Real Salt Lake: Kreis coaches how he played

Jason Kreis doesn't believe there's a perfect coach out there, though he admits Lakers coach Phil Jackson might be.

Kreis also admits that he craves the same type of success and job security that Jackson has attained.

"I look at it the way I did when I was a very young professional soccer player — I want to do well in the worst way, and am willing to work 110 percent, work all the time to try and get to that level of success," Kreis said. "That's just kind of how I'm geared, how I'm driven."

As a player, he achieved remarkable success with mostly hard work, finishing with more than 100 career goals and winning an MLS MVP award in 1999. Not that long ago, Kreis believed he could reach the same level of success in coaching with similar hard work.

He knows he was a bit naive to think he could "make chicken salad out of chicken (poop)."

When Kreis took over as Real Salt Lake head coach on May 3, 2007, the psychology major from Duke University believed he had all the answers. He believed that by making training sessions more competitive, holding players accountable and treating them with open and honest communication, success would simply follow.

"I think I'm a little more realistic than I was before I started the job," Kreis said. "I thought it would be a pretty easy job, and I thought a coach could have drastic changes on levels of play."

In the first four or five months on the job, Kreis discovered you also need some talented players to be successful, something RSL lacked in 2007.

Although Kreis has tweaked some aspects of his coaching style, he hasn't changed his core philosophies.

"When the rubber hits the road and you've got to get results on the weekend, I think you wind up making some practical decisions," said RSL general manager Garth Lagerwey.

Kreis credits his previous coaches with helping him establish a core philosophy of open and honest communication. Kreis had a hunch he wanted to be a coach dating back to his first experiencing working with kids when he was 14 in Omaha, Neb. He took great pleasure from the experience, and believed the ideal scenario for the rest of his foreseeable life would be to play professional soccer followed by coaching professional soccer.

So throughout his career — whether it was at Duke, in MLS or his stints with the U.S. National Team — Kreis tried to be observant.

No one coach was unbelievable, according to Kreis. From a player's point of view, Kreis believes every coach had some positives and negatives about their style. It's those variations that helped him formulate the type of coach he wanted to be.