Category: youth soccer

youth soccer

Referee diary: Unexpected tripleheader and an unbelievable goal

Posted on by Beau Dure
brown and white bear plush toy
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Monday morning

My body is yelling at me as I sit in front of a lower cabinet, scrounging for first aid supplies. An ankle wrap and some tape for the “Compression” part of the “RICE” treatment for Achilles pain. Something to put on a blister on my toe.

I’ve also snagged the aloe vera, as the discomfort on my skin mocks me. I worry about skin cancer to the point of paranoia. My body is riddled with dermatologists’ divots — to be fair, a couple of those moles really were suspicious, and one was some weird thing that could’ve developed into something nasty had I left it alone for many years. I’m on the “every six months” program.

So how did I end up battered and burned on Monday morning? It was a combination of rookie mistakes on my part, worn-down artificial turf and a no-show the day before as I walked out on a soccer field in a yellow ref’s shirt for only the third time.

Working backwards …

Game 3

Damn it, where is that ice cream truck? 

For 40 minutes, I’d been hearing that distinctive music — enticing but a little creepy. And I had it all planned. Hand the flag to the center ref and tell him I’m just dashing to the parking lot. Snag my wallet from my car, dash over to the truck, grab a bottle of water or whatever else he had for sale, then back for the second half.

I wasn’t even supposed to be here. I had signed up for two games. This was my third.

On the field, I was getting better, more confident in my possession calls on the touchline and in good position for every offside call.

But my planning sucked. The day had also evolved from “fall weather in Scotland” to “late summer in Virginia” — much sunnier and warmer than I expected. The Weather Channel is pretty good at showing a nine-foot storm surge with CGI, but why do I trust it for weather forecasts?

My water supply was gone. I hadn’t brought sunscreen, thinking I’d be running the sideline for two games on a cloudy day. A fellow ref brought out some sunscreen when the clouds parted for Game 2 of our mutual acquaintance, and he graciously let me use it when we looked around before Game 3 and did not see anyone coming to replace me.

So as the music played, and I made friends with the parents whose view I kept blocking, I had the halftime plan in my head.

And then … the truck was gone. So was the cart someone was wheeling around with various frozen things.

Five minutes into the second half, I hear the music again. There it is, back in the parking lot. “NOW it’s there!” I exclaimed. The parents got a kick out of that.

“Boy, he does a lot of running,” I overheard from those parents.

“Yeah, and he was here for the last one, too.”

And the one before THAT. 

“Wow. Glad he stayed.”

The parents had every reason to be happy. They had traveled a good 90 minutes to an elementary school tucked into a Northern Virginia neighborhood with a turf field strewn with plastic bottle caps and cigarette butts. For Game 3, I switched from AR1 to AR2, covering the parents’ sideline, and I discovered tons of rocks under my feet. The turf itself was rather hard along this sideline, and I could feel it in my calves. My watch told me I had already run or walked or side-shuffled close to four miles on this field. For Game 3, I didn’t even bother to run my timer, which also plotted my horizontal motion in a messy red line thanks the magic of GPS. I just looked at my watch when each half started.

I could also feel my ears starting to burn. Not because people we’re talking about me. Because I had forgotten to put sunscreen there, and the approved black baseball cap doesn’t cover my ears.

It’s OK. You can’t get melanoma from one afternoon’s lapse. Here comes the white team again. Geez, I wish that kid wouldn’t yell “Ref!” Unfortunately, he’s right, so I’d better raise the flag. 

Tweeeet! Thanks, ref, for not overruling me there.

In my five-game career as an AR, I had never raised my flag for a foul. Now I was watching U16s, who were cleverly trying to foul while shielded from the ref’s view. Come on, guys. Don’t insult my intelligence.

At least this game is relatively easy. The technically skilled but tactically naive team invariably has one defender lolly-gagging his way up the field, so I can gently walk along the line to stay even with him. And the attackers just let fly with long-range shots, so I’m not trying to watch seven people at a time to see if anyone fails to time a run and veers offside. The long-range shots are brutally effective. The big keeper has made a couple of great saves and fumbled a couple of hard shots into the goal.

At least these parents are happy. The dude who asked me about an offside call in the first half seems calmer now. OK, here we go … run. Whoa … MOVE! 

I knew the area — sort of. Twenty years earlier, when I moved to Northern Virginia with my fiancee, we lived not far from this field. It was in the middle of a bunch of big apartment complexes. The nearby high school, recently renamed “Justice High School” in an awkward but necessary rebranding from “Jeb Stuart High School,” is 50% Latino. I was actually hoping to head out after my second and supposedly final game to one of those places — Peruvian, Bolivian, Salvadoran, all good — that extract more flavor from chicken than the Southern deep-fried cuisine with which I’d grown up.

