The Game Within the Child

In the basketball movie "Hoosiers" Gene Hackman plays the coach. During the season, he decides that they don't share the ball enough, so he sets up a race from one end of the court to the other. The players select the fastest player to dribble down the court. Coach Dale starts the race and then throws the ball to the other end of the court, easily beating the dribbler down the court. His point was that passing is more effective at moving the ball around the field than dribbling. Now you know that I prefer you to focus on dribbling first and there is an important reason for that which I have shared with you often enough, but that doesn't mean you should ignore passing/moving/receiving the ball as part of your player development. It is just that you need to do it at the right time. While I emphasize three core skills (dribbling, controlling the ball, shield and turn) during my group sessions, I do also work on passing with my U10 and older players starting during the ...

So you have decided to enroll your child in our soccer program. If you have no experience with soccer, then this article is for you. First, I wanted to talk to you about the nature of the game. Unlike baseball or football or organized basketball, the game does not have any plays. As a result, the role of the coach during practices and games is different. Instead of the coach controlling the action and the players working hard to run the play the exact same way every time, players get control of the game. If you can imagine, every time the player gets the ball, the situation is different and the player has to come up with a way to solve the problem. The solution to every problem requires ball skills like dribbling, controlling the ball and shielding/turning with the ball. As a result, our practices should include lots of time on the ball. The exercises that the players do should require them to make decisions and use their skills to carry out their decisions. They should also focu...

There is an eternal debate about the nature of teaching, is it an art or a science? As a scientist and a teacher, I can offer a unique perspective on this debate. It is clear, teaching is a science. Since you now know where I stand, let me show you how I reached this conclusion. You can probably guess that I teach science. I have been teaching science for many years, but only a few years ago, I realized that my background was different than most of my peers. I had actually started out as a research scientist. I had no intention of going into education as a teacher. How I got here is a story for a different time. Suffice it to say that I was a poorly prepared teacher when I first entered a high school classroom. It should have been obvious to me that teaching is a science very early on, but I'm not that smart. So here are some ways in which teaching is a science: Scientists need subjects for every study. The more subjects, the better the statistical analysis.  Teachers have ...