On Stopping the Spread of Dandelions...and Cleats

You know when you're out in the yard and you glance over at your neighbor's plot?  Then you see it - a bunch of dandelions, soon to go to seed, and infiltrate your oasis.  Herbicide, weed wacker, napalm...so many choices to deal with the threat.  You know you are going into battle...

With a mind that makes some odd, random connections between situations, I had a similar thought after my son's soccer game last weekend.  You see, first, a few weeks back, there was one player sporting a pair of those, admittedly cool, Nike Mercurial cleats.  Then, last week, I saw a couple more...or more importantly MY SON saw a couple more.  You see my son is a bit like my lawn - my lawn accepts dandelion seeds from others, my son begs for cool cleats he sees on others.

If you are a parent of a kid who plays sports, you know that there are two sides to the story.  You want them to engage, to have passion for the sport, to watch their heroes on TV and emulate them on the pitch.  But the other side of it is they want to look like their heroes, and that costs a lot of dough.

I'm currently facing a constant barrage of requests from my little, 11-year old Ronaldo-idolizer for a pair of Nike Mercurials.  I decided, OK, can't stop the spread of Dandelions, but at least maybe I can manage the siege.  I came up with a plan:

I recently read a book by Claudio Reyna (it's available on my Amazon link on the right side of my blog) and he talked about how his dad had insisted from an early age that he be responsible for every piece of his equipment and kit if he wanted to play soccer.  He had to clean his cleats, shin guards and ball, make sure his practice and game uniform was clean and ready to go.  I liked that, and realized we had for too long looked over our son and taken care of a lot of these things for him to the point where he didn't have his shin guards in his bag when we showed up for one recent game.

So I implemented a plan starting last weekend.  I told my son that since his Adoption Day (we celebrate the day when his papers were finalized) was coming up in June, and he had a few weeks left in the Spring season  prior to starting his summer league after Adoption Day, he could show me the responsibility that would earn him a pair of Nike Mercurials.

I told him that he would have sole responsibility for getting everything together before practice, and for sorting his dirty laundry, disinfecting his shin guards (man, those things stink after practice!), and wiping down his boots and practice ball and getting it all back and ready for the next outing.  So far, so good, he's batting 1000 on these new duties - proving if a kid wants something bad enough he'll work for it.  There's no longer a yard sale of his stuff across the floor of the garage after each practice and game.  And me and his mom don't have to smell his shin guards anymore, win-win!

And I've got extra time now to kill weeds, sweet.

MLS campaign: your most memorable goal? Charlie Davies' own story

I enjoy this favorite Goal MLS contest- you get to tell the story of a memorable goal (it can be your own, your child's, or a hero's goal).  If your story is good, they will feature it on their web site, and might also feature it on the big screen at an MLS match.

I found out about the campaign through an e-mail that  D.C. United's Charlie Davies sent out to the MLS community.  His story is pretty cool, obviously, because you can imagine his first goal for D.C. United after coming back from his car-crash injuries must have been pretty emotional.  Here is 

Hello,

 A few weeks ago I scored the two most memorable goals of my career.

Maybe they weren't the prettiest goals, maybe they weren't World Cup clinchers, but they were still huge for me. They were my first goals since coming back from an accident that had many questioning if I'd ever play again.
After sustaining major injuries, I basically had to teach my body how to walk again, and how to function.

But with each passing week, I felt my body growing stronger -- from the hospital bed to the wheelchair to the crutches, from walking to jogging to sprinting -- I kept the faith and pushed myself to the limit.

Finally, after a year and a half, I stepped on the field with D.C. United and felt that feeling that I had been longing for. It was something I'll never forget -- I had made it back.

The first goal of my comeback was on a penalty kick. After the ref blew the whistle, I looked at our captain Dax McCarty for the nod. He handed me the ball and said four words I'll never forget: "We believe in you."

The final whistle blew and I had scored two goals. I looked over at our fans and felt incredible support. I realized how far I'd come and was overwhelmed with emotion. I couldn't have imagined a better return.


Charlie Davies


I'll share my favorite goal in a future post...of course in the spirit of this being a parent's soccer blog, I already have a particular goal in mind...one that my son scored.

What are these kids learning out there on the field, anyway???