Maybe a lot of the kids had massive extended families. Or maybe a bunch of people from the neighborhood figured a U16 soccer game was their best entertainment option at the moment. Or maybe they wanted the field after us. In any case, there were plenty of people along the fences and on the field. And I mean on the field. While the parents were sitting back on the dirt in their chairs, a few dudes were standing on the narrow strip of turf between the touchline and that dirt. Had they stayed just to the edge, they’d have been OK. But no. They weren’t paying attention, and I came close to running over them multiple times.

I don’t speak much Spanish, but I finally waited for the ball to be at the other end and shouted at them: “GUYS! DEFENSA AQUI? (pointing to roughly the top of the box) ME AQUI! (pointing to where they were).”

They backed up for the last few minutes. The whistle blew. I went to midfield, fist-bumped everyone, handed my flag to the ref and dashed over to the ice cream truck. Water would’ve been the most sensible call, but instead, I had the best Coke I’ve ever had.

Game 2 

Don’t let this coach hear you breathing hard.

As I kept running back and forth in front of one team’s bench, I got self-conscious about my own breath, worried that I might undermine my authority. The last thing you want is to be a few yards behind the play when you have a close offside call and then hear some coach mock you for being out of shape and unable to keep up.

But this coach was chill. It helped that his team scored four goals in the first 10 minutes and eventually won by double digits. They had skills, possibly honed in pickup ball on this very field. And they were tactically astute, with center backs meticulously organizing throughout the game.

This league doesn’t do club-vs.-club scheduling, but they pair up teams where they can. Game 3 and Game 2 featured the same two clubs in different age groups.

Let’s not paint this as far-flung Virginia club vs. inner-suburb Latino club. I’ve seen too many people make that mistake. I remember one of those know-it-all youth coaches touting himself as the champion of underserved kids, but if you gain a reputation as a good coach, you’ll attract plenty of overserved kids, too. He posted footage of a game in Annandale, to which another know-it-all coach chortled about the team showing up blasting hip-hop and sticking it to those lily-white suburban kids. Annandale High School is 16.12% white, and half the street signs are in Korean. If I had any tie to Annandale, I would’ve showed up at the next game against that coach blasting Gangnam Style.

What I’m saying here is that it’s Northern Virginia. It’s diverse. The “Latino” club had some African coaches and a few white kids. The far-flung Virginia club was reasonably mixed as well. Our three-man ref crew was Northern Virginia in a nutshell — me, a clearly experienced Latino center ref and a Korean gentleman who joined us for Games 2 and 3.

And the games couldn’t have played out much differently. Game 3 was a rout for the visiting club, as the hosts simply weren’t up to speed. In Game 2, the home team ran circles around the hapless visitors, who used to play in one of those “elite” leagues.

Game 1 

Do they know I’ve never been a center ref? Does it show?

I knew this might happen. I’d asked the assignor earlier in the day. “Hey, we don’t have a full crew here. If no one else signs up, am I supposed to hand the flags to some volunteers and work as the center ref?”

I was assured first that they were working on it, then that they had found someone. But I had a feeling that the new guy was probably coming from elsewhere. And parking wasn’t plentiful at this place.

People were already looking at me. “Hey, ref, do you need us to check in now?”

OK. Calm down. Speak with authority.

A team manager pleasantly but firmly thrust a game card at me. Fortunately, it had some of the info I’d been seeking on my phone from the league site, telling me what I needed to do to check the rosters. They don’t teach us this stuff in ref training, but it went just fine.

12:27 p.m. No sign of another ref. Let’s get this moving.

I’d been meaning to get a new whistle before I debut as a center ref in a couple of weeks. The only one I have is the engraved whistle my team gave me many seasons ago. I don’t use it in practice. Not even sure how it sounds.

TWEEEET!

OK, that worked.

“Captains!”

The coin toss went smoothly. We’re trained to catch the coin in mid-air rather than have it drop and sit at a weird angle on the ground, and I managed to catch it cleanly.

Teams got in formation. And …

Hey, someone just walked up with a big bag. Is that …?

Yep. The ref had arrived.

We drafted a parent to run the other line. We were all set.

This was the inner-suburb club again, but the visiting team wasn’t the same club as in Games 2 and 3. It was a massive exurban club, and they quickly took a 3-0 lead.

But the hosts chipped away. 3-1. 3-2. Finally, in the second half, 3-3. And 4-3. At least one of those goals was a close offside call that clearly rattled the parent volunteer, who was doing pretty well as far as I could tell from the other side.

