At SoccerWire, RSD podcast guest Charles Boehm chats with U.S. Soccer Director of Coaching Education Programs Frank Tschan and Manager of Coaching Education Dan Russell about coaching education and rondos.
One comment from Russell about the former, specifically whether the Federation can reach everyone:
It’s not just U.S. Soccer, it’s not just those within these walls, it’s coaching education reaching out to our state associations, reaching out to US Club, US Youth, United Soccer Coaches, to be a part of this program, this movement as we like to refer to it, to offer more grassroots education opportunities, get more people into the pathway and offer them opportunities to progress within the pathway.
The answer here seems obvious. If U.S. Soccer can’t reach everyone, then maybe it needs to give more respect to training programs from United Soccer Coaches and AYSO.
On the “war on rondos,” something Charlie has already addressed, Tschan gives an answer that’s far too long to quote. I’ll attempt to summarize and translate:
But he did not say “leverage our core competencies” or “monetize our assets,” at least.
To try a bit more seriously, it appears Tschan is saying pro coaches could maybe use things that grassroots coaches shouldn’t. And grassroots coaches need to listen up and do “reality-based” exercises that include going in a direction.
Objections:
At the littlest level, we’re trying to get players to touch the ball. Period. For years, we’ve been taught games that just encourage kids to dribble — ideally with different surfaces of the feet, with changes of direction and with their heads up. That’s fine, at least to a point. And no one told us they all had to be dribbling in one direction.
We did, though, stick with “one player, one ball” a bit too long, thinking little kids can never pass the ball. Then we’re surprised when we see a bunch of U12s who have no first touch and can’t receive the ball to save their lives. (How was your Memorial Day tournament?)
Playing the ball backwards to an open teammate is “reality-based.” I doubt a lot of people watching U10 soccer in the USA think, “Gee, these kids really need to spend more effort passing the ball forward.”
It’s one thing to point out that you might not want to do rondos to the exclusion of everything else. You really don’t want to do anything to the exclusion of everything else. The U12s who can’t receive a pass also can’t shoot or play a long pass to switch the point of attack. If you spend the first six years of player development dribbling and juggling, you’ll have a bunch of kids who can dribble and juggle, but they can’t play soccer.
With that rant over, let’s switch to another problem that isn’t directly related but also demonstrates what can happen when youth soccer is in the hands of stubborn bureaucrats — the sobering overemphasis on academy recruitment in England. From When Saturday Comes:
The academy of a current Premier League club – renowned for bringing young “local” boys through their system – used [a loophole] to bring in players from distances of 120 miles away. This meant two-hour round trips just for training on school nights, four-hour round journeys for children for “home” matches and longer for away games.
Aside from the travelling involved, many young hopefuls don’t realise that academies only really pinpoint one or two players from each cohort that are likely to make the grade but they need a team of other players around them. As such, the attrition rate for academy players is eye-watering, with less than one per cent becoming professional players. …
[T]here are more serious consequences – a research study carried out by Teesside University in 2015 found that over half of the players released were suffering “psychological distress”. There have been stories of players committing suicide and others turning to drug dealing after being dropped from academies.
As with the rondos, perhaps letting kids see there’s more one direction to go isn’t a bad thing.
While Shoeless Soccer (see previous post) touts hard surfaces as a great teaching tool for younger players, especially as an alternative to thick grass, it’s unlikely that all of the families in your local club are going to sign up their kids to play on pavement instead of the local elementary school field.
But would it be an interesting option for some players? And would everyone benefit if hard-surface soccer (we’re going to skip the “shoeless” and “shin guard-less” recommendations, which clubs aren’t going to sanction in a modern litigious environment) as a year-round option, not just in winter futsal?
I’m still a little skeptical that a typical random assortment of 6-year-olds will stop playing magnetball and magically start spreading out and controlling the ball just because they’re on a faster surface than grass. But a self-selected group of 6-year-olds with a bit more aptitude for the game just might.