If you work with groups of kids, whether on an athletic field or in a classroom or on some retreat in the woods, you know that enforcing structure and following a well-defined plan is important to prevent chaos and to promote self-control. But…....

I’ve also found that the greatest opportunities for personal growth often occur when adults ease back the structure of an activity enough to encourage kids to try out “big person” behaviors such as leadership, collaboration, creative problem solving, negotiation, and the mature communication of their interests.

I was a head coach of youth recreational teams for quite a few seasons, with players ranging from 5 to 9 years old. I am not coaching now, but I have stayed close to our youth soccer organization and I always like to see how different coaches, particularly with kids of 10 or 11 and younger, approach the development of their players’ character and mental abilities along with their physical abilities.  Unfortunately, not all coaches even think of anything more than the physical – as though the mind is simply there to execute the instructions given to perform the physical tasks.  But I found that when trying to cultivate enjoyment and even passion for the sport with young kids, they needed times when I could drop my guard a bit and allow them to take leadership initiative, speak their mind without fear, or come up with ideas in practice and have me listen.

I was very structured with my practice plans – I laid out activities for each twice a week, 75 minute practice using 5, 10 and 15 minutes blocks of time.  I had certain skills that I focused on in each session, often based on what I observed in the prior Saturday’s game.  Where I was unconventional was that I learned to build flexibility into that plan to adapt the activities based on the mood and energy level of the players.  Another important skill I learned was to look for that player or players each week who were having a bad day, were tired, or not feeling confident.

The teams I coached were prior to the kids splitting of into “select” and “recreational” paths – just one big pool at the younger ages.  Each season, with an average roster size of 10 players, I would have at least 2 kids who had never played on a soccer team before.

There were many lessons I learned in how to structure activities for a team with such a wide range of skills, keeping the better players challenged and keeping the inexperienced players engaged and improving.  But that is not what I am writing about in this piece.  I am writing about how to help the young player to want to come to practice, to enjoy being part of a team, and to feel valued.  I found that without that, all my grand designs for drills and skills were worthless.

You see, we parents and adults who coach, teach, or volunteer with kids too often don’t see that there are important things going on that are separate from accomplishing a present task.  With the coaching, I realized that I wasn’t there to create the next soccer star or even to win games so the parents could brag about it at the office.  No, with kids 10 and under, I was there to help them develop a love for the sport (or the band, or the theatre, or community work in the scouts – substitute whatever YOU do to help kids grow).  Rigidly focusing on improving their skills would be like arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.  My practices might seem organized, but half the kids would drop out before the next season.

I don’t want that.  I want the kid who Charlie Browns himself on the ground 50% of the time when he tries to kick it to be psyched at the end of the season because he’s now at 40%.  And he or she will get there because something clicked and the challenge became fun.  THE PLAYER decided to own it, to take ownership of his or her own improvement.  That happens most often when they get a little space to make it fun to own it.

“Coach, I hate that drill, let’s do that other one”  or, “why do we only get to scrimmage at the END of practice.”  

(Lightbulb – yeah, why do I always make them eat their brussel sprouts first at practice?).  Sometimes I just listened to their feedback but acted deaf.  Other times I realized the player had a point:  the team would really enjoy some other drill, so I would tell him, “good idea, let’s do it.”  

When kids play they are trying on new roles and practicing new behaviors that through mistakes and successes will become who they are as adults.  When I didn’t allow that “structured play” the result was that I saw kids at my practice with slumped shoulders or arguing or picking on each other.  I knew that I had been the architect of that practice house of boredom and frustration, and that I would need to tear it down and build a new one, a “fun-house” if I wanted the boys to get the spark back.

Adults, I know, Sometimes it sounds like whining or complaining, and maybe it is.  But it is also just an inexperienced and maybe even impulsive expression by a child of qualities that we want them to be good at:  self-confidence, the courage and ability to communicate what they want, and leadership among their peers.  If they can negotiate with me respectfully and creatively to get more scrimmage time, I’m going to reward that, because they are practicing maturity by rejecting my practice plan in a mature way.

An amazing number of parents would say to me things like, “this is the first season he’s really wanted to go to practice and games,” or “we were thinking of dropping soccer, he didn’t think he was any good, but now, even though he struggles with the skills he thinks he can do it and is enjoying that.”