The crowd was into it. The players and parents for the next game were there already. A few parents were fussing with the center ref. “Ref!” from the visitors. “Arbitro!” from the hosts.

Exurban Club piled on the pressure. They were clearly trying to get it to one talismanic goal scorer, a small-ish and skilled African-American kid with a big smile who kept drifting offside.

Crap. This kid’s going to score the tying goal, and I’m going to have to put up the flag right in front of his coaches. 

He did score the tying goal. But not like that.

They got a corner kick. With a couple of big guys, they seemed to have a good chance. But they couldn’t direct it on goal.

Then this kid rose up, parallel to the ground, as if on puppeteer’s strings.

No &*@$ing way. This is U13 soccer. This league is one level above rec soccer in the alleged pecking order of local leagues. The pathway from here to the DA is like all the flooded, washed-out roads in North Carolina. This kid couldn’t POSSIBLY unleash an actual bicycle kick.

He unleashed an actual bicycle kick. It sailed over the keeper into the upper corner.

What just happened? Am I … supposed to do anything? That was legal, right? Did I just see a bicycle kick in a youth soccer game — at a theoretically low level?  

Yes, I did.

And the place exploded. Add up all the different factions there, and it was easily 150 people. Plenty of senior-level clubs would envy the crowd here.

A couple of minutes later, riding that momentum, the visitors got a tap-in for the 5-4 win.

Postscript

I couldn’t resist swinging over to Columbia Pike to see where I used to live. They’ve expanded the townhome developments, and they’re selling new ones for $600,000. You can’t walk anywhere. You get maybe one bus an hour.

I think the other neighborhood is better. You can walk places, and you just might see a spectacular soccer game. And a dehydrated, sunburned, exhausted and happy assistant ref.

 

0
pro soccer, youth soccer

Who goes from Academy to USL?

Posted on by Beau Dure

Three coincidental bits of reading today (for two of them, thanks to Jason Davis for mentioning them on today’s show):

  1. At The Athletic, Will Parchman ranks all 23 MLS-affiliated academies.
  2. At SoccerWire, Charles Boehm has news of a new D.C. United partnership and a nice pyramid graphic showing players progressing from these partner clubs to the new USL side in exurban Loudoun County to the Chris Durkin-esque heights of the senior side. (A few stray thoughts on this later.)
  3. On a local message board, one anonymous parent reacted to this news by asking which Academy kids get to play for the USL side.

My first reaction: What do you mean — who gets to play for the USL side? It’s pro soccer. Who gets to play pro soccer? Really good players!

Second reaction: Wait a minute. Who does get to play for the USL side?

So I figured I’d do a case study on Will’s No. 1 academy — New York Red Bulls. Who’s playing for NYRB II?

The results:

Former Academy players – 8 

  • Amando Moreno (signed directly from Academy; years ago)
  • Ben Mines (signed directly from Academy)
  • John Murphy (signed directly from Academy)
  • Evan Louro (homegrown contract after college)
  • Kevin Politz (homegrown contract after college)
  • Steven Echevarria (homegrown contract after college)
  • Andrew Lombard (free agent after college)
  • Chris Lema (free agent after college)

Played for PDL Under-23 team – 3, all from 2018 draft

  • Brian White
  • Jared Stroud
  • Jose Aguinaga
  • (also: Lema, Louro, Politz, Echevarria, Murphy)

Lived in NY/NJ, then drafted – 3 

  • Ryan Meara
  • Ethan Kutler
  • Jordan Scarlett

Developed in OTHER MLS academies – 2

  • Jean-Christophe Koffi (D.C. United)
  • Tommy Redding (Orlando)

Then two other draftees, four free agents who just finished college, and six from foreign clubs.

I used a loose definition of an NYRB II player. A couple of these guys have recently been called up to the MLS side, and they’re not the only players to move up in the last few years. (Think Tyler Adams.)

So that’s eight Academy alumni out of a pool of 28 players. The ages of those players: 23, 22, 22, 22, 22, 21, 18, 18.

Sources:

Check my work here.

Back to the Boehm piece (January 2018 podcast guest): D.C. United’s partner clubs here are:

  • Arlington: Current DA through U15
  • Loudoun: Current DA through U15
  • PPA: No current DA
  • Pipeline: No current DA
  • Virginia Development Academy (itself a partnership that includes my hometown club, Vienna): Current DA through U19

So what does this mean for VDA’s older age groups?

(Side note here: VDA’s girls moved from the DA to the ECNL, but they didn’t rename themselves “VECNL,” which sounds like a horrible health insurance company. I didn’t include girls’ DA teams in the breakdown above because United’s program here is boys-only. We’ll talk about the Spirit some other time.)