I once coached a player from Argentina. He turned up at our first practice in a Messi shirt and impressed everyone at practice with his footskills. Then he was a non-factor in games because he could never get the ball out of the mob that chased it around the field. I didn’t see him again after that season.
Another player on my U-Little teams had a knack for running into open space, where he would wait for a pass that would set him up for an easy goal. That pass never came. He plays baseball now.
Maybe if the club offered an alternative soccer experience, it would attract like-minded players who could grasp the concept of using all the available space, not just the space around the ball.
So here’s an idea for your local club: Offer futsal not just in the winter but in other seasons as well. Kids could sign up for this instead of or in addition to the traditional outdoor league.
And you can make the financial argument that you’ll have more “field” space! One reason so many kids play on bad grass fields is because clubs are desperate. If some kids are playing in gyms, which are mostly vacant when it’s not basketball season, fewer kids need outdoor fields.
Surely some clubs are already doing this. How’s it working?
Today at The Guardian, I have a provocative piece suggesting the U.S. men simply aren’t going to win the World Cup.
At all. Ever.
Coincidentally, I recently read a book (and will be talking with one of the authors) that unintentionally demonstrates why.
The basic idea of Shoeless Soccer: Fixing the System and Winning the World Cupis intriguing — we need less formal travel soccer and training, and we need to build up informal play on harder surfaces, preferably without shoes and shin guards. The authors are a couple of Bowling Green faculty members — one of whom (Nathan Richardson) has spent a lot of time coaching and running soccer clubs, one of whom (Carlo Celli) has spent a lot of time in Italy. It’s not just a facile comparison between Italy and the USA — the authors correctly diagnose many problems in U.S. soccer and offer interesting solutions to some of them.
Given the academic background, the number of careless, sloppy errors in the book is startling. First, there’s a logical/philosophical issue — the authors condemn a method of training by associating it with one Friedrich Frobel, saying he was “a disciple of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who in turn was a follower of Jean Jacques Rousseau,” and Bertrand Russell later claimed Rousseau influenced totalitarianism. I believe my logic professor would call that “guilt by association” — and a faint association at that.
Perhaps the Rousseau-bashing is to be expected, though, because the book is as much of an entry in the long-running “mommy wars” as it is a soccer polemic. It was featured prominently on a blog called Let Grow, which is firmly in the “free-range” parenting camp as opposed to the “helicopter” method. That’s a legitimate point of view — we parents certainly should fight our instincts to stifle our kids’ development by shielding them from failure — but it sometimes leads to messy politics and just a bit of tedious dogmatism.
And some of this book reads like your neighborhood populist’s screed against pointy-headed intellectualism, eschewing research and even history. They say the USA hasn’t won a war since Eisenhower was president, which I’m sure will surprise veterans of the first Gulf War in 1991. (I did mention “messy politics.”) The aforementioned Bertrand Russell was a utilitarian at first and then evolved to the next level of trying to attain as much knowledge as possible, so it’s hard to imagine he’d scoff at the latest centrally planned training methods from Germany.
(Thus ends my longest philosophical digression since college, though I did cite Plato and the film Real Genius in my take on Jesus Christ Superstar. Yes, I majored in philosophy (and music), but we mostly read Plato, Descartes and Hume. Ask me about the cave sometime.)
Then we have the basic errors. The “Herman” Trophy. “Demarcus” Beasley — who, incidentally, is going along with the book’s underlying ideals by building futsal courts in his hometown. Author Lewis Carroll is spelled two different incorrect ways — “Carrol” and “Carol.”
And some of the soccer takes are simply incorrect. The authors say MLS tried to introduce the shootout, forgetting the old NASL. (We’ve all seen Once in a Lifetime — some of the Cosmos’ foreign stars actually liked lining up from 35 yards out for a one-on-one tiebreaker!)
(Hello, Mr. Eskandarian! And the upside-down clock is a nice touch.)
