Month: February 2014

soccer

Single-Digit Soccer: Don’t specialize … really

Posted on by Beau Dure

The chorus against specializing in one sport at an early age is growing.

Just today, I’ve stumbled into two pieces:

– Specific: NPR on kids suffering back injuries.

– General: Changing the Game author John O’Sullivan at Potomac Soccer Wire, presenting mountains of data.

It’s such a temptation, isn’t it? Your awesome athletes get overrun by a team that’s practicing twice a week through the whole school year and doing a few things in the summer, and you feel like you need to keep up, right?

(Of course, it’s also tempting for me to print out O’Sullivan’s piece and present it to the gloating parents in our indoor league, but that’s another rant.)

For the Single-Digit Soccer book, I’ve already interviewed a lot of famous athletes. The vast majority played more than one sport growing up.

So you need to ask — is it your goal to develop a good high school (or college or even beyond) soccer player and a well-rounded person? Or to win U9 games?

Update: Thanks to Setting the Table for pointing me to a radio discussion with John O’Sullivan and radio host Marc Amazon. I like the host. Then he gets a scary caller — “Dave from Columbus,” who says he’s a coach of elite 9- and 10-year-old football players. He’s not worried about burnout because the only players who burn out are the ones that stink.

So, so many things wrong with that statement:

1. What can you tell about a kid at 10 years old? You can’t even tell that much at age 17. Freddy Adu and Lionel Messi were once close to the same level. U17 stars wash out all the time. So you’re telling me you can tell who’s a good player and who isn’t before kids even hit puberty? Suppose your good little running back goes through a growth spurt and ends up 6-4 and scrawny? Suppose your big lineman doesn’t grow much more? Suppose you had a 9-year-old who was going through a clumsy growth spurt and settled into being a pretty good athlete by age 11, and you told him to go away at age 10?

2. What’s the point? You just want to coach kids who look like the total package at age 9, and the rest can just go sit on the sofa?

3. “If these kids don’t specialize, how are they going to make any money?” How many pros do you know, Dave? How many of them specialized? Not many. A lot of NBA players played other sports. I can’t think of a soccer player I’ve interviewed who played nothing else.

But Dave is also an old-school soccer basher who thinks soccer is a sport for weaklings and isn’t American. Bully for him.

I think Dave has built a business convincing parents they need to pay him so little Billy will be a D1 football player. And guess what? No one can promise that. I’m not going to call Dave from Columbus an outright fraud, but he’s not looking good.

“So how do I know you’re not an absolute idiot,” Amazon asks him. Good question. The next caller also buries Dave, pointing out how many prominent NFL players are crossover athletes. Some NFL players barely even played football growing up. And there’s another three-word argument: Michael. Jordan. Baseball.

So Dave clearly falls into the Friday Night Tykes school of stubborn old-school idiocy. We don’t have any of those coaches in soccer. Right?

Another update: Another tangentially related link — participation levels in youth sports are dropping as the “casual” player is left out.

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olympic sports, winter sports

Unfinished Sochi and Olympic deprivations

Posted on by Beau Dure

Some of the stories about the Sochi Olympics range from the sad to the horrifying — immense costs, terror threats, something about stray dogs I don’t have the heart to investigate, etc.

Then you have the head-scratchers that provide the low-hanging fruit for journalists who can’t help but notice them. Like the double toilets — yes, they’ve found another one. Organizers should probably just drop the defensive tone about them and claim the double toilets are some sort of game inviting people to find them, like Easter eggs in a video game.

This weekend, The Washington Post ran a cheeky piece on the state of media hotels. The story came across a little silly — honestly, who hasn’t had the occasional missing light bulb or faulty TV remote in a hotel at some point? And why are we supposed to be aghast that the hotel didn’t have a room ready for someone who arrived earlier than her reservation? (And then accommodated her, anyway?) But the photo gallery at the bottom shows a few things in the usually tidy Olympic venues that look nowhere near ready for prime time.

The bigger story on media hotels: Some of them aren’t ready. That’s bad. And I checked — one of them is the hotel for which I held a reservation before deciding against the Sochi trip.

While all these little oopsies fit into the larger narrative that Russia has spent $51 billion and accomplished very little, I have another thought: Flashbacks to Torino.

Eight years ago, I arrived in Italy on a plane that looked and sounded like it was struggling to climb up and over the Alps. I landed in a tiny airport where a lot of confused people pointed in different directions to direct the arriving media to shuttles to their “media villages.” Three of us wound up in a cab that made a few loops along a traffic artery in Torino, then stopped in the median. A 10-minute phone call followed. Then we somehow made it to our dorms.

That would not be the only time I would get lost in Italy, but it may have been the only instance for which I could hold the Olympic organizers directly responsible.

Torino had plenty of additional idiosyncrasies, though. You had the media center sinks, which had one pedal for ice-cold water and one for HOLY BERLUSCONI THIS IS MELTING MY SKIN! The media center sundries shop had no cough drops but several varieties of condoms. The biathlon venue had no video display or anything that would let those of us in the standing area know who’s winning.

And they clearly had last-minute preparation issues. I arrived two days before the opening ceremony. The next day, I saw a crew working on the monorail track — all 300 yards of what apparently remains from a 1961 expo.

[cetsEmbedGmap src=https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Palavela,+Turin,+Italy&hl=en&ll=45.021335,7.668886&spn=0.003024,0.00523&sll=45.058198,7.695065&sspn=0.008549,0.020921&oq=palavela&t=h&hq=Palavela,&hnear=Turin,+Piedmont,+Italy&z=18 width=450 height=425 marginwidth=0 marginheight=0 frameborder=0 scrolling=no]

Check this photo and my blog post from the time, and you’ll see a star-shaped sculpture. At night, it’s supposed to turn and lift water from the pond below. About halfway through the Games, they finally filled the pond with enough water to make it work. By that time, the bathrooms in the Media Center had taken a turn for the worse.

(I was in the Media Center most of the time, watching five TVs at once to keep up the live blog that I re-discovered today through the Wayback Machine.)

They did have one advantage over the Beijing bathrooms, though — you could flush the toilet paper. In the Beijing Media Center, no. They put up signs with anthropomorphic toilets asking people not to put paper in them. Trash bins full of used toilet paper smell exactly as you think.

Fortunately, most of the media facilities didn’t have these:

IMG_3316

Yes, you’re supposed to squat.

So Sochi isn’t alone in unique toilet fixtures or other novelties. And it’s not alone in terror threats. I watched helicopters fly ominously over the Salt Lake opening ceremony, and I saw police clear out a block for a suspicious package. In today’s media climate, that would’ve been a good couple of hours of cable programming. Then, it was a couple of sentences in the next day’s paper.

Torino actually had a suspicious vehicle near the Media Center, which was convenient for coverage purposes. It was eventually exploded. As I said at the time, I think the carbinieri just wanted to blow something up.

Hosting the Olympics is a unique experience. Welcome to an elite club, Sochi. Now, please, take care of my buddies over there.

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