Is soccer declining in the United States?

Posted on July 15, 2018 by Beau Dure

“Oh, soccer is doing fine!” you may argue. “It’s the Federation that stinks.”

It’s entirely possible that the second statement is true while the first statement is false.

A couple of metrics look very bad:

World Cup ratings are down, even accounting for the USA’s absence. You can blame Fox’s production if you like, but they’re also way down on Telemundo.
A household survey conducted by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, which does this sort of thing regularly and works with the Aspen Institute’s Project Play (which aims to get more kids playing, no matter what the sport is), shows youth soccer participation in freefall. The New York Times has a follow-up. The full numbers of the most recent survey aren’t available, but you can check out last year’s survey and see that soccer’s decline had been comparable with other sports but now appears to be considerably worse.

As with World Cup ratings, the SFIA survey can’t be completely explained by everyone’s favorite scapegoats (Alexi Lalas, Fox producers, Sunil Gulati, unnamed people in U.S. Soccer’s Chicago HQ). We’re not talking about U.S. Soccer’s registration numbers, which have been either flat or declining a bit for a good while — see my attempt to make sense of the numbers.

This survey collects data on everyone. All those unregistered players the presidential candidates touted? Yeah, this survey is intended to account for them, too.

person jogging near soccer goal during sunrise — Photo by Flickr on Pexels.com

You can question the survey’s methodology. You can even say polling as a whole is in disrepute after the 2016 election, but if you look carefully at those numbers, you’ll see they weren’t that far off — it’s just that the 3 or 4 percent errors all broke in Trump’s favor.

Sure, it’s still possible that there are plenty of people playing soccer who didn’t answer the poll-takers. But you’d certainly be hard-pressed to look at any metric and say participation is growing.

Here’s the trickier question: Why?

A lot of the coverage focuses on misguided Federation initiatives — birth-year registration, the DA’s insistence on not playing high school soccer, etc. More generally, the “travel or bust” mentality parents get — with considerable pushes from the local clubs — leads to burnout and frustration.

But we don’t have data to measure the impact of each of these factors. That’s not part of the survey. (Which is understandable — who wants to deal with a 100-question survey asking, “Did your local club make you want to quit? Or was it the jersey colors? Or do you just want to play xBox?”)

And the World Cup numbers are also difficult to assess. Is interest dropping, or are ratings failing to take into account everyone going to watch parties or watching on their phones? Or do Millennials really just “consume” sports by watching highlights and not complete games?

So the questions aren’t simple, and neither are the answers.

Yet we should be able to agree on one thing: We can’t take soccer’s growth for granted. We can’t turn youth soccer into a joyless breeding ground for elite players. We have to do better with TV coverage. And yes, we need to rev up our professional game in multiple divisions. (And we need to talk about the nuances of doing that — 15 years of yelling at each other on Twitter and prior forms of mass communications of done jack-squat.)

We can certainly agree on this: We’re not where we want to be. And it’s not just a ball taking a bad bounce in Trinidad or a bad call that got Panama to the World Cup. It’s not just parents who want to “win” too badly — it’s also the coaches who pick out top athletes at age 8, discard everyone else and then moan when they have no one to replace the top athletes who pick other clubs or other sports.

It’s the Federation and its ham-fisted mandates, but it’s not just the Federation. It’s everyone.

Something’s wrong. Many things are wrong. And we need to start talking about it with a good Kirk-Spock mix of passion and reason. Soon.

youth soccer

What youth soccer can learn from karate

Posted on July 13, 2018 by Beau Dure

Following up on my School of Rock post, here’s another one about a youth program that offers a few good lessons for soccer to follow …

1. Run afterschool programs. Elementary-school parents balk, with good reason sometimes, at having to drive kids all over the place at dinner time and afterwards to get them to soccer practices all over creation. Having a mere two practices a week can be an imposition.

Yet these same parents will send their kids to karate five days a week. Why?