They say the 2002 World Cup team had a “nucleus” of players from Bruce Arena’s Virginia and D.C. United teams, which is a bit of a stretch — Carlos Llamosa and Tony Meola were barely involved, and Claudio Reyna was nearly a decade removed from his college days. U.S. Club Soccer becomes “the US Soccer Club Association,” which has “courageously imported coaching expertise from La Liga.” (Wasn’t every NSCAA session a couple of years ago some variant of learning to play like Barcelona?) They say the USA has produced only “second-tier stars in second-tier leagues,” which will come as a surprise to Reyna, Beasley, Brian McBride, Brad Friedel, Steve Cherundolo, John Harkes, Alexi Lalas, Clint Dempsey, Geoff Cameron, Stuart Holden, Tim Howard, Eric Wynalda, Christian Pulisic and Kasey Keller, let alone Mia Hamm, Abby Wambach, Alex Morgan, Becky Sauerbrunn …
Then the interesting ideas are often taken to the point of absurdity and beyond. They start with the notion that playing without shoes can teach players proper technique because it hurts a bit to kick the ball the wrong way. Then they proceed to suggest players lose their shin guards because they’ll steer clear of shin-to-shin contact. Unfortunately, that does little good when it comes to foot-to-shin contact — I’m still wincing from the moment I stepped in to demonstrate something in practice a few weeks ago and got whacked.
They end up almost like the footballing Amish, shunning anything that can’t be hand-crafted on a farm. The words “shiny” and “new” are tossed out as frequent insults (isn’t everything shiny and new at some point in its life cycle?), and one of the notes I scribbled on my Kindle is, “What do these guys have against water bottles?” (Or “smart boards” in school classrooms, another of the unwelcome sociopolitical digressions here. Smart boards rock.)
But the book rewards the patient reader. They aren’t the first writers to use the derogatory term “soccer-industrial complex” — I used it last year, and a search for the term turned up many references in the past decade — but they do well to expound upon its ills. We’re spending a lot of time and money on travel and gizmos (check out the obscene prices on soccer goals sometime) that could be going to actual soccer.
They clearly see a lot of the problems, some of which aren’t obvious to all youth coaches. Our participation rates are down. Coaching education is expensive and incoherent (as I write this, I’m still trying to figure out why U.S. Soccer changed its license courses again this spring). High schools and colleges have the infrastructure, and instead of trying to work with schools to reform their soccer programming, we’re turning away from it. A lot of kids turn up for rec soccer because their parents just want an hour of baby-sitting with exercise, a challenge for all of us who’ve coached U6 soccer. Then kids get to travel soccer, where their parents complain if the kids who torched the Pugg goals at U7 have to play a few minutes on defense. And the more “elite” you get, the more likely you are to be traveling to another state for a game of dubious quality when you could just as easily have a good game across town.
They even give credit where it’s due — sometimes. They see clubs starting pickup soccer sessions. They see U.S. Soccer coaching gurus encouraging individual ball skills at early ages, and the fed is admirably moving to a good mix of online and in-person coaching education.
Their own ideas aren’t bad. Having an older kid join a younger group’s practice to teach by doing sounds great — that mix of age and experience is actually one of the things I love about School of Rock as a children’s activity that we don’t get in youth soccer.
And if the “shoeless soccer” motif seems a little too off-kilter or unrealistic, consider the “street soccer” ideas they present. They’re not the only people pushing street soccer, of course — look back at Kyle Martino’s emphasis on hybrid basketball/futsal courts during the presidential campaign and Martino’s subsequent role with Street Soccer USA — but they build a strong case for some of the lessons that can be learned from playing on a small, hard surface. If you’ve coached young kids who are determined to play magnetball and clump around the ball no matter what, you might be a little skeptical that a fast surface will work wonders as opposed to your local grass (dirt) field, but it’s worth a try.
Nor are they the only advocates of free play. Apparently, in their local schools, kids aren’t playing soccer at recess, which is unfortunate. When I volunteered for the day at my local elementary school, I found myself in an entertaining 10v10 game in an enclosed space. It wasn’t perfect, but they were playing.
Playing shoeless or on pavement probably isn’t for everyone. I can’t imagine many of my old U6 rec players taking to the idea or learning anything from it. The highly motivated player, though, might love it and develop more quickly than he or she would in weekly rec soccer activities alone.
