Category: youth soccer

us soccer, youth soccer

Finding an “a la carte” option to get more kids in soccer

Posted on by Beau Dure

How do you get more kids playing youth soccer? How do you encourage the good players to get into programs that help them maximize their potential? How do they do it in France?

For reference, check three Soccer America articles:

Bondy and the French grassroots system: Kids routinely play after school. Then they have a cheap-ish (just under $200) multisport club staffed by adult facilitators and some coaches. Much of the funding comes from a source we generally don’t have available in the USA — the government.

Secrets to the French soccer revolution: Among the noteworthy elements here — 35 French pro clubs have full-fledged academies, but kids rarely leave their home clubs before age 16.

AYSO’s Mike Hoyer: Youth soccer needs options between entry level and full travel/club commitment: He speaks in mostly vague terms aside from plugging two AYSO programs and tossing in an interesting points — kids’ time is being taken up not just by video games and other activities, but by homework.

That may seem like an odd point, but when you see kids go into high school, it’s startling to see how much is piled up. Parents have been fed metrics such as the Washington Post Challenge Index, which rewards schools for getting kids into as many intense AP courses as possible. We’re starting to see some pushback on the idea that cramming for the equivalent of 3-4 bar exams every year is the best use of teenagers’ time, and it’s about time. But that’s another rant.

The AYSO programs Hoyer mentions, AYSO Extra and AYSO United, are designed to give intermediate players more options. You’ll see the occasional AYSO program operatinIg a travel team in your local league. That’s a nice rec/travel hybrid, and we could use more creative solutions like that.

But I see ways to build on that, some of which are antithetical to the AYSO ethos of forming new teams each season for the sake of balance. I’ve kicked around some of these ideas for a few years. Others are relatively new.

No full-time travel before age 12. I’ve written about this for a while. It doesn’t rule out elite professional training and frequent “All-Star” games. It leaves open the possibility of “a la carte” models in which any interested families can get professional training and be sorted into groups that give them challenging games. It lets kids play with their neighbors and friends, as they do at Ajax and other clubs, while also giving them part-time options for advanced play with those of similar ability and aptitude. It rules out forming U11 leagues in which kids are traveling 200 miles for a league game. It also forces club’s technical staffs to look at kids who aren’t on the “A” teams.

Rec soccer that is free-play only. No commitment needed. Want to come play on Friday night or Saturday afternoon? OK — sign up, pay $10, and we’ll bring you out to a big field where we’ve organized many small-sided games and can sort players so they’re not totally overmatched or totally dominant. Maybe we’ll do the same in neighborhoods that just have one futsal court, and we’ll say beginners play at 2, slightly advanced players at 3, and you can scrimmage with our travel players at 4. For many players, this might be all they do. For some, it’ll be a gateway to a more “organized” program.

Above U12, drop the “rec”/”travel” distinction and form pyramids instead. I’ve seen some clubs that are starting to do this. At my coaching-license course this weekend, I met several parent coaches who are leading teams that are moving up from the local “developmental” travel league to the league that used to be the big dog before all these “elite” leagues formed. (Some of those “elite” leagues are, of course, not elite. I can’t understand parents who pay for their kids to be on C teams that travel out of state for “elite” league games.)

Instead of imposing tiers on teams — you’re “travel,” you’re not — just let the teams sort themselves out. If your team is dominating its “rec” league, let it move up to the next level. If your team is overmatched in “travel,” move down. Sure, professional coaches might not go for this because parents will learn that they’ve been paying $2,000/year only to find that their U14 kids aren’t at the level of the local “rec” kids. But that’ll force more change. Eventually, the tiers will be more seamless. The top teams may fire professional coaches. Lower-tier teams will stick with parents. (Though, frankly, parent coaches are often better.) Ideally, clubs will offer professional training for all, then offer a mix of pro and parent coaches on gamedays.

Along these lines …

Let teams stay together. Here’s where a well-intentioned AYSO philosophy backfires. A lot of kids, particularly those who aren’t chasing elite status, want to play with their friends. AYSO breaks up teams in the name of parity, which makes sense. But if you have a pyramid with many levels, you’ll get parity anyway.

