The Game Within the Child

I once had a parent/coach in my program who was an accomplished coach who had a talented child. The child played multiple sports and excelled at each of them. For this reason, he only played in my program every other season. His father was his coach initially, but wasn't able to work coaching into his schedule after the first season, so he had to relinquish coaching to others. I would see him on the parent's side of the field, pacing, fists clenched. He would yell instructions to his son (sometimes other players) and always looked unhappy. Sometimes other parents would report his behavior to me when I wasn't around. When I did talk to him, he was always reasonable, but he was never happy either with his son's play or the coaching that he was receiving. Do you get the picture? I was reminded of this recently when I came across this excellent article from Go Play Better, a website dedicated to improving youth sports by focusing on player development and teamwork. Thei...

U6 is the entry level for many players in soccer. Because the level isn't very high, there is an idea prevalent that anybody can coach U6 players. That idea is quickly dispelled when parents go out to coach for the first time. While it may be easy to entertain your 5 year old, when you have a group of 5 year olds, the challenge is much more complex. As a high school teacher during the day, I constantly encounter peers who say that they couldn't deal with a group of children that young. With a spouse who is an elementary school teacher, I hear comments from her peers about how they couldn't handle older children. For some reason, that has never been an issue for me. I don't know why, but I can coach any age and not be intimidated or uncomfortable. For over 20 years, I have taught parent coaches how to work with the U6 player. The past seven years, I have been able to watch these coaches then go out and try to coach. This is not to say that a 4 hour training session or ...

I have always been reluctant to post model training sessions. Probably the most important reason is that coaches may take that model and then simply copy it, without putting in any of their own philosophy or ideas. Having taken model sessions from others and trying to implement it never worked out that well. The next issue is that the session should match the players as well as possible and that takes the ability to read the session and making changes as the session progresses. However, after watching hundreds of practices, I came to the conclusion that my model of providing coaching courses, suggesting activities and dropping in on practices was not giving me the quality of session from my coaches that I was hoping to see. In short, only a few practices were at an acceptable level. The vast majority were of low quality and did not focus on the core skills I have identified as important to develop players. So this season, I decided to do a relatively generic session that included ...