But for all these good ideas, which could indeed push U.S. soccer forward, the book demonstrates so many American traits that will hold us back:
The obsession with the “quick fix” instead of an honest assessment of the generations of American exceptionalism (which doesn’t make us “exceptional” — it just makes us the “exception” to the rule) that have led us to fall behind in soccer.
Sloppiness in developing those quick fixes (see the errors above).
Offhand dismissal of relevant objections. The authors smirk at the injuries that can be sustained if we let our kids play rough on any surface they can find, an odd assertion given the injury (read: ACL) concerns we’re seeing these days, particularly in women’s soccer. They note an Italian club that has no mechanism for informing players of cancellations because they never cancel, which perhaps struck me at the wrong time because, just this week, I was in a basement riding out a tornado warning after informing my team that we would not spend the evening on an open turf field volunteering for a reenactment of The Wizard of Oz.
Straw men that give the appearance that the speaker alone is wiser than the mob. They seem to think no one else in the USA has noticed the emergence of Iceland or its coaching education. “We fret about the wrong things in US soccer,” they say at one stage. “And our players suffer.” No, we fret about everything in U.S. soccer. Not all of it is wrong. Mathematically speaking, that would be impossible.
Everything is someone else’s fault. When one of the good professors fails to reserve space on an indoor turf field, and the international soccer club must yield to the local Quidditch team, he blames Quidditch rather than his own organizational skills.
Near the end of Shoeless Soccer, we find a passage that says it all. The authors say “the grassroots proposals in this book require nothing more than a bit of humility.”
We’re Americans. We don’t do humility. We do things our own way, and if that doesn’t work out, we take our ball and go home.
But we can always use ideas, and this book has several worth discussing. Look for a podcast down the road.
I guess you didn’t know it, but I’m a soccer admin too …
I’ll bet an Umbro of gold against your soul to think we’re better than you
This is probably my fault. I did the Area Guide for Georgia a couple of weeks ago. Nice and simple. Big statewide traditional league. Big DA and ECNL clusters in and around Atlanta and a couple of scattered teams in U.S. Club Soccer NPLs, but generally easy to digest. Right?
Couple of quick things about the video for The Devil Went Down to Georgia:
Playing keyboards with one arm in a sling is impressive dedication. I once did a recital with a finger in a splint, but I’ve got nothing on that guy.
The devil won, right? Does anyone really think Johnny’s tune was better?
I got an inkling a few things were in motion from the friendly and informative GaSoccerForum, as mentioned on the Georgia Area Guide:
“There is some rumbling on GaSoccerForum.com that several clubs are considering a “Champions League.” Those same clubs already have their A teams in the DA or the ECNL or the SAPL.”
So a handful of clubs were going to figure that if their A and B teams were already playing in other leagues, they might as well pull their C teams as well or something like that. (And yes, we need a moratorium on calling something a “Champions League” if it’s not full of actual champions. Europe’s Champions League is bad enough, with a bunch of third- and fourth-place teams contending for the title. It’s worse when it’s a bunch of youth soccer clubs, some of whom aren’t champions of anything and some of whom have the “Champions League” as their second or third priority behind the DA, ECNL or U.S. Youth Soccer National League. But that’s another rant.)
Little did I realize how intense this would get. Check out the Cherokee Impact Facebook page (HT to GaSoccerForum post) …
To translate all this …
Those six clubs are United Futbol Academy, Concorde Fire, NTH (the umbrella term for North Atlanta Soccer Association (NASA) and Tophat), Gwinnett Soccer Association, Atlanta Fire United and Southern Soccer Academy. They’re big Atlanta-area clubs, though UFA and SSA have operations elsewhere in the state as well.
“SRPL/RPL” is the soon-to-be-defunct U.S. Youth Soccer regional league, which will be replaced by a new conference, as I’ve already mentioned in a post with an even funkier musical tie-in.
This may or may not be meaningful. If the Big 6 weren’t interested in playing SRPLNLIOU anyway, maybe it doesn’t. Perhaps it’s simply a symbolic gesture — “you can’t quit; you’re fired!”
