The U.S. national team coach and legendary German player wants to see more “informal” soccer akin to basketball’s 1-on-1 and H-O-R-S-E games.

He also has direct advice for U8 coaches:

Have fun! Let the children enjoy themselves! Help them learn the excitement they can experience kicking a ball and playing soccer-type games on their own, with their friends, and with their parents wherever they are with whatever ball they have available.

via SoccerAmerica – Klinsmann Q&A: Parents can set an example Part 1 11/04/2011.

One thing I’ve heard from Brandi Chastain on occasion is that she thinks growing up playing multiple sports helped her in her soccer career. She stayed active, stayed refreshed and translated certain skills like anticipating a fly ball in softball.

Think that’s a thing of the past, only applicable to previous generations? Alex Morgan would say no. Until high school, she was in AYSO, not intense club soccer.

SoccerAmerica – Becoming Alex Morgan: Rising star reflects on youth game (Part 1) 11/02/2011.

Good read on the advantages and disadvantages of showing athletic talent early or late.

The early bloomers get confidence and a quick pass to advanced coaching, but if they fail to meet expectations, that confidence can be easily crushed.

Late bloomers have a harder time getting that coaching.

Early bloomers also can be incredibly rude to Matt Saracen and then lash out when Coach Taylor benches them in the state final. But I digress.

Early and Late Bloomers in Youth Sports: Lessons for Parents | MomsTeam.

So I’ve got Nicky and Mikey back on defense, Pedro and Paulie are up front … we’re just about ready … hey! Andy! ANDY! ANNNNDDDDYYYY!!!!!!

(Names changed to protect the innocent and the kid who has just wandered into the woods.)

We had a discussion among a few coaches recently about quality of play. I raised the point that one difficulty we had was that some players weren’t particularly interested in being there. If you’ve ever coached, you know the type — picking at the grass, playing with the net, perhaps even going on what Crocodile Dundee would call a walkabout.

I got a bit of a smackdown in response. We should NEVER turn our backs on such players. Perhaps that player will be the next Steve Jobs.

OK. Fair enough, I suppose. Not really saying we should ignore such players. Just saying it’s a challenge.

And there’s a fundamental issue of fairness here. If you spend a whole practice session or game trying to coax a reluctant player into playing, you’re not coaching the rest of the team. At some levels, perhaps that’s OK. Kids who have soccer aptitude, speed or strength might not need a parent volunteer’s help to develop their skills at this stage. Our club offers additional training for serious players at a small cost, so they can always take advantage of that. But the dominant players deserve — and need — a bit of attention as well. Some of them need to dial it back a bit. Some need to pass the ball once in a while. Some need to quit picking on the kids who aren’t interested.

And frankly, I feel better equipped to deal with those kids. I can communicate with them. Most of them want to get better. If they misbehave, they’re in trouble with me and their parents. In three years or so of coaching, I can honestly say I’ve made a difference for several talented players, encouraging them to round out their skills and learn teamwork.

The disinterested kids are more difficult. Their parents might be able to get through, but more often than not, they’re hoping a new voice — that of a coach — will help coax them out of their shells.

It’s safe to say these challenges have stretched my creativity. I asked one player who was always smiling but never playing if he had a favorite superhero. He said Batman. I said, “OK, pretend you’re Batman. Gotham City needs your help! Your teammates are in danger!”

Nah. Didn’t work.

Being raised on old-school YMCA sports, the only model I have to follow is yelling. Then yelling louder. Modern-day child psychology frowns on belittling, so there’s not much left from the old school.

So what do you do? Seriously — I don’t know. Any ideas?

That’s not to say I’ve been totally unsuccessful. I’ve seen a couple of players progress with a bit of patience. I just managed to hold the door open long enough that they eventually wandered through. But I’d love to be able to do it more consistently.

In the single-digit years, kids have two reasons for playing soccer:

1. Getting good at it, competing and challenging themselves.

2. Being on a team with their buddies.

Some kids play for both reasons; some for just one. But at some point, they have to be split up. The kids who are playing for recreation keep playing recreationally, perhaps making a breakthrough in aptitude and interest at a later age. The other kids are herded into national training camps at age 7 to practice eight hours a day, living on a special regimen of protein-boosted smoothies … oh, no, I guess we’re not to that point. Yet.