 

0
pro soccer, us soccer, youth soccer

U.S. Soccer coaching education: One foot forward, one foot firmly stuck in the mud

Posted on by Beau Dure

U.S. Soccer just unveiled its new grassroots coaching modules for 7v7, 9v9 and 11v11, making it much easier for parent coaches to learn what they need to know for working with players who will go on to become elite players, travel players, adult rec players, youth coaches and fans. It’s an important —

… What? Something else happened?

OK, let’s get back to those coaching modules. They’re worth discussing. But what you may have heard about was the first of two Soccer America interviews with U.S. Soccer technical people about coaching education and youth development. The interview didn’t have any specific quote saying, “Hey, Latinos aren’t interested in doing coaching education,” but the USSF’s bureaucratic language certainly came across as a little dismissive. Something along the lines of “mission vision proactive hey they’re just not signing up assets leverage activation.”

Herculez Gomez, the retired MLS/Liga MX player now doing commentary (including an excellent podcast with Max Bretos) for ESPN, pounced on Twitter.

One of the many great things Gomez is doing these days is following up on his initial reaction. U.S. Soccer offered up conversations with the people in this interview, Nico Romeijn and Ryan Mooney, and Gomez reported on the conversation on the Aug. 20 Max and Herc podcast.

Romeijn and Mooney clarified and apologized, and Gomez seemed to be satisfied that they didn’t intend to slight any persons of color. That’s not to say USSF’s outreach is as good as it could or should be, and diversity efforts will always require watchdogs.

In any case, the conversation shed light on several other issues, many of them at least indirectly related to diversity.

First: Cost. Excluding travel, which is going to be a significant cost in itself, someone moving up the coaching ranks will pay (according to Gomez — I’ve contacted USSF to confirm, and they did):

  • C license: $2,000
  • B license: $3,000
  • A license: $4,000
  • Pro license: $10,000.

Yikes.

Now, in fairness, if you’re working for a half-decent professional club or the federation itself, your club will pick up the check. We’d hope. But if you’re trying to break through to those ranks, well …

Second: Difficulty getting pros involved. Here’s where the MLS union got involved …

MLS Players Union executive director Bob Foose will be talking about that with Glenn Crooks on SiriusXM’s The Coaching Academy on Wednesday.

The good news: The NWSL has taken steps to get its players a good headstart on this path. Details are confidential, and any dissatisfied players should certainly feel free to contact me, but it seems promising.

The Max and Herc discussion took a couple of wrong turns. Gomez was surprised U.S. Soccer didn’t have data on the number of minority coaches taking their classes, saying all employers should have that data. But people don’t take coaching courses to be employed by the federation (excluding Development Academy jobs). They take them to be hired by youth clubs. In some cases, up through the D and maybe even C licenses, they take them to be volunteers. That sounds extreme, but in other countries, you’ll find B-license volunteers. All that said, perhaps U.S. Soccer will consider gathering such info in the future, not because of employment law but because it’s simply a good metric to see how their outreach efforts are faring.

Also, Max and Herc seemed surprised that the federation hired Belgian consulting firm Double PASS. That’s definitely not breaking news.

But the discussion did indeed get a much-needed push forward. And it’s clear from the Soccer America interviews — first with Romeijn and Mooney, then with Jared Micklos of the Development Academy — that we’re still not getting much by way of illuminating conversation from people in Chicago. They’ll tout their new training center’s central location in Kansas City, which is indeed a vital asset if all their prospective coaches are traveling by horseback.

And yet, somehow, progress is being made.

The new “grassroots” modules will never get the attention that the Gomez/MLSPA tweetstorm got. That’s understandable. But they’re giving coaches a good way to get started, and they’re giving parent coaches — usually the first coaches a player will encounter — much firmer footing than in the past.

Sure, I still miss the old F license video series. The new grassroots series, though, is better than the old E and D license.

In the old path, the older the kids you were coaching, the higher the license. So, in theory, you needed a D license just to coach rec soccer from U13 on up. Now we can take the corresponding grassroots class, which is (A) less of a time imposition, (B) can be taken online and (C) presents a new practice approach that is already making my life easier.

The approach is “Play / Practice / Play.” As kids show up to practice, you get them playing small-sided games. (Pause to have them do some dynamic stretching once they’ve warmed up a bit.) Then do a half-field activity — 7v7, 8v6, etc. Then a scrimmage. The biggest difference from practice to practice isn’t so much the “drill” you’re attempting as it is the coaching points you make during each practice.