It’s not because they have dreams of their kids being the next Chuck Liddell or Lyoto Machida. It’s because the karate program runs vans and mini-buses to several nearby elementary schools, and the parents have jobs that make it difficult to pick up their kids at 3:15. (Can you tell I’m speaking from personal experience here? The same kid who played travel soccer and is now devoted to School of Rock has a brown belt.)

2. Have a fun but disciplined environment. Learning to break a board with a wheel kick isn’t the most practical skill unless you’re a soldier who does a lot of hand-to-hand combat. But the discipline of martial arts will carry over into anything.

That said, your kid probably isn’t going to be thrilled about going straight from school to a boot camp. Play games, give kids some time to unwind, and then start training.

3. Divide up by skill level, not age. When the time comes to work on particular skills in our local karate program, the brown belts and green belts would go in one room, and the white belts and … yellow? blue? I don’t remember … would go in another. Age didn’t matter. Sure, age and size were a factor when kids started sparring — even with tons of protective gear, you don’t want a 13-year-old kicking a 7-year-old — but that’s easily managed.

4. Be cheaper than other programs. Maybe day care had skewed our perception of how much it costs to have people look after your kids, but karate wasn’t killing family budgets. They could also go to a local place and learn coding, but that’s waaaaaaay more expensive.

5. Be role models. You don’t need to show your kids Christian Pulisic and Alex Morgan to give them someone to emulate. Young kids are going to look up to the adult in charge in the room.

Granted, there’s not much professional karate in mainstream culture. I mentioned Liddell and Machida above because they’re the rare old-school example of karate practitioner in MMA. These days, it’s mostly wrestlers who’ve learned a bit of kickboxing. (That said, the “mixed” in mixed martial arts isn’t a bad thing, and I once walked in to pick up my kids and saw then-UFC fighter Kamal Shalorus teaching wrestling. Persia represent.)

Sure, in soccer, we don’t just want to have fun. We want to find the next Pulisics, Ramoses and Cherundolos. But if you’re bringing in first-graders and second-graders five days a week and helping them progress, that’s not exactly a bad foundation.

us soccer

Bruce Arena vs. the world (book review)

Posted on July 10, 2018 by Beau Dure

It’s easy to be petty. It’s more difficult to make a larger point that overrides the pettiness.

Bruce Arena (with Steve Kettmann)’s book What’s Wrong With Us?: A Really Long Subtitle Follows is certainly petty at times. And it’s tempting to respond in kind.

How many potshots does Arena take at the soccer media? Let’s put it this way — I paused reading about a third of the way and searched for my own name to see if I ever came up in the firing line. I did not, which either means I’m on his good side for now or I’m insignificant. (Maybe both.)

Grant Wahl isn’t so lucky. Arena says Wahl’s book, The Beckham Experiment, takes the

Us Weekly approach as opposed to the more literate SI tradition started by great writers like Frank Deford and Ron Fimrite. The July 6, 2009, issue of the magazine carried an excerpt from Wahl’s book under the headline “How Beckham Blew It” with a blurb that threw around words like failed and alienated. I didn’t take any of it very seriously. When you’re on the inside looking out, you just chuckle at that kind of stuff and move on. Who really cares about stories of players going out for a meal together on the road, and Beckham being told he couldn’t drink unless he showed ID? I guess they call that human interest.

(Yes, let’s all note the irony that Arena cites Frank Deford, a man who prided himself on knowing nothing about soccer but turning up his nose at it anyway, like Dan Aykroyd’s character in Trading Places would scoff at a man with no butler, as part of the great literary tradition at Sports Illustrated.)

He’s also frustrated with reporters for failing to ask about a penalty kick he thinks Jozy Altidore deserved (“Don’t they watch the games?” he wonders). Then he offers up something that’s frankly a good critique of many young reporters who haven’t found a voice:

Sometimes reporters are like the kind of students who want to make sure you know they’ve done the required reading, as opposed to just keeping their eyes open and asking a question they really want answered.

That was every reporter I edited in college. And probably me at one point. And a lot of reporters I’ve known who just wanted to do the most perfunctory job possible, lie low and avoid layoffs.

