This one was a long time coming. Sean Breen and I lived on the same floor at Southern Virginia University, played soccer together, and somehow let way too many years go by without actually catching up. This episode fixed that.

Sean grew up in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia — a military town, a house divided between Spain and Ireland and Germany and the US, and a family where sports were always on the TV whether you had a team or not. His mom is from Spain, his dad was Air Force, and every summer from the time school got out until the day before it started back up, Sean was on a plane to Spain by himself. No parents. Three months in Europe with his cousins, his grandmother, and an uncle who made sure the boys were swimming laps, playing tennis, and doing math homework whether they liked it or not.

He also got politely asked to leave Catholic school in sixth grade for throwing food at silent lunch. Which honestly tracks.

We talk about what it was like coming into SVU as a non-LDS student from a Catholic family — his mom's hesitancy, the 25 books she read about the church before letting him go, the student code he misread and the coffee he ordered at an Italian restaurant sitting right next to the student body president. We talk about his twelve years in property management, the golf handicap he's been grinding down, and the SVU friendships that somehow survived years of silence and still feel like family.

We go deep on the World Cup — Spain winning, Infantino needing to go, the VAR mess, the pay-to-play crisis, Pochettino staying on, and why nothing ever seems to actually change with US soccer no matter how many times we have this conversation.

And at the end Sean drops the most quietly powerful piece of advice this podcast has heard in a while:

Find fulfillment in the things that aren't the societal norm. The little things. The friend group that shows up on a Wednesday night. The dinner with your mom every week. The Marvel movie you still go see with the same people you went to high school with. A lot of little things can be as equal — if not greater — than one big thing.

This one's for anyone who's ever felt behind because their life doesn't look the way everyone said it was supposed to.

🎧 Listen now and share this with someone who needs to hear it.

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