Here’s the fun part for parents and players — imagine you’re trying out for one of these clubs or just about any club in Georgia with regional potential this spring. At this point, you really have no idea where you’re going to end up playing in the fall.
PARENT: So if my daughter makes this team, will we be playing mostly around Atlanta? Or Alabama, as rumored to flesh out the Champions League? Or Idaho?
COACH: We won’t know until the lawyers sort it out. That’ll be $3,000 and a commitment for the year, please. It’ll be another $2,000 if we make the Mega Premier Elite Champions League.
Yes, I said “lawyers.” U.S. Soccer has a principle called “interplay,” and those who violate it often end up defending themselves against grievances.
(I did try to contact most of the Big 6 clubs a few weeks ago. You’re still welcome to respond.)
In other “giant game of Risk” news from recent days …
Also overlapping with Georgia but taking place in the years before the statewide Athena/Classic league, it’s the Carolinas Premier League! It’s for U9 through U12 only, so “Developmental” seems like a better term than “Premier.”
Seven Arkansas clubs are forming the U.S. Club Soccer (but not NPL?) Arkansas Premier Clubs.
The Virginia NPL is adding two clubs. (Disclaimer: The VPL or VNPL includes my hometown club, Vienna. At least, that’s the last I’ve heard.)
Your soccer club’s site is so upbeat, talking up the programs it offers to help kids play in college. Maybe even beyond!
So you spend a couple thousand a year for your child to play travel soccer, starting in third grade. You congratulate and console your child through all the wins, losses and long trips as you watch him or her grow.
Before you know it, your child is in high school. And if you’re not in the Development Academy, your child tries out for the high school team.
And might not make it.
Not talking here about the Michael Jordan mythology in which he was “cut” from his high school basketball team his sophomore year. He was on the JV. (He also grew quite a bit after that.) We’re talking about not making any team — varsity, JV, anything.
In some cases, maybe parents already knew the deal. In others, maybe not.
The point of Ranting Soccer Dad is to help parents get information. Ideally, we won’t see any families paying thousands of dollars in the expectation of college soccer careers, only to see their kids not even play in high school.
That’s why I’m rolling out two surveys — one for parents, one for coaches. Share your experiences. Can every travel player make a team at your high school? Would a rec player stand a chance?
Well I was rolling down the road in a minivan I had a keeper in the back and a guest player at the wheel We going cross-country and we’re skipping school We tired and I’m lost – I wonder why this is cool
Oh I’m bad … I’m nationwide
We know we’re not supposed to do this, right?
At the youth level, we have six national championship-ish events despite legitimate concerns that all we’re doing is rewarding families that can spend a lot of money on travel. And despite the legendary Horst Bertl (Dallas Comets, now FC Dallas) quote: “National youth championships in the USA are the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Whoever thinks these up should be stoned.”
At the adult level, we fret over the costs a team like Christos FC incurs when it advances in the Open Cup. Then we see teams fall all over themselves to enter national leagues on top of national tournaments.
And the trend is only accelerating. Consider the news from the past week …
U.S. Youth Soccer is revamping the regional pyramid that forms the base of its national league system, which is really a series of national showcases because no one really expects Tennessee Soccer Club to schedule a U15 league game against Greater Seattle Surf.
To some extent, the UPSL is a loose network of regional leagues. It’s much bigger in California than it is elsewhere. But it does have a national playoff and advertises a separate Cup competition called the Admiral Cup, though that doesn’t appear to have been contested recently.
A national playoff of this sort is a little curious. If you’re one of the many people annoyed with the USA for doing things that other countries don’t do, well, this is something other countries don’t do. I don’t see a national Regionalliga championship in Germany — just playoff games to determine the promoted sides, with no overall winner. Nor do I know of any English divisional championships after the fifth tier, which is the last nationwide league. (England does have the FA Trophy, a cup competition for those in tiers 5-8, and the FA Vase for anyone lower than that. But the U.S. counterpart to that would be the U.S. Amateur Cup, which many UPSL teams enter, and that winner can play in the supercup-ish Hank Steinbrecher Cup.) European clubs in regional leagues try to win that league and progress as far as they can in their cups.
