Category: us soccer

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.

11
podcast, us soccer

RSD38: A sensible promotion/relegation discussion with Kyle Williams

Posted on by Beau Dure

Soccer writer Kyle Williams firmly believed that he and I could have a reasonable discussion about the U.S. soccer landscape and the potential for promotion/relegation within it. And we did. So there. I even found myself thinking of a new way to think about it by the end.

If you want to read even more about this, check the pro/rel page in all its words, er, glory.

0
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.

 

1
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
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.

0
us soccer

Bruce Arena vs. the world (book review)

Posted on by Beau Dure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(But I digress.)

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

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

1
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
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.

0
us soccer, world soccer

The old “secret society” of soccer fandom and what we’ve lost

Posted on by Beau Dure

Remember when the U.S. soccer community was all united and welcoming?

No? Then you’ll have to trust me. It did indeed happen.

If you don’t trust me, trust Michael J. Agovino, author of The Soccer Diaries: An American’s Thirty-Year Pursuit of the International Game (coincidentally, thanks to a buyout of my publisher, now issued by the same press — University of Nebraska — as my book Long-Range Goals) and a recent guest on Tim Hanlon’s “Good Seats Still Available” podcast.

Agovino talks about discovering the game in the early 1980s while living in New York City, where it wasn’t particularly easy for him to get to Cosmos games. Like a lot of us that age, he sought out magazines and whatever broadcasts could be found in whatever language.

Without mainstream acceptance, soccer fans formed what Agovino called a “secret society” before backtracking because the “secret” adjective implies some sort of exclusivity that soccer fans weren’t seeking. Soccer fans were welcoming, Agovino says. If you found someone else who liked the game, you found a friend.

And that’s how I remember things as well — not just in 1982 but even in the late 1990s. I was excited to move to the D.C. area in part because I knew there was this sports bar called Summers that showed soccer. I could go and see soccer with other soccer fans. Sure, Greensboro had the late, lamented Keegan’s Pub, where 4-5 people would show up for Saturday morning EPL broadcasts, but this would be different.

We were still outnumbered by a wide margin. People hated soccer. Hated it. It’s not like cricket or rugby, toward which nearly everyone I met was indifferent. Hated it.

So perhaps we soccer fans were nice to each other because we were united against a common enemy. Perhaps we had to cling to each other because we simply didn’t have many other people who shared our interests.

Or perhaps Twitter hadn’t been invented yet.

 

1