This is an improvement over the “Warmup with a drill that takes a little bit of time to explain / Small-Sided Game that takes a little bit more time to explain / Expanded Small-Sided Game that’s ridiculously complicated and will never be explained over the course of this practice / Scrimmage” approach, in which we were all supposed to develop practice plans like we’re Fabiano Caruana prepping to face Magnus Carlsen for the world chess championship in November.

It’s certainly not perfect. For one thing, United Soccer Coaches’ Soccer Journal seems like a relic now — it’s full of all the triangles, circles and squiggly lines that take us 10 minutes to understand and half of a practice to explain to our kids. (I did like the “secret goals” exercise in the preseason issue, where each side has to do something before scoring — possibly a cross, possibly a certain number of passes — but the other team doesn’t know what the opponent’s restriction is.)

The bigger issue for many (see “Rondos, The War On”) is the insistence that everything has to “game-like.” And it’s a slippery definition. Having the defense try to clear the ball to any one of three “counter goals” is game-like. Having a neutral player is not.

And the jargon is mind-numbing. We have four “moments” of a game — attack, lose the ball, defend, win the ball. So can you come up with a practice that prepares you for … losing the ball? (Don’t even get me started on the “six tasks of a coach,” which include “Leading the player,” “Leading the team” and the redundant “Leadership.”)

But if you can cut through that, you’ll find something quite useful. The video examples in the 11v11 online course are terrific.

So maybe we could sneak an editor into Soccer House to translate bureaucratic talk to plain English?

 

 

 

21
youth soccer

High school soccer participation: Good news for a change? No, but …

Posted on by Beau Dure

After all the gloomy talk of declining youth soccer participation rates, we got a bit of promising news this morning — high school soccer participation rates are up. (HT: Soccer America)

Naturally, I’m going to throw some cold water on this. But the survey is still interesting on several levels.

The number of high school boys soccer players went up by 6,128, up to 456,362 nationwide. The number for girls also rose slightly, from 388,339 to 390,482.

So why complain?

First, look at one of the sports that’s still ahead of soccer. It’s basketball. And that’s stunning for one big reason — the sheer number of players needed to play. A basketball team can get through a season quite comfortably with 12-15 players. A soccer team really needs at least 20, and 25 or so is better. (The average boys program has 37 kids; the average girls program has 32. Those numbers include junior varsities and maybe freshman teams in counties that have them — hint hint, Fairfax County.)

How is basketball still ahead? Simple — more schools offer it. Many more schools.

Soccer’s 2017-18 numbers: 12,393 schools with boys teams, 12,007 with girls teams. That’s up slightly from 12,188 and 11,823 the year before.

Basketball? 18,510 and 18,171.

That’s thousands of high schools that do not have soccer.

On the girls side, soccer ranks sixth in terms of the number of programs, behind basketball, track, volleyball, softball and cross-country. It’s actually a steep drop from cross-country (15,216) down to soccer (12,007). For boys, even with recent cuts (actually not that many), 11-player football has 14,079 programs, and another 1,407 schools have smaller teams. The 11-man pointyball game is fifth behind basketball, track, baseball and cross-country. Soccer isn’t even sixth. That goes to golf — golf! — with 13,524 programs. Then we get soccer, at 12,393.

Before you ask — no, high school soccer programs aren’t folding because of the Development Academy. It’s a rare high school that has more than a handful of kids playing in the DA, and those schools can easily find players to fill in the rosters.

If anything, the report offers strong evidence that kids are indeed still interested in playing for their schools. Seems like a few thousand schools should try to accommodate that interest. It’s mind-boggling that in 2018, a school with a football field and enough people to field a football team can’t also have a soccer team.

The entire report is an interesting browse, though it’s troubling that they can’t spell “rhythmic,” as rhythmic gymnastics. Five girls in Ohio participate in that.

0
youth soccer

My assistant ref debut

Posted on by Beau Dure

Is 48 too late to debut in yellow? I guess not. I was the AR2 for two U14 boys tournament games this morning.

Everyone there was a little shaken at the outset because, in the preceding game, a girl fell and apparently broke her wrist in a visibly gruesome way. I made a point of not looking too closely, but her screams were terrifying. The refs (including two who carried over to my game) called off the rest of the game — they had little choice because paramedics had to come onto the field, and they understandably took a bit of time to stabilize before carting her away. I’d never seen an injury like that.

But we went on with the schedule, and I was in the next two games. Here’s what ran through my mind …

1. What the hell? White vs. Gray? And I’m staring into the sun? Yeah, I’m glad I have prescription sunglasses, but holy cow.

2. No offside calls to make yet, but I have quite clearly bungled my first two possession calls. Which way is White going again? Wow, they didn’t train us to make these calls.