But that playoff is, in the words of Douglas Adams, mostly harmless. It’s the summer leagues, PDL and NPSL, that have counterproductive national playoffs. These clubs serve a valuable purpose — giving college players a few more competitive games in the summers. Then they cut their regular seasons short to race through a set of playoffs that no one really cares about. (Seriously — lower-division fans can all remember U.S. Open Cup upsets such as Reading United over the New York Cosmos, Michigan Bucks over everyone, Des Moines Menace over a couple of pro teams, Chattanooga FC over Wilmington, etc. Name the last PDL champion. Or try to remember anything from the NPSL playoffs other than Midland-Odessa scraping together a team to play the final after the bulk of its roster went back to school for the fall.)
That’s the state of adult soccer. What about youth soccer?
Maybe the new U.S. Youth Soccer leagues will be an oasis of sanity. Unlike the Development Academy and the ECNL, they should have enough entries to split into sensible regional divisions. (The DA has a few good clusters at U12 but hits peak absurdity by U15, while ECNL travel budgets are rather excessive even in the long-established girls’ divisions.)
And somewhere in the ashes of the 2018 U.S. Soccer presidential race lies an interesting idea — a national Youth Cup. This exists in England, where the FA Youth Cup draws hundreds of U18 entries (and note that the age range is not by birth year) and Broxbourne Borough of the Spartan South Midlands League Division One (unfortunately, the senior team is facing relegation down to England’s 11th tier) was one game away from the quarterfinals last year.
One national championship. (OK, maybe two — England has a national U18 league with north and south divisions that face off in a national playoff, but that’s about it for national travel, even in a country that requires no airplanes for away fixtures.) That seems sensible. And the top academies might have to face off with a Broxbourne Borough in a meaningful game instead of sitting in a silo.
Basically, if you’re going to have a national championship, maybe it should include everyone in the nation — at least those meeting a certain criteria like “amateur” or “Division 3 or below” or “Division I college teams.” Otherwise, why spend time flying when you could be playing?
So I’m making a good bit of progress on the next Area Guide — Southern California this time. Should be ready in a day or two. Hey, what’s this in the inbox?
But that’s just the journalist’s take. It’s the equivalent of an 89th-minute goal that forces us to tear up the stories our editors are expecting in five minutes. How does everyone else feel about it?
Oh dear. (Disclaimer: Ranting Soccer Dad is an NCSL parent.)
What does this mean?
1. Instead of four regional leagues, we’re about to have a lot of conferences. They’ve named eight so far, but that just covers the East Coast, the Southeast and Texas.
Will this format include more teams? Seems that way, but we’ll wait for clarification. In the current format, the Eastern Regional League has 16 teams in the Elite Division. The lower Premier and Championship divisions can theoretically take more teams but do not. The Midwest Regional League looks a bit bigger, as do the Southern Regional Premier League and the three-pronged Far West Regional League.
Through the current regional leagues, teams can qualify for the National League, which uses the hashtag #EarnYourPlace to establish its intent and perhaps throw some shade on the invitation-only DA and ECNL. And through the National League, teams can earn a place in the regional championships (an alternate path: State Cup) and then the National Championships.
Those pathways will continue. But will they be more crowded?
2. EDP, which currently has its top levels (out of many levels) in U.S. Club Soccer’s National Premier League, has apparently switched over to U.S. Youth Soccer. (I’m asking to have that point clarified.)
3. The press release mentions “newly formed club vs. club brackets may be offered.” That raises two questions. How, given the team-by-team #EarnYourPlace qualification for these leagues? And why, given the objections raised by … OK, maybe just me? See “Club-centric scheduling” on my “About the Area Guides/National Info” page.
4. With these leagues being more localized than the current league system, is the expectation that each team will enter only these leagues? In the current system, some teams play in both the U.S. Youth Soccer regional league and their “home” leagues.