There’s nothing better for me than that as a coach:  winning a tournament doesn’t even come close.

How did you respond to a challenge?

If you are a parent of a player, can you remember the first time you were in a game and an opponent seemed intent on having you leave the game on a stretcher?  For most of us, it was pretty distracting, trying to play a game while keeping an eye out for an elbow, a shove, or a reckless tackle.  Most of us taught our kids in the pre-school years to share, to play fair with others, and we set the expectation with them that others would do the same. We also sometimes give them the impression that adults will be there to police situations. And then…they enter the world of competitive sports.

I enjoy talking to youth players and hearing what they like and don’t like. Players have told me how it bothers them when coaches during practice or referees during games allow a player to repeatedly foul, sometimes even with intent to hurt, yet do nothing.  It’s not easy to tell kids the hard reality, but it’s important for them to understand that facing up to challenges is a key part of growing up. I’ve told both my son and other players that it is one of those difficult “rites of passage”, and the sooner they overcome fear of physical intimidation the sooner they will return to enjoying the game.

Of course, with the benefit of years of education in the school of hard knocks, I can now act like the old wise Sensei who tells his student, “Ah, young grasshopper, do you not see that Providence has put in front of you those things that you do not like, so that you may become a stronger man by facing up to them?” And they respond, “Dude, you talk weird, and what’s with the ‘grasshopper’ deal, my name’s Joe-Bob-Billy-Bob.”

But seriously, one thing I tell my son is that when an opponent commits fouls it is a sign that he recognizes your skill and speed are superior to his. That’s an important confidence builder for kids when faced with such an opponent – to remember that the opponent is basically admitting your superiority. So my first piece of advice is to continue to do what aggravates your opponent: beat him with skills and speed.

But there will be situations where heavy physical contact cannot be avoided and shouldn’t be feared. And there are situations where it is not due to an opponent on a “headhunting” mission, but just the normal course of play in a contact sport.

With the exception of going for a header, soccer is a sport where a player can maintain a compact, well-balanced stance. I did a little exercise with my son and daughter to show them just how hard it is to unsettle someone who maintains a low, balanced center of gravity. My daughter, who is a year younger than my 11 year old son and probably 25 pounds lighter, took a staggered stance with one foot forward and spread out from the other, knees bent, and weight distributed evenly on her two feet. My son then tried to push her off the stance, and even with some pretty rough pushes, she held her ground. Then, I stood straight upright, with my feet even and about 6 inches apart, and both of them easily pushed me off of my stance. My kids were impressed with how a low, strong, balanced stance allows a much shorter and lighter person to resist the force of a taller and heavier person.

The martial arts of Judo and Aikido are based almost entirely on redirecting the energy of an opponent to your advantage. There is also a philosophy in these martial arts about the connection between overcoming a challenge or struggle and developing our identity. Because of this, I think that some of these martial arts concepts are great for young soccer players too.

I started Judo instruction at an early age. As martial arts go, Judo is to wrestling as Karate is to boxing. Judo is about leverage and center of gravity. A female judo black belt can easily throw an attacking man who is twice her weight to the ground and neutralize his aggression. Aikido, which I studied later,  has two concepts that can help a young soccer player understand the connection between mind and body in a stressful situation. They are the concepts of “Ki” (pronounced like “key”) and “Hara.” Hara is your body’s center of gravity – you can think of it as a point in the middle of your body where you are most balanced and stable. Ki is your inner center of energy – your ability to maintain focus, determination, and confidence no matter what you face in life. To bring your physical Hara and your mental Ki into balance is the goal of the Aikido student.

My blog is not about teaching techniques for tackling or shielding the ball so why am I going down this rabbit hole? Well, because what our kids face in youth soccer is not just about soccer but about life. So, facing up to challenges, whether “fair” or “unfair”, is very much like the Aikido principle of keeping the body’s Hara and the mind’s Ki in balance no matter what the situation. When we get stressed playing sports, we start by unbalancing our body, and that leads to more unbalancing of our mind. That is what our opponent hopes for. We can teach our kids to not give their opponents that satisfaction. They won’t win every challenge, but by practicing balanced body and balanced mind they will improve their chances and enjoy the game more at the same time.