3. Phew — OK, an offside call. Had a clear view, and the ref was already set to blow the whistle when I put up the flag.

4. Could we please get these guys off the sideline? I’m going to plow into one of them pretty soon.

5. OK, halftime. And this has been one-way traffic. Should be an easy second half.

6. OK, end of the game. Yeah, that was an easy second half.

7. Yes, coach, I know, we need to get on with it. Did you see or hear the girl with the broken wrist? We’re a few minutes behind. (I didn’t *say* this. At least not like that.)

8. White vs. Purple. This’ll be much easier.

9. Yikes. Two own goals for Purple in a couple of minutes. This could get ugly. And I’ll probably be busy in the second half.

10. (wheeze) yeah …. (pant) … I’m pretty busy in the second half. That dude in White is a master at taking off right when the ball is played, and the center is taking a good look at me every time he gets the ball.

11. Seriously, dude, would you back off from the sideline? I know you’re all warming up for the next game six inches behind me and all, but seriously? I’ve asked you three times.

12. Certainly sounds like an exciting game behind me. Do … not … turn … around. Purple’s going right-to-left, so if they play it out, raise the flag with the right arm for a White throw. And vice versa.

13. Phew! Made it through two games without a major incident. No one made a fuss when I was quite clearly fumbling my way through those first five minutes or failing to outsprint a through ball in the last 20.

I found I had to keep repeating to myself which team was going which direction and reminding myself which way to point if the ball went out. “White, right” was my mantra when the White team was going right-to-left.

And the center — only 25 but clearly experienced — reminded me that my priority is offside, not possession on the touch line. I can try to watch both, but I simply cannot take my eyes all the way off that second-to-last defender.

So I have a lot more to learn. But I enjoyed it. And everyone was congenial, which helped.

Next assignment will likely be a U9 rec game. Gotta read up on the buildout lines.

Your turn, Taylor Twellman.

0
podcast, youth soccer

RSD short: On Twitter and Cordeiro

Posted on by Beau Dure

Today’s podcast sums up why I’m boycotting Twitter and goes into a bit of detail about today’s Guardian story on Carlos Cordeiro’s first six months, particularly Pete Zopfi’s “functional unification” idea.

Just to clarify: I’m not off Twitter because of anything directly affecting me. This is my response to their selective enforcement of hate speech and harassment, and the tipping point is the nonsensical decision to allow Alex Jones to keep posting falsehoods designed to do nothing but turn gullible people into dangerous people.

We’ll see what happens. If they relent and ban Jones, I’ll be back as soon as it happens. Until then, all you’re going to get from me is the occasional automated post showing that I’ve published here and a daily tweet explaining why I’m boycotting.

Here’s today’s podcast …

 

1
youth soccer

Biobanding and the Little League model

Posted on by Beau Dure

One of those sudden brainstorms — or at least a brain-quick-bolt-of-lightning. The recent USSF (from England) “biobanding” initiative is similar to the Little League model I once proposed.

The common thread: Let players progress on a pathway that’s more flexible than “U8, U9, U10 … U14,” etc.

The idea is simple. Instead of age groups, you have levels. Those levels would have common-sense age ranges — no 16-year-olds on the same field with 9-year-olds — sure, it’s good for free play, but every self-respecting adult or upper-teen player is going to back off a bit against the tweens. But they would overlap.

One way to do it, going from kindergarten up to age 12:

  • Top level: All 12-year-olds, a lot of 11-year-olds, some advanced 10-year-olds
  • Level 2: Any 11-year-olds who aren’t at the top level, some 10-year-olds, advanced 9-year-olds
  • Level 3: 10, 9, 8
  • Level 4: 9, 8, 7
  • Below that, you’d probably just want a first-grade league and kindergarten league

This could run concurrently with or instead of a rec league organized mostly by grade year. (See my other pieces on not having full-time travel before age 12.)

Want to support Ranting Soccer Dad? Great! Check out the Patreon page or buy the “three minivans” T-shirt.

1
pro soccer, youth soccer

A pro academy and a rec program

Posted on by Beau Dure

“We all start as recreational players.”

I’ve been saying that for a while, and I’m not alone. Whether it’s a suburban U5 program with parents and size 3 balls or a kid joining a neighborhood kickabout, everyone’s first experience with soccer is low-stakes recreational soccer. Unless you think Messi was birthed as a fully formed U16 Barcelona academy player, you realize the basic truth here.

American youth clubs are usually all-inclusive. Even if they have a Development Academy program or other elite teams, they tend to have rec programs running from U5 to U19, including TOPSoccer. (Yes, I found it amusing and kind of tone-deaf that a new soccer semipro league boasted about having “the TOP soccer players in the region.” I’m surely not the only person who thinks of TOPSoccer upon seeing that, and it makes me wonder if the people running this league are aware of the complete range of the U.S. soccer community.)