Perhaps it’s unfair to think of these changes mostly in terms of the Turf Wars — U.S. Club Soccer vs. U.S. Youth Soccer in general, then the proxy war of the Development Academy (U.S. Soccer) vs. ECNL (U.S. Club Soccer) vs. traditional league/tournament play (U.S. Youth Soccer) at the elite level. But it’s really impossible to think about it otherwise.
So you may be asking: How does this affect me, especially if I don’t have a kid in the top 1-5% of youth soccer players who might be involved with these programs?
My tentative answer: We may be hitting a tipping point of trickle-down “elite” soccer.
Here’s how …
1. Clubs in your area scramble to get their top teams in the DA, ECNL or U.S. Youth Soccer conferences. (We’re already seeing this for the DA and ECNL; the current U.S. Youth setup is more complimentary.)
2. Clubs that don’t get into these programs (or want their B teams to be in something “elite”) scramble to form “elite” leagues, some of which are pretty good and some of which are demonstrably worse than the old traditional leagues’ top divisions. (Already seeing this, too, in some areas.)
3. Your traditional league needs to recruit more teams to fill the holes in their divisions. Suddenly your big local club has six travel teams in one age group. Suddenly your local “development” league consists of a couple of teams in one place and a couple more 100 miles away.
In short, we can sum it up with one word …
Chaos.
Whether your kids are in the top 5% or the middle 50%, you may find yourself in leagues that are unsettled, with clubs and teams coming and going. Maybe a new team comes in that blows out all its opponents 10-0 or loses all its games 10-0. Maybe a league that used to have all its games within a 45-minute drive now has its games scattered all over your state.
Or not. We just don’t know. So when you sign up your kid for a full year (because heaven forbid a club lets you sign up for one season at a time) of “travel” soccer, you have little idea what you’re getting into.
So it’d be nice if the powers that be would get together and explain to us why this is necessary.
The Ranting Soccer Dad Guide to Youth Soccer is underway. It includes a guide to national programs and, in progress, an area-by-area guide across the USA. Check out the Patreon page for full access and updates.
Preseason coaches’ meeting. It’s always more of a lecture than a “meeting.” There’s absolutely no reason an email wouldn’t suffice. The in-person “meeting” would be much better reserved for a training session with a lot of small breakout groups.
But anyway …
The Important Person In Charge (IPIC, as in “I pick what we’re doing”) reminds us of the importance of “development” instead of “winning.”
In U19 recreational soccer.
I would’ve asked what we were “developing” these players for at this point, but I didn’t want to prolong the meeting. So I’ll ask here …
What are the developmental goals of recreational soccer for kids who are never going to play at a higher level?
These kids aren’t going to make their high school teams — most of the travel kids won’t make the high school teams. Simple math. This year, I’ve seen a lot of kids from “A” teams who don’t make the JVs at their local high schools. The sweet spot for high school play in our region is the level immediately below the Development Academy — and bear in mind that a lot of kids may ditch the DA their senior years to get in that one season of playing with their classmates.
(Quick aside: I’d love to see youth clubs list the players from their clubs who make local high school teams. Or I’d love to see parents crowd-source it so we can see which clubs really are getting kids to their high school teams. Let’s fact-check the coaches who insist their players can go play wherever they want. We’ll get back to that.)
At U14, rec kids can still make the transition to travel. They might even be raw talents who play a lot of pickup soccer and can still “develop.” It’s rare at this age, but it can happen.
By U19? Aren’t we basically “developing” the next generation of adult rec players?
They may turn into parent coaches one day. They might even sign up to be referees. Great. Let’s keep them in the game.
But the next level as a player is basically adult league and/or college intramurals, where I really wish I’d seen the matchup of Christian Pu-LAW-sic vs. Game of Throw-Ins.
So why aren’t we letting high school kids do the same thing? Why are we running high school rec soccer through parent commissioners and coaches who oversee practices at which they might get 3-4 players on a given night? Why are we trying to “balance” these teams instead of letting a group of friends play together and figure out which level to enter?