Anticipation, Balance, and Leverage/Redirection of Energy. If your young player gets stressed about being fouled or playing against aggressive opponents, try your own redirection of energy by helping him or her understand some of these concepts, and then practice applying them. It gives your kid a way to take his focus away from the personal stuff (“those guys play dirty” or “I’m not tall/big/strong enough to win that ball”) and re-centers his focus on good techniques for dealing with adversity- in soccer and in his life beyond.

MLS 2011 First Kick....my first thoughts

I'm excited for our kids, because pro soccer in the USA is on the up.  Tonight, we had the LA Galaxy vs. the Seattle Sounders.  Galaxy won (yeah, I'm a Galaxy fan) 1-0 on Brazilian forward Juninho's hard, dipping shot that beat Sounder's keeper Kasey Keller to his right corner.  Here's a link to the video, pretty cool shot, note how he strikes it with the upper, outer surface of his right foot, producing the swerve on the ball that eludes even Keller, who is the former keeper for the US National team.



Landon Donovan also had an awesome run, being fed in on a break past the Sounders defensive line, and he nailed a hard shot that unfortunately hit the crossbar.  Beckham showed nothing spectacular, although he made a stoppage-time yellow-card foul in his own end that demonstrated his intensity for maintaining the Galaxy's clean sheet.

So that is the positive, and let me say there were plenty of plays in the game that were fun to watch.  However, the MLS still plays the ball in the air way too much.  That is a big problem. And I don't quite understand why some of the respected  MLS-oriented soccer blogs don't call them on it more often.

Sure, in the later stages of the game, the Galaxy went into a "prevent defense" formation, and focused on clearing the ball from their own end.  But when they cleared to a forward player, the player rarely seemed to settle the ball and keep close control of it.  What our young players in the USA need to see from the MLS is players who can settle the ball to the ground, keep tight control of it at their feet, and deliver precision passes to teammates. 

There is a lot of talent now in the MLS.  There are a lot of foreign players who have been brought in for their skills.  Let's see it, guys.  Let's see that Barcelona-type ball control.  You have the skills, now let's build that culture, right here, right now, in the MLS, in the USA.

Didn't we play in rain and mud when we were kids?

My son and I had a frustrating Saturday morning.  He needed to be at a field at 8:15am for warmup for a 9:00am kickoff.  He was actually supposed to play two matches back to back for different squads - he was excited, I was excited.  The drive is almost an hour, so off we went at 7:20 under clear blue skies.  It had rained hard on Wednesday, but not since.

The club who we were playing ended up closing the fields due to "poor conditions" and canceling both matches - they did this after all of us were already driving our sons to the match!  They knew the distance we had to travel, so they must have known the posted cancellation on their web site was unlikely to reach most of us before we got to the fields.  Ridiculous, considering that it wasn't a sudden wicked storm that blew in - they could have notified us on Friday night.

 The immediate frustration of our screwed up Saturday morning is not what I'm blogging about.  This is about a trend I see toward clubs canceling matches.  They are canceled because there is currently rain falling, and they are canceled because rain fell 3 days earlier.  Even our own club seems to have a haphazard approach to determining if fields will be open, and our club has also been guilty of closing fields within an hour or so of the scheduled start of a match.  I can only guess that, absent lightning danger, they are trying to "save their fields" for games later in the season.

No, I do not claim that I walked five miles to and from school every day when I was a kid, uphill both ways and in two feet of snow.  But I do remember playing in some horrible conditions.  I remember playing with a kit so wet with rain that it seemed I had jumped in a lake.  As for field conditions, I remember playing a couple early morning games on a field where the mud had frozen solid and the puddles of water on the field had frozen.  Going for a ball one time my cleat hit the puddle and I basically skated across it, hit the frozen mud on the far side of the frozen puddle, and took a dive onto the tundra.

The fields at the club where we were supposed to play are in chronically poor condition.  So the idea that they were saving them for something, as though by not playing a couple of matches today they would be magically transformed to resemble a PGA fairway, is ridiculous.  And when clubs cancel matches too readily, they are cheating young players out of important lessons in learning to handle whatever conditions (in the sky or on the field) that are thrown at them.