More fluid exchanges between club teams. This might sound like the opposite of the previous point. But it’s all about giving kids options and opportunities. Clubs should always have the opportunity to let a kid try a more advanced level, even if just for a game or two. And leagues should allow it. Our local Northern Virginia “rec” league disqualifies players if they play a “travel” game just once during the season, which is utterly ridiculous.

Options. Opportunities. Maybe then we won’t lose so many kids.

 

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us soccer, youth soccer

U.S. coaching education gets better, but …

Posted on by Beau Dure

I had low expectations for the new 11v11 U.S. Soccer grassroots coaching course, and getting up early Sunday morning to drag myself to Springfield didn’t help. Neither did the uninformative “Introduction to Grassroots Coaching” that replaced the helpful online F license after only a few years.

Five hours later, I wished that U.S. Soccer had done this years ago, back when I was first starting. Or I wished I had younger kids.

grassroots

Sure, I miss the old (but not that old) F license videos, which should really come back to replace the new intro. The 4v4 online module also was rather disappointing.

But when I took the 11v11 module this weekend, it clicked. I “got it.” And what I got was a new outlook on coaching.

The basic framework of a practice has changed.

Old way …

  1. A warmup activity related to the topic
  2. A small-sided game, also related to the topic
  3. An “expanded small-sided game,” also related and less comprehensible
  4. A scrimmage, also related … etc.

New way …

  1. Play
  2. Practice
  3. Play

Yes, it all relates to a topic. But we’re no longer dependent on explaining a new set of exercises to kids each week, at least in the 11v11 module.

Let’s look at it from the kids’ point of view …

Old way …

  1. What are we doing? What the heck is this?
  2. What are we doing? What the heck is this?
  3. What are we doing? What the heck is this?
  4. What are we doing? What the heck is this?

New way …

  1. Hey, we’re playing soccer, 4v4 or similar numbers. I get it.
  2. Hey, we’re playing soccer. The coach is freezing us on occasion, but I get it.
  3. Hey, we’re playing soccer again.

So the exercises don’t change that much. It’s soccer, just with different numbers per side and different coaching points to emphasize. If you take a look at these training plans on the Massachusetts Youth Soccer site, you’ll see there’s not much difference between them aside from what the coach says during practice. The U8 training plans vary a bit more, but they’re not too complicated.

That’s great. More playing. Less time explaining the purpose of the 100 cones on the field. And the coach spends less time figuring out different drills for different occasions. Just go to the Digital Coaching Center, pick your topic, get some suggested points of emphasis, add your own (perhaps based on something your team did really badly the week before) and off you go. Brilliant.

And it’s flexible. We can still do some of the old “four-phase” (warmup, small-sided, expanded small-sided, scrimmage) in the “practice” phase. You can introduce something with your favorite warmup activity — a “gates” drill if you want to sharpen their passing and receiving skills before getting into the tactics of attacking, a 3v3 before you get to the 6v5, etc.

I asked specifically about heading, prompted by a few fellow “candidates” in the course who were concerned about it. We’re supposed to limit the time we spend on heading, and I doubt many coaches were spending a whole 90-minute practice on the topic even before concussion awareness ramped up. My instructors’ suggestion — just take a few minutes out of the practice phase and toss around the ball a few different ways.

But this leads to my basic problem with every coaching course I’ve done — new way, old way or older way …

Is this really a course for grassroots/recreational coaches?

In fairness, a lot of the people in the class had ambitions beyond rec league. To get to the D license and progress up the ladder from there, you have to take three of the eight available grassroots modules, and the in-person 11v11 module must be one of them. (If you’ve played three years in a top-tier pro league, however they choose to define that, you can skip to the C.)