If some of those friends want to practice once or twice a week and have a coach, fine. They can enter the “Open A” division and play only with or against people who are just as interested in soccer as they are. That’s frankly a better option at that age than lower-level “travel.”
The kids playing U19 rec soccer have survived a decade or more of adults telling them what to do. Why not give them a little reward and let them make a fun transition to adult soccer instead of treating them like U9s?
Not as a soccer writer, though they agreed to let me write a weekly column online. That’s how the site went in those days — a lot of us would spend 30-40 hours a week doing the nuts-and-bolts work of posting and maintaining content, then 10-20 hours a week doing the fun stuff that made the site unique.
I was hired as a community content developer. At first, my primary job was to moderate message boards.
Which was hell. I had to kick people off the boards (though one of my Facebook friends today is someone I kicked off the boards twice, so there’s a certain amount of respect built up over time in some cases), and I spent my 30th birthday exchanging email with Rush Limbaugh, whose lobbying to host Monday Night Football was crashing our servers.
But I still believe message boards and similar forums can be useful. It all depends on the context and the people involved. The reader comments at Deadspin are usually better than the stories. Bloody Elbow has painstakingly cultivated a lively but mostly reasonable community of readers and commenters. BigSoccer is hit or miss — some arguments in the indoor soccer forum have been ongoing since maybe 2001, but there’s some useful information exchanged. And if you’ve been kicked off BigSoccer, you probably deserved. (That’s why all the slander specialists are on Twitter, still griping about how they got kicked off BigSoccer.)
Anonymous message boards should be a valuable source of information for youth soccer parents. You can share candid information without fear of reprisal from coaches and clubs. But you can also share unsubstantiated accusations. Maybe little Johnny isn’t quite good enough for the megaclub’s A team, so the parent goes on the board to tell everyone the coach is clueless or corrupt or whatever.
The worst boards are the ones that aren’t just anonymous but require no sign-on. The conversation generally runs like this:
Anonymous: We’re thinking of moving my 9-year-old son from FC United to United FC. Any thoughts?
Anonymous: Oh, you’re probably one of those moms who thinks your kid is the next Messi.
Anonymous: United FC is falling apart. All the coaches are terrible, and the board members are rec-league parents who want their kids to be on the A teams.
Anonymous: We get it, you’re upset that you were fired from United FC.
Anonymous: Oh, shut up. You’re on the board, aren’t you? You’re the one whose kid made the U10 A team in 2010.
Anonymous: Um … I don’t think anyone’s been on the board that long.
Anonymous: You’re not fooling anyone. You’re the same person.
Anonymous: The same person as who?
Anonymous: We KNOW who you are.
Anonymous: Yeah, you’re mad because your kid had to go to another club in 2012 because none of the parents liked you.
That could be 10 people. It could be two.
I’ve been on one such board for a while, and I’ve finally started using a unique sign-on. I’m RantingSoccerDad. So it’s pretty easy to put two and two together and figure out who I am. That means I’m not going to share much information about my sons’ clubs, but that’s a fair trade to me. And I’m hoping to start a movement where people create unique sign-ons so we can actually see how many people are in these conversations.
Flawed as they are, these message boards can be helpful. I like Georgia Soccer Forum, where I’ve learned a bit about a potential “Champions League” and reminisced about the Athens Applejacks.
All facts need to be checked elsewhere, of course. But it’s nice to get some impressions from people on the ground. On the whole, we probably need more of these boards. Maybe multiple boards in one area, so we can promote and relegate them.
If you have any favorites anywhere in the USA, please share.
Like the Borg, the UPSL has grown in part through assimilation. The Premier League of America (which, despite the name, covers a relatively compact area around Lake Michigan) simply merged into the UPSL and 
Which was hell. I had to kick people off the boards (though one of my Facebook friends today is someone I kicked off the boards twice, so there’s a certain amount of respect built up over time in some cases), and I spent my 30th birthday exchanging email with Rush Limbaugh, whose lobbying to host Monday Night Football was crashing our servers.
Duresport.com 