural 2005 USL Premier Development
League season.
It was also announced Friday that team president Shashi Vaswani and chief
operating officer J.J. Vela will serve as co-general managers.
"We are excited," Vela said. "His experience brings a lot of potential to
our team."
Jepsen, a native from Valparaiso Chile, is the club's third head coach in
its short existence.
He was most recently the Dallas U-23 state team and assisted the DFW
Tornados and the Texas Spurs at the PDL level.
He coached at university of Texas-Pan American in 1995-96 and the Youth
State Olympic Development program for the North Texas region.
"He has PDL experience, I threw him a lot of curveballs as to why he
shouldn't want to come coach here. I wanted to see what his commitment was
and he passed. None of us here are doing it for the money, but for the sport
and the youth," Vaswani said.
Lance Noble started with the club before being replaced in mid-season by
player-coach Eddie Silva.
"Silva is working out for the team, he got the itch to play after coaching
the club, so he made a decision to try out," Vela said.
Silva is the head coach for the LBJ Wolves and is looking forward to
contributing to the team as a player.
Under Silva the Heat (2-5-1 PDL, 5-7-2 overall last season) closed out the
regular PDL season out scoring their last three opponents 14 goals to none.
Laredo implemented a 3-5-2 formation in the latter part of the season, which
included a sweep of the Lafayette Swampcats (5-0 and 4-0) and a 5-0 thumping
of the Rio Grande Coyotes.
The Heat have retained Jorge Canales as an assistant and Jepsen is looking
to hire another assistant.
Jepsen, 34, isn't a new face for the players, he was involved in the final
two games of their exhibition season.
Jepsen was mainly involved in the game against Coyotes and the final
exhibition game against the Tigres de Monterrey second division team.
The Tigres ended regulation play at a 2-2 standstill, Monterrey edged out
the Heat 5-3 on penalty kicks for the win.
Regarding Jepsen's aspirations for the season, the new coach replied, "it
will be a rebuilding year, basically the goals are wide open. Personally I
want to start our program the right way. We have good local talent.
We just have to help the kids develop as they grow up. From where I come
from we begin as early as seven years of age, so I'm bringing that knowledge
down here," Jepsen said.
The Heat will base itself after the South American style of soccer.
"We will pass the ball a lot, a Spanish style, but it depends on who we play
against. It will be like the way we played the last couple of games," Jepsen
said.
The Heat's goal remains intact, "We want to be able to compete with Division
I soccer talent and above, so we are gonna have to bring players from out of
town," Vaswani said.
Ultimately they want to have kids from Laredo and Nuevo Laredo form the core
group of talent.
"We want the youth to excel, some have the talent, they were just not being
pushed and now they are being pushed. We have no goals in terms of wins and
losses this season, but we still will have a solid team," Vaswani said.
The long-term vision for the Heat organization is to build adequate soccer
fields in the city.
"We would love to have the ability to purchase lands. I am vigorously going
after the county to ask for land at a fair price to build the fields on,"
Vaswani said.