But it’s really a pity Arena doesn’t have an appreciation for editors. Because my goodness, this book needed one. Is he Robbie Keane or Robby? Who is this “DeMarcus” of whom he speaks? And the most egregious error of all, in the third sentence of the book, he says the 2002 World Cup quarterfinal was “as far as a US side has ever advanced in the world’s greatest sporting event.” Leaving aside for the moment the fact that the U.S. women have won the World Cup more than once and whether the women’s event qualifies as “the world’s greatest sporting event,” the U.S. men reached the semifinal in 1930. You could argue 2002 was a greater accomplishment given that a couple hundred teams entered as opposed to the 13 in 1930, but it’s still factually incorrect.

There’s also an amusing error that apparently belongs to one of his predecessors but is passed along here with no explanatory note:

Former national team coach Walt Chyzowych, the director of coaching for the federation, gave the course’s opening talk, titled “The American Problem.” Walt said: “We are geographically a very big country: we have three different time zones,

Almost seems like a veiled slap at the Pro League Standards and the “three time zone” rule.

(Granted, book editing seems like a lost art today. I opened up a book on drummers today and read about Steve Smith’s time at “Berkeley” College of Music and that great keyboardist “Chic Korea,” which I can only assume is Niles Rodgers’ new K-Pop band.)

What’s funny about it is that Arena is certainly detail-oriented. My first conversation with him was a live chat at USA TODAY in which I fed him reader questions and then typed his answers. He had the chat open on his computer so he could tell me every typo I made.

Granted, he loves the back-and-forth with the media. He’s often a bit snarky — when I asked him what he thought of the U.S. Soccer curriculum Claudio had just unveiled, he said, “Claudio who?” (It’s fair to say Arena was aware of Claudio Reyna’s existence and the fact that he had been tasked with developing a curriculum.)

And yet he would always give good insight. Many times, I finished an interview with Arena shaking my head, then found several great quotes when I played back the recording.

So that’s why it’s a little disappointing that the reform ideas are so poorly developed. Part V of the book is called “A Bold Plan for the Future,” and it’s anything but that. There’s a checklist at the end that includes a few obvious things: “Hire a national team coach” isn’t exactly ground-breaking, though lengthening the MLS regular season and shortening the playoffs is a bit more interesting.

The biggest complaint Arena has (and he’s not alone) is that American players aren’t getting enough playing time in MLS, and he suggests we’d be better off with more protectionist policies. By his figures, the percentage of U.S.-born players in the league dropped from 62.3% in 1996 to 43.5% in 2017. OK, but in 1996, there were 10 teams with roughly 20 players each — 200 players in all. Let’s do the math — that’s maybe 125 U.S.-born players. (The A-League was fun to watch in those days in part because it still had a lot of watchable U.S. players — something the NASL and USL have difficulty duplicating.) Today, MLS has 23 teams with 28 roster spots, or 644 players. That would mean the league has 280 U.S.-born players, though the league claims 290.

Either way, the number of Americans in MLS has far more than doubled. You could argue that they’re not getting enough playing time. Then again, didn’t we hear for years that American players needed to go to Europe and fight for places in the first team? If they’re now doing so in the USA, why is that a bad thing?

(But I digress.)

Arena’s best suggestion may be his call for MLS and U.S. Soccer to give former players more prominent roles in the front office. That’s not a bad idea. Still not what I would call “bold.” (Maybe he’s learned that this “writing” thing is more difficult than he thought from the other side of the podium?)

But What’s Wrong With Us? is still an entertaining read, filled with fun behind-the-scenes stories from the USA’s most successful (since 1930) World Cup and its least successful (since 1985) qualifying campaign. The reader will learn more about U.S. soccer from those stories than she/he will from the reform suggestions, but maybe that’s for the best. Arena always was better at coaching than punditry. Here’s hoping he gets another job in which we can interview him more often.

us soccer, youth soccer

Creating opportunities for all U.S. youth

Posted on July 8, 2018 by Beau Dure

In a vast country, how do you make sure everyone has an opportunity to go as far as he or she can go in soccer?