What we actually do is this: We take the top players in each age group into “travel” soccer. In my area, that starts at U9.

But it’s creeping downward. Back in the first installment of this series, I mentioned a program that took U8 players into an Academy program in which they would practice more and play less. Here’s another club’s program: When a lot of rising U9s (and U8s looking to play up) turned out for travel tryouts, they created a program straddling the House and Travel programs. This middle “Club Academy” tier is like House league except that teams practice twice a week, and Travel players make guest appearances in their games.

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My first exposure to youth sports was at the Athens (Ga.) YMCA. We played football in the fall (flag in first grade, tackle from second grade on), basketball in the winter, soccer in the early Georgia spring and a brief softball season.

In football, we learned positions right away. I still remember mine — end in one season, guard in another. And I remember the numbering system. The backs were numbered 1 (QB), 2 (left RB), 3 (middle RB), 4 (right RB). Then we numbered holes — even numbers on the right, starting with 2 (between center and right guard), 4 (guard and tackle), 6 (tackle and end), 8 (sweep). Odd numbers on the left. So if the coach called 23 in the huddle, the QB would hand off to the left running back, who would run between the left guard and left tackle. Everyone knew which way to block.

Reminder: We’re talking about second-graders here. And though we moved tentatively and sometimes dropped the ball, we could run all the plays. They even taught us a tricky blocking scheme in which we “pulled” the guard (me) out to block the defensive end. The offensive tackle and end shifted inside to block, leaving a confused defensive end wondering why no one was blocking him. He stood there until I ran into him at full speed. Oh, how the poor kid cried. Not sure we tried that again.

The staff at the Y were all former football players, and in that day, it’s fair to say they didn’t know much about soccer. My guess is they hadn’t gone through an F license workshop or read up on the latest U.S. Soccer training guidelines. So when they put us on the field for soccer, we all got positions. Left back, right mid, goalkeeper. Off you go.

I can’t remember whether the games devolved into “mob-ball” or “magnet-ball” as you see in single-digit soccer today. I mostly remember playing goalkeeper and blaming myself when an easy shot got by. As far as I remember, my defense held its shape pretty well — probably better than it did in the adult league game I played Friday night. (“Geez, why am I running back from right mid again?! Why is our right back drifting all over the place?! My leg hurts!”)

I mention all of this because, according to what we’re taught as single-digit soccer coaches, this is impossible. Kids can’t learn positions or tactics. Don’t worry about “magnet-ball.” It’s OK for now.

Yet we learned them at the Y. The English family on my team says they learned positions at age 5 and have had to adjust to mob-ball in the USA. What’s different about modern U.S. youth soccer?

I’ve read through the new U.S. Soccer curriculum again, and I can’t quite tell whether that mindset has changed. The curriculum says players are supposed to be able to “occupy the original position in a game once an action is finished,” which I’d guess means that we’re supposed to be assigning positions. But the “tactics” space is left blank in the U5-U8 plans.

My hunch is that if we really worked on positions, we’d get them to work. But we get one hour a week of divided attention in which to teach them, and we’re supposed to be working on dribbling drills (without calling them drills) and maybe passing and shooting games.

The Y was different. We were there for two practices a week. And the same coaches who taught us to be a right tackle were there to teach us to be a center midfielder. We got the message. Perhaps with some disciplinary measures that modern parents and psychologists would frown on.

This season, I’ve tried to get my team to spread out at the very least. I took a cartoon approach. I’m telling them we don’t want this:

Let’s have two people back, but not like this:

(The two defenders are sitting back and waving at their teammates at the other end of the field, who are outnumbered 5-to-3.)

The ideal is this:

I’ve certainly seen coaches try to instill positional sense at U6 and U7. Some of them are just good-hearted and trying to do their best. Maybe they got through at some level, though it never showed in the games.