I am just relating a Dad's perspective on all of this.  I am not a groundskeeper, so I may underestimate how much damage my son's teams would have done to the pitch today.  But I don't care, and here is why.  Clubs have fields to play matches on.  If a field can't handle having matches played on it in anything less than 4 or 5 days of dry weather as well as dry game day weather, then it doesn't deserve to be "saved for the rest of the season."  No, the kids deserve to play, and if there are a few more sections of dirt for the rest of the season, I guess club management needs to do a little more off season work on soil and drainage. 

That's not my son's job, his job is to get up at 6:30 on a sunny Saturday morning and go play two matches.  And he really doesn't care if he plays on dirt, he just wants to play.

At your kid's soccer match, everyone has one job - including parents

Back when I coached, I would see my son or his teammates try to wear too many hats while they were on the pitch.  I wanted to come up with a simple, direct way to tell him and his buddies to stop stressing and just focus on their own job.

They would dispute calls or gesture to the referee.  They would tell teammates what they needed to do (usually "you needed to pass it to me") or where they screwed up (particularly destructive to a team when done right after they've let a goal in - most kids know what they did wrong, and if not, the coach can tell them).  With older (say, above U15) players, a team captain might speak with the ref about a call or a carded foul, and a goalkeeper or central defender may be vocal directing teammate movement on the field.  But with younger players, and particularly when done randomly by whatever player feels like opening his mouth, it's a problem.  I needed a Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) slogan so young players focused on their own stuff.

Here is what I came up with.  I told him you can only have one job at a match:  you can be player, you can be coach, or you can be referee.  If you want to play in the game, which is by far the most fun job, then you have to give up trying to be a referee and a coach at the same time.  He didn't like this restriction on his employment options, but knew it made sense - that he had enough to focus on.  In a way, it makes things so much LESS stressful to focus on one job.  Coaching and Refereeing are stressful, kids.  Calls, or non-calls, can be frustrating, so if my son wants to tell me, off the field and after the game, how he thinks a ref missed a call I'll listen.  Sometimes it's a way to discuss certain laws of the game, or just let it out.  But even at the top levels of the sport, you have to move on and you can't do it while leaning on that "bad officials" crutch, as this really well-written blog piece by an Arsenal fan regarding coach Arsene Wenger's obsession with the officiating after a loss to Barcelona.

But I realized that while my (obviously brilliant) "one job at a game" saying helped him, I wasn't following it myself: I sometimes acted like I was player, coach, and referee at the same time, and I wasn't any of those, I was "Dad".  So I had to add a new job to the job jar : "you can have one job at a match:  player, coach, referee, or PARENT."  Hint:  If you are sitting in a folding chair with a coffee and wearing Crocs, talking with a group of adults also with folding chairs and coffees and Crocs, I think your job application for parent was already accepted.

My man, Number 7

It's difficult for parents to do.  Sports are emotional, that's why we love them.  And parenting our kids is emotional too, so the mix of the two can get us pretty fired up.  I guess it's a matter of how frequent and how loud a parent's comments are that determine if it crosses the line.  As kids get older and more skilled, and their coaches are working on certain techniques or tactics that parents don't even know about, it can really confuse a player to have parents shouting instructions during a match from the sideline.  In the end, it's your child and you have to make the call whether you are helping him or distracting him, but shouting instructions (or negative comments) to someone else's kid?  That is out of bounds.  I'm not paying other parents to coach my child during a match, that's what the coaching staff is for!  The worst is hearing a parent of a player on the opposing team call out my son for a foul, or worse, at a recent tournament I guess a Mom was sick of seeing my son slice through their defenders and she actually yelled "trip that number 7"!  I wasn't imagining it because three of us heard it.  Parents, bad idea to shout at someone else's kid, even worse if that kid is on the opposing team.

The other area parents get too involved in is officiating.  You know the saying, "the squeaky wheel gets the grease."  Well, I figured out that the opposite is true when it comes to parents repeatedly shouting at the ref for stuff as MEANINGLESS as which team is awarded a throw-in.  OK, I've seen a loud chorus of parents sway a ref to make a call, but only if you've built some goodwill with the ref.  If a team has parents that from the opening whistle are telling the ref what he or she got wrong, the ref often develops a curious case of sudden deafness syndrome.