Not an easy question. Today, a lot of the focus is on inner cities, where several organizations are working to set up futsal courts and programs.

But we can’t forget smaller towns, either. Meet Chris Kessell, a passionate advocate (and someone who doesn’t just talk about it but also gets out and does it) for West Virginians:

Every community big and small deserves the ability to dream. Every child in this country who loves the sport deserves the ability to be able to dream about their place in the sport. Continue to speak up for lost and forgotten communities in this nation and advocate for #ProRelForUSA and #ReformUSSF.

It’s tough to argue with people who are doing such good work. But this argument isn’t about the work or the intentions. It’s about the overarching solutions. Pro/rel has long been called the “third rail” of American soccer, and my attempt to reset the conversation earlier this year went nowhere.

And so, with the utmost respect for Chris’ work, I’ll suggest the following:

The English system wouldn’t give these kids much of a dream. A modified pro/rel system may help, but even if that happens, we’ll need some creative programs to reach kids like the ones Chris is describing.

By “English system,” I mean a straight up-and-down ladder. That’s what England has in its first five tiers of soccer. Only then does it start to resemble a pyramid.

We can’t reasonably ask a fourth-division team to travel cross-country. And I think most people get that. So a lot of the plans I’ve tossed out for discussion have a much wider base — a national top tier, a West and East region in tier two, then tons and tons of D3 teams.

Here’s the bottom line: We want to create opportunity.

And England demonstrates that a healthy pro system doesn’t necessarily mean every club has a thriving academy. See this post, which is generally about the “pros” of pro/rel but also gets into the English situation.

Finally, the pro-affiliated academy system can’t reach everyone. The biggest club in Cornwall appears to be Truro City, which is in the National League South — England’s sixth tier. It’s in a town of about 21,000 people, not far from other towns about that size. The closest fully professional club is Plymouth Argyle, which can be reached in 71 minutes if you live at the train station. After that, it’s Exeter, then you have to go considerably farther. If you live farther west than Truro — say, Penzance, which also has about 21,000 people — it’s longer. Morgantown (WV) is actually closer to a pro club (Pittsburgh Riverhounds), even in a country that will likely never have the saturation of pro clubs that a small, football-mad country like England has.

So let’s consider options:

An English-style pro-rel ladder would likely put Morgantown in a sixth tier with little chance of going much higher.
A pyramid with no relegation from the third tier (or fourth, if we suddenly get hundreds of clubs) would ensure Morgantown has a stable pro club.
An NCAA-style system would mean Morgantown could be one of hundreds of “D1” clubs that can play for a national championship in any given year. No need to climb rung by rung. If they suddenly have a bunch of really good players, they can make a Butler-style run to the national final. (Yes, the Open Cup does sort of the same thing but not quite.)
German-style training centers in every metro area with a traffic light would be great. Germany realized its clubs can’t find and develop everyone, so the federation does more. The USA has a few programs along these lines — traditional ODP, U.S. Club Soccer ID programs, mobile training centers — but we could surely do more.
High schools. Consider this: The greatest college football player ever, Herschel Walker, came from a town in Georgia that had about 2,500 people at the time. The county had less than 9,000 people. Stretch out over two counties in the “Dublin Micropolitan Statistical Area,” and you might get to 50,000. Herschel was discovered 15 years before anyone knew what the Internet was.

So you can see why I’m skeptical when someone says kids can dream if only they had pro/rel. I’m not saying and I certainly hope I’ve never even implied that I don’t care about kids having that dream. Quite the opposite. I keep coming up with ideas. People keep ignoring them and telling me I’m ignorant.

Yet this is a topic I’ve been tackling in a lot of detail since I left USA TODAY in 2010. I didn’t discuss it much at USA TODAY — I doubt my editors would’ve been interested in a story on it, and I was busy covering soccer along with MMA, Olympic sports, high school sports, poker, horse racing, etc., etc. USA TODAY hasn’t had a full-time soccer writer since Peter Brewington in 2001. (Great, great guy.) They’ve been lucky to have a few people who sneak in some soccer content — not long after I left, former George Mason player Mike Foss came in and revamped their blog, making sure it had plenty of soccer.

