Question Number: 16672

Other 9/13/2007

RE: U-14 Under 14

Patrick Trombly of Winthrop / Newton, MA USA asks...

This question is a follow up to question 14487

Thanks for the feedback. We had even better results in Spring against the same teams, going 10-0 and giving up only 8 goals in the 10 games despite losing our top goalkeeper to the travel team over the winter and losing our most athletic player to a family move with 6 games to go, and playing better, and more like a team, as the season progressed.

To me that's very validating - that the gap between us and the other teams grew the more we played them and despite losing key players means the things I did a bit differently (well not that differently, I've read that Scolari uses Sun Tzu) aren't gimmicks - if they were gimmicks they'd have less effect over time. But over time, and despite the loss of two key players, we got better. This all in a league where the players are deliberately assigned in August based on player ratings to achieve roughly equal teams.

But it was frustrating to deal with this anti-winning thing we have in US soccer now. We've taken the noble desire not to turn into youth hockey and multiplied it by 50, emasculating the players - we've taken "don't pressure kids to win" to mean don't teach them the angles, don't teach them strategy.

There's supposedly this dichotomy between winning and player development but that doesn't make intuitive sense in this sport - the better your players, the better they'll play, and if you develop your weak players, you can make your stronger players more effective by giving them longer respites. Honestly I think the whole anti-winning thing is a cop-out - some coaches consistently go 4-16 but they volunteer their time and nobody wants anyone to feel bad, so instead of trying to help the situation, we castigate the most successful coaches and team - but as a result, the kids who get the clueless coaches play like they'd never met each other and never seen a soccer ball.

There is definitely a dichotomy at earlier ages between winning and skill development - I coach my son's 2nd grade team, they play very well too but there's a big difference between what would "win" now and what will enable these players to play "winning soccer" 4-5 and more years down the road, and the latter is what I try to teach them. But by middle school I just don't see any major distinctions between what wins now and what will win later on - by that age most of the physical differences are there to stay, the kids are old enough to play cerebral soccer and they want to use their brains. And like I said, if I were wrong, the gap wouldn't have grown, especially under our circumstances.

I think kids have 'soccer burn out' because unlike other sports, soccer coaches don't COACH, and that combined with the fact that until recently soccer wasn't on tv and still isn't as much as other sports leaves youth players bewildered about what they're supposed to do. They drop out because they get no guidance, they don't comprehend their role as part of a functioning unit other than that the kid who doesn't have the ball is supposed to "get open" or "move around" or at best "find an open space" - I show them a few set plays off stoppages and they quickly start to coordinate their open field play in the same format, and not only did we win as a team but as individuals they played better, 2 of my players made the leap to travel team and all of them signed up for soccer for the next season. The ones who stay past 5th grade don't "drop out" at age 14 because they "lose interest" or feel too much pressure: they go to high school, where there's only one soccer team, thus excluding 90% of the youth players! Or they switch to another sport where winning is even more a priority - it just doesn't make sense to say that they left soccer for swimming, football, baseball, basketball, field hockey, lacrosse or hockey because they felt too much pressure to win, and there's no evidence that that's the case - the anti-winning crowd just SAYS that.

Anyhow, yes, my kids learned a great deal about sportsmanship - - - about doing everything within the rules to win and then congratulating the other team for bringing out the best in them. The parents bought into it, got me a super coach's gift, and the players had a blast. And the feedback I got from my players was that many of the kids on the other teams wanted to play for me the next year. Unfortunately three of the nine other coaches complained - not coincidentally the one whose teams we beat by the widest margins and two that we shut out. I guess that puts the lie to "it's not about winning" - if it weren't, then losing shouldn't have mattered to them.

My daughter and I have now moved to the boys' league in our town. So far so good, started out with a 2-0 win and dominated the game possession-wise, but left too many scoring chances on the table; we also scrimmaged one of the top travel teams for about 40 minutes and lost 1-0 - - but the next day the travel program recruited my top goalkeeper.... So, it looks like everyone else is at least as competitive as I am if not moreso, they just claim not to be when they lose. So I'm going to keep doing it the way I've been doing it until it stops working. I owe that to my players.

Thanks for all the feedback. Some of it, e.g., the idea that if you run in the direction of the opponent and frown menacingly at him or her but never make contact, that could be a foul just because it's intimidating, or that lining up on your team's throw-in so that the defender will have to run around you could, even if you don't move to continue to be in his path once he decides where he's trying to progress to, could still be imeding the progress, or be a foul against my guy, not the other guy, if the other guy runs into my guy - those are interpretations that we'll just have to agree to disagree on.

Answer provided by Referee MrRef

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