And the parent/professional line seems to be blurring more than I’ve seen in the past. The course’s host, Braddock Road (hey, Vienna — can I be reimbursed?), is moving its parent-coached teams up from the developmental/recreational leagues up to the NCSL. A lot of the parents in the room were anxious to take the D as soon as possible. (Apparently, it’s more accessible for parent coaches than it was in the past when I griped about it.) Maybe some clubs have realized they don’t need to hire pros to be on the sideline for every “travel” game any more.

Also, some parent coaches are really into it. Maybe a bit too much. One coach said he does his practice plans based in part on what he sees in scouting his opponents. At U9. I’ve only seen three distinct styles of play at U9.

  1. Alexandria Soccer: We’re going to complete a couple hundred passes each game, and unlike Spain, we’re also going to score because the typical U9 defense and goalkeeper can’t cope. If we concede goals to a big fast forward, so be it.
  2. Northern Virginia Soccer Club: We’re going to beat the crap out of you. Literally. Not like U9 refs are going to blow the whistle on most of these fouls, much less give us yellow cards. Then by U12, we’ll be ready to identify your top player and kick him out of the game just after halftime, then reduce your team to barely enough players to finish the game.
  3. Kids playing soccer. They’re kids. They’re going to do what kids do, and what the coach says is just a small factor in what they do.

But there are two reasons why this “grassroots” module still doesn’t quite meet the needs of a parent coach, even though it’s dropped some of the insistence on incomprehensible practice planning that the E and old D license had.

plan

1. We’re not learning how to teach technique.

Sure, at U14, it’s less of an issue than it is at U8. But we’re still getting some players with less experience or players who may move on to travel once they fix a couple of holes in their game. We’re still not getting that.

Granted, former elite players will always have an advantage here. My fellow rec coach who played with Julie Foudy at Stanford will know more about technique (and tactics, and probably a lot of things) than I ever will. No coaching class is likely to make up that gap. But I’m still surprised that, in all the resources and reading we’re given, no one emphasizes the best way to strike a ball, receive a ball, etc.

Heading is especially problematic. Maybe U12 rec coaches don’t need to know the finer points of dribbling and passing, given the lack of potential elite players in their ranks. But heading is an actual safety issue. Shouldn’t we learn how to do it and teach it? (Sure, I learned it when I was a youth player, but that was 35 years ago. Times have changed.)

So my constructive criticism for USSF would be simple. Give us a few videos on technique. In the in-person session, maybe spend 15 minutes on it while we’re on the field.

2. A lot of the information still seemed unrealistic for recreational coaches.

One of our instructors noted that it often takes a year for lessons to sink in. Travel coaches and elite coaches may have their teams for that long. Rec coaches usually do not. If they’re in AYSO, the teams are broken apart and reformed each year.

(Maybe that’s more of a criticism of the AYSO “redistribute the teams” model, but that’s another rant.)

Other notes from the session …

  1. We no longer use neutral players — say, a 5v5 with two players available on the wings who’ll pass back to whichever team passed it to them. Not “game-like.”
  2. Also not “game-like” — rondos. We didn’t talk about these at all. (I should point out that the Massachusetts U8 training plans above had a few things that also weren’t really “game-like.” Are rondos or neutral players any less “game-like” than having multiple goals on each side of the field?)
  3. Dynamic stretching is built into the first “play” phase. Basically, let them play for a few minutes, and let that be the primary warmup. (Personally, I plan to tell them not to go too hard at first.) Then pause, do your Frankensteins and barn-door swings, then get back to it. Makes sense. In my running days, I knew plenty of runners who’d jog a bit before stretching. Stretching a cold muscle incurs the old snapping-rubber-band analogy. And yes, you can use the “FIFA 11” warmup, which is coincidentally the only soccer video game in my house.
  4. We now “freeze” the action only in the practice phase. In the first play phase, we coach over the flow of the game and sometimes pull players aside. The last play phase is more like a game — maybe you’d pull a player aside, but you’re more likely to shout things over the flow. (Or not shout, if you’re stick with a tiny practice space like I am.)

So on the whole, this is an improvement. I’ve talked a lot about what parent coaches need, including a full presentation at an NSCAA convention. This gets us partway.