Meanwhile, at other news organizations, you’re not going to see much talk about pro/rel. It’s not because people are told not to talk about it. It’s because the idea just isn’t gaining a lot of traction. People talk and talk — see the Chattanooga summit. And yet the UPSL, NPSL, PDL, USL and NISA are all doing their own thing. The UPSL brags about having pro/rel in certain areas — just like most other amateur leagues.

And the idea isn’t gaining a lot of traction because we can’t talk about it without egos and emotion getting in the way.

What can we do to change that?

us soccer, youth soccer

Why coaching youth soccer is impossible

Posted on July 7, 2018 by Beau Dure

There’s something funny about listening to a chat between the great soccer coaching gurus John O’Sullivan and Sam Snow while dodging baseballs lobbed over a bunch of Little League All-Stars and the right field fence by a baseball coach might be a little too excited over this coaching gig.

As I retrieved a ball that had sailed over my head, several yards beyond the fence on the park’s walking trail, I heard O’Sullivan and Snow talk about things that make them cringe as they see soccer coaches in action.

I laughed at the first few items. Starting a practice with laps is so 1983, isn’t it?

Then Sam, someone who has been a wonderful resource for me and thousands of others, lamented the warmup drill in which players line up, play the ball forward to a coach, run on to the square pass the coach sends them, and blast it at the goal.

Hey, wait a minute. That’s my gameday warmup.

Sam’s objection — in addition, I presume, to the fact that we coaches are supposed to avoid “lines, laps and lectures” as much as possible — is that it doesn’t mimic the game.

“Well,” I objected in my head as I continued my walk on the uphill section and started breathing a little heavier, “if you have a forward who understands playing his back to goal, you might see a give-and-go combination … OK, Sam, you’re right.”

But what I didn’t hear was what I’m supposed to do instead.

I’m sure some hotshot Self-Appointed Elite coach who only works with top-tier talent will tell me what I’m supposed to do. Maybe it’s some sort of dazzling drill in which the ball is played out to the wing and a defender applies some pressure before it’s played back into the center. Or maybe I’m supposed to do what every NWSL team does — possession drills and some sort of painful-looking exercise involving large rubber bands.

Let me explain a few things to the SAE coach:

I’m not coaching D.C. United’s U-18s. I’m coaching rec league players. If I have 11 players by the time the ref calls us over to check our shin guards, I consider myself lucky. I don’t have a lot of time to explain anything. I need to keep it simple.
Why do we think of finishing as dessert? (I can’t cite the originator of that analogy because it’s quite old.) Do your 5,000 short touches, juggle 3,000 times, run 20 possession drills with no passes longer than five yards, and then we might let you take a shot. And then we wonder why no one can score a danged goal.

So I hear what Sam’s saying. But then how do I learn what I’m supposed to do instead?

Google didn’t help. The first item that came up on my search was a warmup drill that’s basically free kicks with no defense. How realistic is that?

Here’s the next problem: We have so many different philosophies. John didn’t use the word “rondo” but stepped into The Great Rondo Kerfuffle of 2018 by fretting about “directionless” drills. (Granted, after seeing Spain crash out of the World Cup because it ran a 120-minute rondo against Russia and neglected to set up meaningful scoring chances, perhaps the U.S. idea of adding “direction” to possession drills will gain some traction. Or, again, maybe we should work on finishing on occasion?)

But the biggest problem was something John and Sam mentioned as a positive of older-skewing licenses. In the National Youth License, coaches are taught how to teach. They’re taught about the “psychosocial” aspects of coaching.

Those of us who coach at the earliest stages of the game are taught nothing of the sort. And yes, I’ve taken the new “grassroots” modules — at least the ones that are out now. The F license, which was discarded for reasons known only to people in Chicago, taught a bit of it, at least by the example of seeing Shannon MacMillan teach.