Apparently, we’re not alone. If you get the United Soccer Coaches magazine Soccer Journal, please check out the interview with Espanyol’s Eloy Perez. Among other interesting things (re-typed here, so typos are mine):

Q: You have a large recreation program at the club. Can you tell me how that works?

A: Yes, we have 56 teams in the recreation program. The players can decide if they want to train one or two times per week, and to play a game on Saturday mornings.

Q: And it takes place at the training ground?

A. Yes, yes, it takes place here at the training ground. The same place that the academy and first team practices.

Q: Have you had much success bringing players from the recreation program and then into the academy, and eventually the first team?

A: Yes, we had out first player from the recreation program play for our first team last year, Oscar Melendo. He started in the recreation program when he was six years old. Hopefully he is the first of many.

Q: What other goals do you have for the recreation program?

A: For us, it’s an opportunity to work with the community, to make sure children from 5-14 get good training and get to know we are a family club that looks after its people. They get to learn the game well, to be introduced to sport, to work with others. Things that will help them.

I’m curious to know how many other pro clubs in Europe do this.

And why can’t we?

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us soccer, youth soccer

Repealing the birth-year mandate and other obvious moves

Posted on by Beau Dure

Some of the initiatives U.S. Soccer has rolled out over the last 10 years are well-researched and sensible.

Restrictions on heading the ball are simply a safety issue, and coaches should be able to adapt to teach proper technique and judging the flight of the ball. (Or, just as a wild notion, maybe playing the ball out of the back instead of blasting it 70 yards up the field and yelling “win it!” to a tall person.) Small-sided games are globally accepted as a better idea than tossing a bunch of first-graders into an 11v11 game.

Other initiatives are worth discussing. The new coaching education system is an improvement in many ways but could use a few tweaks, most of which shouldn’t be decided by one person’s experience.

Then you have The Dumbest, Most Wrong-Headed Thing U.S. Soccer Has Done To The Youth Game And There’s Really No Debating It.

That would be the mandate on birth-year age groups.

U.S. Soccer can say, with some justification, that we don’t have hard data linking birth-year mandate to the stagnant-to-declining youth soccer participation numbers. (Note to Soccer America commenters: Gripe about the methodology of the study all you want, and it’s a good point that Spanish-speaking communities may not have been adequately represented, but it’s awfully difficult to see those numbers and come up with a way that youth soccer participation is increaing.) Fine. But at some point, it’s a bit like eating three party-sized bags of potato chips each day and pointing out that we don’t know the heart attack we just had was directly the result of eating all those chips. Sure, there may be other factors, but we have plenty of evidence to show this was not good.

Maybe the evidence is anecdotal. But it’s an awful lot of anecdotes. In my case, it’s every parent with whom I’ve talked. Every coach. Every administrator who is not directly employed by U.S. Soccer.

Conversely, no one has made the case for extending the birth-year mandates from the Development Academy and ODP all the way down to U-Little soccer. No one has explained why a child’s first experience with soccer has to be, “Oh, sorry, you can’t play with your kindergarten classmates because you were born in November and they were born in February.” We may hear coaches were confused because some players in a U17 scrimmage were born in one year and some in another, but they don’t seem to realize some gifted players may be playing up anyway, and they don’t understand how confusing it is for parents and club registrars to deal with this stuff on a grassroots level. I don’t mean to impose, coach, but if you can’t take a few seconds to ask whether that player you’re scouting is a 2002 or 2003, your time management skills suck.

In fact, U.S. Soccer has tried to avoid saying such things with a lot of corporate-speak. “We’re not saying you can’t have a kindergarten league, but you can’t have a kindergarten league.” That sort of thing. Initially, at least one club was able to clarify that its rec league could continue on school-year age groups. Another admin told me otherwise but agreed that U.S. Soccer wasn’t going to send the police or even kick that club’s top teams out of the Development Academy.

It’s telling that AYSO, the mostly recreational organization, felt compelled to go along with the mandate. (Don’t tell anyone, but some clubs’ “House” leagues do not. Shhhh.)

United Soccer Coaches’ Lynn Berling-Manuel, formerly of AYSO and Soccer America, points a finger at U.S. Soccer in yet another can’t-miss Soccer America interview. Here’s the key paragraph:

Let’s reframe the conversation from player development to cultural development. We’d like to redefine “preeminent” in the U.S. Soccer mission statement “to make soccer the preeminent sport in the United States” to: ensure that every player falls in love with soccer. And that “fun” is defined by a player at any age or level saying, “I want to do it again.”