Then there’s the guy I’ve mentioned before who would stop games to tell his team how they could’ve done better on that last goal from a tactical perspective. He’s the same guy who made occasional snide comments at other coaches about their sideline instructions, and he scheduled his team for the first game each Saturday but never assigned himself to set up. While the opposing coach grunted with the portable goals, his team was running actual drills, having been driven to the game 20 minutes early by a gaggle of frightened parents. Then he would get mad at us because our players were running late. (See, parents? See what happens to your poor coach when you don’t show up on time?)

Results don’t matter at this age, but running over that team felt pretty good.

A blog post making the rounds this week is the ambitiously headlined “A Treatise: The State of American Youth Soccer.” To underscore how serious an effort this post really is, The Shin Guardian presents it with an intro saying the author, Ryan McCormack, is a USC master’s candidate who “spent hours refining the piece with TSG’s US Youth expert Nick Sindt.”

Given that buildup, I was a little disappointed. The piece wasn’t terrible, but given that introduction, I guess I expected more novelty and perhaps less of a fixation on Jurgen Klinsmann. But this piece is far better researched and argued than a lot of what you’ll find on the Web and much more worthy of actual discussion. And the commenters have brought on that serious discussion.

My basic objections are that the treatise is big on unanswerable problems, and it doesn’t take into account what makes the USA unique, for better or for worse.

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Start with a nearly unanimous point in today’s youth soccer: We don’t take 6-year-olds who’ve never played soccer and fling them out onto a 110-by-70 field playing 11-on-11 games. We start them with small-sided games where they can get used to touching the ball often, and we worry about teaching them the tactics of being a withdrawn forward or holding midfielder a few years later.

The idea is perfectly sound. But like many sound ideas, can it be taken too far?

In U6 soccer, you can hope the kids eventually pick up a few basic ideas. I’ve seen coaches try to assign positions in pregame warmups and huddles, and it all collapses into chaos as soon as the ball is kicked. The English family on my team tells me kids in England learn positions around age 5 or 6, but that may require a more ingrained soccer culture than we have here. The 3-on-3 games are fine, and if you yell “Pass!” enough for kids to grasp the concept, great. Our practices are all about getting comfortable with the ball at your feet.

But by U8 soccer, the mob that forms around the ball is getting rather intense. You still have a handful of kids who are more physically imposing than the others, and they can run all over and dominate play.

The result: The kids who are getting the most touches on the ball are the ones who might be better at rugby than soccer. Players who have terrific skills on the ball but aren’t likely to emerge from a ruck with the ball won’t get to show those skills in games.

Some regional variations may be at fault here. The U.S. Soccer curriculum calls U6 through U8 the “initial” stage and tells us not to bother with tactics. But by U8, we’re supposed to have moved up from 4-on-4 games to 7-on-7. My club, though, usually plays 4-on-4. Because we had so many people sign up this year, they let us move to 5-on-5.

We’re still not playing with goalkeepers at this age, which makes sense on some levels but confuses the kids who think someone needs to be standing right in front of the goal, no matter how many times we yell “No goalkeepers!” at them.

This week, I’m going to try to break up the rugby-style ruck a little bit. We already have players who veer back toward defense. With five players, I should be able to convince two of them to drop back and get a concept of “left” and “right” rather than “goalkeeper” and “everybody else.” And I’m going to do some 2-on-1 drills to get them to understand the benefits of passing.

But I can’t help wondering if we’re just failing to give our kids enough credit at this age. At the rec-level YMCA program I described last time, we had positions in 2nd grade (I was a mediocre goalkeeper, though not as bad as I was in the parents league last Friday). Surely if we told kids we were all playing positions, they’d get the concept. Wouldn’t they?

In 4-on-4, positions are little more difficult to assign. When I’ve played pickup with that many players, we may drift into “left” and “right,” but we have to overlap quite a bit to cover the field. I might make some progress in 5-on-5. Perhaps 7-on-7, I could put my mini-Messi out on the wing and let him beat a few defenders before slicing into the middle. And then maybe he’ll be confident if he goes into a tryout for U9 travel next year.

Because we want the most skillful players, not just the big, fast dudes who can physically overwhelm people. Right? Isn’t that what small-sided games are all about?