The Game Within the Child

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...

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 ...

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...

Among the most successful activities for U6 players is this game that requires the parents to chase their children as they try and score a goal as quickly as possible. "Don't Let the Bird Bite You in the Bootie" works on three key skills for U6 players: dribbling at game speed, vision and shooting. The setup is very simple. Line players up on a line about 15-25 yards from a small goal. Have their parents line up behind them and act like birds (trust me, they will do it). On your command "Don't let the bird bite you in the bootie" players dribble as fast as possible to a point where they can take a shot on goal. Their object is to get the ball into the goal before they get "bit." Obviously, this one works because you sell the kids on the risk of getting bit by a bird. In an earlier iteration, it was "don't let the bird bite you in the back." I observed several kids dribbling while putting their arms behind them to keep from getting b...