It’s unfortunate in a way that U.S. Soccer needed to do such a drastic revision. It’s difficult to feel the previous lessons weren’t wasted. But the good news is that any changes in the future should just be tweaks rather than a teardown.

 

1
podcast, youth soccer

RSD37: Part 2 of the Shoeless Soccer conversation

Posted on by Beau Dure

Forget the long grass. Forget the complex drills. Shin guards optional.

That’s the advice from Shoeless Soccer co-author Nathan Richardson, a coach and one-time director of coaching when he’s not busy with his day job as a professor of Spanish literature. (We did not discuss whether Man of La Mancha, a musical in which I once played drums, is faithful to the source material.)

If you missed Part 1, please check it out. If you’ve already listened to Part 1, here’s Part 2:

 

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podcast, youth soccer

RSD37: Shoeless Soccer author Nathan Richardson on taking youth soccer off the long grass

Posted on by Beau Dure

Nathan Richardson, co-author of Shoeless Soccer: Fixing the System and Winning the World Cup (which I reviewed here), joins the podcast this week to talk about the radical yet somewhat globally accepted ideas in his book. Basically, instead of turning soccer into an expensive coach-driven activity, why not let kids learn by playing? And maybe on hard surfaces so they’ll learn to control the ball instead of booting it?

This conversation should give us all some ideas for how to reform youth soccer, even if you don’t agree with all of them, and it should put the term “rec mindset” to bed once and for all. We all start as rec players, and in many cases, that’s where we (well, not me) learn the things that make us better players down the road.

We ran rather long, so this will be a two-parter. (Here’s Part 2.)

Here’s Part 1:

 

Practice plans mentioned in the podcast are on the Massachusetts Youth Soccer site.

Thanks as always to Patreon supporters, and keep an eye out for RSD merchandise available soon.

Patreon supporters are:

Keith Bundy
John Stewart
Dave Russell
Jason McConnell
Tim Stanton
Bill Beane
Judith Cavill
Taylor Sorrels
Robert Hay
Rich Heironimus
Armando Diaz
Jeff Clarke

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us soccer, youth soccer

Is soccer declining in the United States?

Posted on by Beau Dure

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

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

A couple of metrics look very bad:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the trickier question: Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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youth soccer

What youth soccer can learn from karate

Posted on by Beau Dure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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us soccer, youth soccer

Creating opportunities for all U.S. youth

Posted on by Beau Dure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let’s consider options:

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

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

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

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

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

What can we do to change that?

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us soccer, youth soccer

Why coaching youth soccer is impossible

Posted on by Beau Dure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me explain a few things to the SAE coach:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

1
youth soccer

Why School of Rock is better than youth soccer

Posted on by Beau Dure

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

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

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

School-of-rock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or maybe this …

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

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

And one factor in that development is this …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what can youth soccer learn from School of Rock? 

A few things:

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

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

rocks

 

 

1
pro soccer, us soccer, youth soccer

SafeSport, SUM and other U.S. Soccer issues

Posted on by Beau Dure

Funny thing about engaging with Soccer Twitter: You can find yourself assigned a lot of volunteer work. A bunch of people who will never donate to your Patreon page or buy a book from your Amazon affiliate links (in some cases, they even think it’s an imposition to go to your blog, where you’ll make 0.01 cents on their visit) will demand that you do X, Y or Z, just because you’re a soccer journalist.

But every once in a while, there’s a legitimate question that I can answer. That happened this morning …

https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1012297332124258304

Good question, and I did some recent reporting on it that was trimmed from a story — not for any nefarious reason but because it was a long story, and this didn’t fit that well.

So here’s the part that was trimmed:

(START)

The U.S. governing bodies for several other sports — gymnastics, volleyball, taekwondo and swimming — are dealing with horrific sexual-abuse scandals. Congress has responded with the Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse and Safe Sport Authorization Act of 2017 was signed — despite the name, it was signed in 2018 (Feb. 14).

