The Game Within the Child

I got the opportunity to coach a U10 game this weekend. The coach was out of town and asked me to step in. They were a very good group of kids, especially for this level. We were playing a team that had been together for a long time with a coach who has been in the program for many years. The game went well, it was close throughout and the level of skill exhibited by the players was higher than you would expect to see at a recreational level. Basically, everything I would hope to see from the players was on display in this game. As the coach, with little knowledge of the players abilities prior to the game, I just broke them into two groups and substituted the entire team other than the goalkeeper every 7-8 minutes. As the DOC, I tried to model the behaviors that I want my coaches to use every game. I sat behind the players on the sideline and talked to them about the game. I asked them to help me organize who would be playing what positions when they re-entered the game. I did hig...

When I observe a practice, the most common thing I witness is the coach working hard, the players sometimes working hard and the parents relaxing in chairs or milling about watching the action. Obviously, the first improvement in this scenario is for the players to be working or playing hard. However, the next improvement is to get the parents involved as well. While we have seen a tremendous growth in the number of players whose parents also played soccer, we always get lots of parents who have little or no experience in soccer or even in sports. Even those parents who do have experience playing soccer probably didn't have a very good developmental environment when they did play (lots of standing in lines, huge numbers of players on the field, inexperienced coaches). It is very accurate to say that we should be teaching our parents about the game as much as we are teaching the children. That is very hard to do when the parents aren't paying attention or are absent from the...