The Game Within the Child

A few weeks ago, I published an article on some common phrases I use in training. One of those phrases is "show your teammates your hips and the defender your backside." After publishing that article, I headed out to a training session where I was working on one of our core skills which is shielding/turning with the ball. I worked with both a 8U group and a 12U group that night and all but a few players had the same problem: turning into the defender. It is a frustration that both the coach and the player share. If you turn into the defender, there is a high probability that you will lose the ball and have to work hard to get it back. Unfortunately, it is also a behavior we do innately. It is the fastest way to change directions and if no one is on you, then you don't have to worry about how you turn. So when you are coaching this skill, it takes a lot of patience and focus to create the right conditions for skill development. Below, I have the text from my previous a...

If there is one issue that crops up in youth soccer more than any other, it is when games are not competitive. As a young coach, I experienced it first-hand with my U12 boys team when we played the team where the coach was the president of the league. Even though it was AYSO and the teams were supposed to be balanced so that there shouldn't have been any major mismatches, this team dominated every other team including mine. That wasn't such a big problem for me except that every time this team scored, the team mom would hit the play button on the boom box and Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" would blast out of the speakers. It really symbolized to me that this coach didn't have any idea how it looked when you played a celebration song for the last goal in a 9-0 win. I have also been on the other side of that scoreline a few times at the HS level. The last time, my team was up 8-0 and I was encouraging my team to pass the ball around and possess it, but we ended...