A month later, U.S. Soccer member programs manager Caitlin Carducci discussed the law with state associations and affiliates. A couple of weeks later, U.S. Soccer issued a statement on the basics, specifically the need to report abuse allegations to law enforcement within 24 hours.

U.S. Club Soccer has gone a few steps farther, requiring online SafeSport training of its members.

U.S. Club’s Kevin Payne stresses the urgency. A well-meaning coach, he says, could end up violating federal law by taking internal steps without meeting the 24-hour window to report to law enforcement.

“People who’ve devoted their lives to youth sports will have their lives destroyed because they didn’t report something quickly enough,” Payne says.

So the U.S. Club effort here is essential. It costs a bit more money, but it’s one soccer expense that is absolutely worthwhile. Better to pay a little more now than defend a lawsuit or deal with the horror of abuse.

(END)

So there you have it. Some info compiled from public statements, then a bit more from an interview, along with some context and even a recommendation. Do with it what you will. It’s a good question, it’s an issue I’ll keep pursuing down the road, and everyone else should feel free to keep asking as well.

Then there’s SUM, on which I get stuff like this:

https://twitter.com/duresport/status/1012287440571297795

https://twitter.com/duresport/status/1012288098519146497

https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1012289261532581888

https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1012296841592000519

Good grief. We know immigrant children are being separated from their parents. We don’t know SUM, USSF and MLS are doing anything objectionable beyond the things we know about (to which some people have objected — some reasonably, some a little tinfoil-y).

I think that’s reasonable. And perhaps people can come up with good ways to apply pressure for more transparency. Carlos Cordeiro said he’d be more transparent, and he actually has worked as VP to change the governance. That may not be enough, and there’s nothing wrong with pressing USSF to open up a bit more, especially when the next deal comes up.

I might be able to answer other questions:

From my reporting before and after the election, the full board (including people who aren’t part of the supposed cabal) has always approved everything with SUM —  unanimously. I even specifically asked if the “unanimous votes” were all shenanigans, like the local hospital board I once covered that had a split vote (roughly 6-3 or something like that) but immediately moved to let the record show that the vote was unanimous. I was told — again, by people in and out of the supposed cabal — that the votes were legitimately unanimous.

Now — you could argue that the board shouldn’t be holding so many executive sessions, or that the minutes should reflect what was discussed in executive session. (Not “we all ganged up to silence a Youth Council rep and then gave a national-team coach a negative performance review,” but perhaps “the board then went into executive session, where it discussed the renewal of Soccer United Marketing’s contract and the latest complaint from the North American Suing League.”) I’d frankly like to see a delegate raise that point from the floor at the next Annual General Meeting, if not sooner.

But yelling at one freelance journalist (which, to be clear, Nick isn’t doing) isn’t going to get us very far. I’m actually in less of a position to get to anything than, say, this guy …

Good on you for asking, Chris.

And yeah, perhaps it would help if people with full-time journalism gigs would ask. So go harass the people swimming in venture capital at The Athletic.

Because from my perch on the thinnest branch of the U.S. soccer tree, I see things this way:

  1. It’s a lot easier to get answers when you’re (A) inside the organization or (B) working for a major news organization.
  2. In terms of major issues facing U.S. Soccer right now, I consider the January formalizing of the SUM deal very far down the list. For these reasons:
    1. USSF and SUM were demonstrably acting with a deal already in place well before 2018.
    2. At some point, we have to ask why we’re so angry about a deal that provides USSF a considerable amount of money. Same with Copa Centenario. You’re welcome to argue that the SUM deal and other USSF governance oddities give MLS too much power, but you don’t need me to spend a month investigating things for free to make your case there.
    3. Youth soccer is a freaking mess, and that’s where every U.S. player starts (aside from those we import from Germany).

Besides, there’s a lot of nastiness in the world today. I often think about ditching soccer journalism entirely to do something that might help turn back the fascist tide in this country. That might happen one day.

In the meantime, if it’s OK with everyone on Twitter, I’m going to get back to youth soccer.

After the morning World Cup games, of course.

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