If we have a better soccer culture — one of the goals of everything from soccer field-building to promotion/relegation — does anyone doubt we’ll end up with better players?

U.S. Soccer can’t simply flip a switch and repeal the birth-year mandate. They’ve asked thousands of teams to reconfigure once already. No point in making them do it again.

Here’s what USSF can do:

Make a distinction between elite leagues and everything else, and let the elite leagues stay on birth-year groups.

The Development Academy and ECNL will be “elite.” Leagues that feed into U.S. Youth Soccer national championships — most likely just the top divisions — will be “elite.” (Leagues that feed into U.S. Club Soccer national … look, U.S. Club Soccer shouldn’t be running “national championships” aside from ECNL in the first place, but that’s another rant.)

These leagues start at U12 (probably should be U14, but that’s also another rant) and attract players who have advanced well past the introductory phase of the game. They have to get through intense tryouts to make it this far, and playing with friends isn’t the priority here.

Other travel leagues and recreational leagues can start phasing out the birth-year groups at will.

This process won’t really take that long. The reason we’re not making an immediate transition is because we don’t want to break up teams — again. But under the birth-year groups, you have to break up teams when they hit high school or college anyway. A team might have half its players taking a season off to play high school soccer, and then you have to reconfigure anyway.

So maybe next fall, if we’re talking about a league that starts travel at U9, have birth-year groups at U16 and U17. (U19 is often combined U18-U19 anyway — frankly, there’s no reason to have U18 at all.) Let U15 go back to school-year (or Aug. 1 or whatever makes sense). Have birth-year at lower age groups where you’re trying to keep teams together.

Clarify, once and for all, that recreational leagues never had to be on birth-year in the first place.

Again, a few of them weren’t. AYSO should’ve simply said they’re not going to do it. They can go back to school-year or other age groups immediately — they bust up teams every season already. (Which they shouldn’t, but that, too, is another rant. Actually, I recently ranted about this and some of the other “another rants” above.)

So if you run a rec league for middle schoolers, great. Kindergartners? Great. High schoolers? Great. (Tons of players don’t make their high school teams, so a rec league can keep them involved.)

One question some of you surely have by now: Why do we care so much about “teams”? Aren’t we all club-centric by now? Shouldn’t we want kids to move up and down between teams? 

A lot of clubs say they’re club-centric and will move players from B-team to A-team from week to week. How many actually do it?

And that’s OK — to an extent. Ideally, a club would have the following in each age group:

  1. An A-team in an elite league with a fluid roster, calling players up from lower teams as needed.
  2. Several teams in other leagues and lower divisions. (As argued in the last rant, the pyramid should ultimately reach down to rec teams as well.)
  3. A no-commitment free-play option. And maybe some of these players can fill in on the other teams.

If a player moves on to a DA, ECNL or other elite team permanently, so be it. We certainly don’t want to slam that door. Everyone else should be allowed to play with friends at convenient practice fields — as they will when they play college intramurals and adult amateur soccer.

And then we’ll build that soccer culture, which is quite clearly about something more than forcing kids into a soccer-development machine at age 4.

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youth soccer

Now for sale: TRAVEL SUCKER T-shirts

Posted on by Beau Dure

Are you a travel sucker?

It’s OK. Many of us are. We’ve paid thousands of dollars for this, and we’re wondering whether this is really worth it.

But when we laugh about it, we gain power over it. We demonstrate that we have serious questions about what we’re doing and why. Maybe we shouldn’t have driven 200 miles for this game. Maybe we parents should have more of a say on a team that isn’t going to send 15 people to college and three more to the pros.

shirt-e1532540500273.pngSo show your pride. Show that you’re an independent thinker with a sense of humor. And support Ranting Soccer Dad in the process.

This shirt has the TRAVEL SUCKER logo in the place where a sponsor logo would go on a typical jersey. The RANTING SOCCER DAD logo is where you might have a Nike swoosh or a Puma or adidas mark.

And the badge? It’s a bit like England’s three lions, but instead of lions, we have minivans.

Shirts are available for a limited time direct from CustomInk. I’ll also be shipping a few to supporters on Patreon once they hit a threshold of donations.

Patreon supporters can also get a window cling that looks like this …

rsd-decal-full

Finally, if you have not yet “liked” Ranting Soccer Dad on Facebook, please do. As Bluto once said, don’t cost nothin’.

Your support will help me decide how much more of this to do. I’ll be revving up the parents’ guide again in a few weeks once all the leagues have settled. The podcast is back underway. And I’m planning a short book.

Rant on.

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