The licensing courses have typically focused on practice plans. Is that really the first priority for grassroots coaches? Shouldn’t we be getting our practice plans from those who have really studied them?

Unfortunately, the practice plans we get generally aren’t helpful. They’re written for other members of the technical staff, full of jargon that Coach A and Coach B might understand but not the befuddled coaches of the C-teams and the recreational kids.

The new “Play-Practice-Play” practice plans, admittedly a good bit simpler than the “Warmup-Small Sided Game-Expanded Small Sided Game Because You’re Supposed to Guess The Difference Between That and the Small-Sided Game-Scrimmage With Caveats” practice plan we were taught a couple of years ago, are interesting. But the first set of plans I saw (I’m not going to name the state association that posted them) had something interesting. I checked out the U14 plans, which had nice names like “attacking from wide areas” and “defending crosses.” Take away the titles, and every practice was almost exactly the same. Get the kids to warmup with some 2v2, 3v3 and dynamic stretching while you talk to them about their day. (The last bit is a nice touch — finally teaching us how to teach.) Then move into the “practice” phase — which is basically a half-field setup in which seven players are trying to score against six. Doesn’t matter what topic it is. It’s an odd-number attack.

Maybe we should simply admit it. “OK, coach of a team from U12 on up. You’re going to do the same thing every practice. You’re going to do small-sided scrimmages, then basically a halfcourt scrimmage. We’re just going to ask you to emphasize different points in each one.”

So instead of a bunch of diagrams that spell out the same thing every practice, you just give us a list. Hey, we can put that on our phones. Nice.

Even then, though, we still won’t have much idea how to teach a lot of valuable skills. How do you teach someone to shoot like Denis Cheryshev? How do you teach someone to drop a 50-yard pass effortlessly into the stride of a teammate? (Granted, those might be beyond the capacity of a rec-leaguer, anyway.)

I’m going into my U16 and U14 seasons with two goals.

Get players a lot of touches on the ball in varying situations. Futsal is nice, but it doesn’t teach you how to switch the point of attack on a full-sized field or deal with a hard-hit ball at chest level.
Learn how to move on a big field.

That’ll be tough, because my practice space is generally one-fourth of a field. But we’ll give it a shot.

I’m open for ideas. Especially a new warmup exercise for unskilled finishers with short attention spans.

youth soccer

Why School of Rock is better than youth soccer

Posted on July 5, 2018July 4, 2018 by Beau Dure

We’ve made a decision in our household. Less soccer. More music.

Don’t adjust Project Play’s dreary stats on quitting sports. We still have soccer players under our roof. (I’ll actually be the only non-player in the house this fall, and I’ll be coaching and possibly reffing.) But the year-round commitment? Three practices and a game in the typical fall or spring week? Long drives out to the exurbs and beyond? Done.

Instead, the top activity will be School of Rock. And even as someone who has devoted most of his professional career to sports, especially soccer, I’m thrilled.

As a parent, I can say with no doubt whatsoever that School of Rock isn’t just a different experience than youth soccer. It’s better.

Sure, I’m glad my kids will continue to play soccer in some form. They’ll learn teamwork in situations in which the outcome is far from certain. They have to deal with winning and losing at some point in life. Better to do it now.

Plus, there’s the whole “don’t be a slug as a child and grow up to be 300 pounds with all sorts of health issues” thing. If your kids aren’t playing soccer or any other team sport, they need to be cycling or running or swimming or something else to stay active. Then we have to keep up the pace as adults, especially when we hit 40 and our metabolism slows to a crawl.

But School of Rock offers so many things youth soccer does not.

Kids truly progress according to their own aptitude and effort. There’s no “U10” or “U12” at School of Rock. At my kid’s very first show, he was maybe 9 years old, playing a few relatively complex parts. A few other young kids were playing parts of various complexity. And a few older kids were stomping out awesome bass grooves and guitar solos while singing and strutting across the stage like they’re auditioning to replace Ann Wilson or Roger Daltrey.

School of Rock students get whatever parts they can handle. The big high school senior who plays rock-steady bass parts will be the guy who holds Disco Inferno together. The scared elementary schooler who can barely reach the drum pedals will play a simple beat on a simple song. And everything in between.

It’s not like youth soccer, where we recreational coaches toss out a kid on the field to play his required half of the game, knowing full well we’re going to have a massive hole in the lineup that will be exploited by the bigger, faster, ruthless attackers on the other team. And it’s not like a travel soccer game in which one team might not be challenged. If I Love Rock and Roll is too easy for you, try this …

Or maybe this …

Those two songs featured in the little one’s last show. He played keyboards on the first. The second was held together by a high schooler who’s a pretty good soccer player but also an amazing drummer. (And guitarist.)

I majored in music. (And philosophy, because I collect useless degrees.) My son surpassed me in terms of ear training and general keyboard skills before he finished elementary school.

And one factor in that development is this …

The older kids encourage the younger kids. One student we’re going to miss at School of Rock now that she’s graduated is a charismatic, ever-smiling singer. Earlier this year, at the CBGB-themed show, I saw her sing Blondie’s Call Me and then point over at my kid when it was time for the keyboard solo.

At the last show for her and the big bass guy, I thanked both of them for encouraging my son so much. She gave him a big hug and told him how awesome he is.

You might get that sort of atmosphere at your local soccer club. We were lucky to have a small travel club in which the older kids set a nice example and got the younger kids juggling more without even realizing what they were doing. But most of the time, the U18 team is off doing its own thing while the U9s never see anyone older.

“But this is an unfair comparison,” you might say. “You can’t throw elementary schoolers on the same field as high schoolers, and team sports teach kids to deal with adversity.”

Sure, but you can find ways to mix the age groups without having a 16-year-old run over a 10-year-old. And as for adversity …

School of Rock teaches kids to deal with failure. Every once in a while, a song turns into a train wreck. The drummer’s concentration wavers on a difficult part. The singer can’t quite hit all the notes and is rattled to the point of missing a few words. It’s just as painful to watch as a parent as a defensive breakdown or a whiffed shot on the soccer field.

So what happens next? You play the next song. It’s not like soccer, where if you have a bad game, you have a week to deal with it. If you know a season’s going down the tubes, you’re SOL. Gotta stay in that division for the rest of that season — or longer, if you have the misfortune of being in an “elite” league with no promotion/relegation or other mechanism for pulling an overmatched team out of the fray.

And you have to try out to make the top bands. We have a “House” band that’s basically the opposite of “House” soccer. It’s the best of the best. There are some damn good musicians in the “JV” House band and some more who, like a recreational soccer player, simply can’t make the commitment to the extra practices required here. Kids might try out and not make it.

So you’re not sheltered from anything at School of Rock. Even on an individual level, the frustration of not being able to nail a difficult part is just as hard to handle as the frustration of missing that crucial shot or failing to meet your juggling goals.

So what can youth soccer learn from School of Rock?

A few things:

Don’t get locked into age groups. Let kids progress according to their abilities, a plan I fleshed out at SoccerWire a couple of years ago.
Foster a sense of belonging to a club. The “club-centric” model is ridiculous for leagues but not a bad idea for the occasional showcase, especially if it’s set up so teams in the same club can actually watch each other play. Have pickup games or mixed scrimmages so kids can get to know players in other age groups. Have club-wide social events.
Teach better. Work with kids both one-on-one and in group settings. Let them explore their strengths and weaknesses.
Embrace diverse approaches. The School of Rock teaching style, basically tailored to each student, is a refreshing change from the pedantic egomaniacs who pontificate on coaching youth soccer the “right” way and scoff at everything else. They’ll always teach ear training, just as any good soccer coach is going to work on foot skills in some way, shape or form, but if Student A learns a part differently from Student B, that’s fine.

Maybe then, youth soccer will rock almost as much as School of Rock. Almost.

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