Parents have a tough time seeing their kid get fouled or injured.  But soccer is a contact sport, part of the lesson for our kids out there is to learn not to be intimidated and to handle situations for themselves.  Besides, all parents, even me, are too biased to make accurate calls on many fouls.  Soccer referees sometimes know they missed a call, and will try to compensate for it by calling a foul on the player or team later for something that otherwise might have been ignored.  I have been at one or two matches where there truly is a player who is on a headhunting mission, and it is taking place away from the ball so the referee and coach don't see it.  In that case, parents need to make someone aware of it.  But again, it almost always gets handled without your intervention, and just being there often gives our kids the confidence to handle stuff on their own.  And really, that's our goal, isn't it?

One job at a match.  Coach, Player, Parent, Official.  And a parent's job does not include directing or criticizing someone else's kids.  Remember: the player job may be the most fun, but the parent job is easiest, so fellow parents, it's the weekend, let's be lazy.

Is there something better than year-round "organized" soccer?

I came across a blog on CBS Sports Community and the topic was "Is Club Soccer the Problem?".  Eye catching title, with a lot of follow up comments.

The original post I found a bit ridiculous.  For one thing, he likened the development of soccer skills to, say, those of football.  It's unfortunate that so many think that skill (on the ball, and years of practicing it in soccer) can be substituted with athleticism (the primary determinant of football success).  Athleticism of a good level certainly helps in soccer, but it doesn't determine winners and losers as it does in soccer.

One point from the orignal poster did get me thinking.  He said we lose a lot of soccer players in high school to other sports, when the demands to play year-round in soccer prohibit them from playing other seasonal sports.  Hmm....I agree the demands are high, and it forces kids to choose, but as the bar is raised on soccer in the USA is there any alternative?  It gets back to how hard it is to develop both great skill on the ball and intuition for situations that develop in a game that is very fluid and does not have set plays as do football, basketball, or baseball.

Maybe the question isn't "how do we allow soccer players to play other sports" but "how do we develop the most well-rounded soccer player while keeping it fun so that they want to play year-round?"  I have an idea on that one, and it's roots are in the proverbial dirt streets and vacant lots where Pele learned to love the ball and love the game.

 We all structure the heck out of our kids these days.  I think part of it is fear of letting them run around, unsupervised, in light of information we get about predators, bullying, etc.  But the more we lock their days into tight time slots and on top of that have rules and supervision within the activities in each of those time slots, we take away our kids' abilities to learn to think "on the fly".  Those abilities matter alot in soccer, and are the kind of thing we see in players from Brazil, Argentina, and Spain.

The US soccer federation was talking to former Germany Coach Jurgen Klinsmann about becoming head coach of the U.S. National Team.  Word has it that Klinsmann wanted to turn some things on their head.  Here is what a blogger, again on CBS Sports Community, said he was looking at doing:

He wanted to implement a scouting system that got away from college, the olympic development program, and the expensive club system. He wanted scouts to visit pickup games in the cities and basically look at the next layer. What kind of talent is out there on the street that we're missing?

I can see, based on existing ties and financial interests, why that did not fly with US Soccer.  But we don't need to throw away ODP and clubs, we just need to carve out unstructed, street-soccer time for our kids.  The last two winters, the parents of players on my son's academy team have signed up for an indoor league.  We all agreed to some guidelines that we would have NO coaching (either from the two dads we selected to supervise game substitutions and lineups or from the parent's sideline!).  The play and creativity that has resulted has been really fun to watch.  Indoor was the perfect setting to set up this "structured, yet uncoached" setting for our boys, with the pace of the indoor game and the walls putting creative thinking on your feet at a premium.

In high-school each winter we had indoor soccer intramurals in the basketball gym.  I used to love those games as much as any game in any sport I'd ever played.  It was fast, creative, and we actually officiated ourselves.  That would be the only improvement I could see on my son's indoor league, if we could sometimes remove the officials, I think it would actually result in a cleaner game after the two teams realized there was nothing to gain from reckless fouls.

So, we have to acknowledge with the level of competition in soccer these days, it will crowd out participation in other sports the higher a kid goes, but that's not the issue.  The issue is if you son or daughter is playing multiple seasons of soccer, make sure some of it is uncoached free play, where they can really connect with why they love the sport and enjoy "thinking on the fly".

The Things We do for Love (of a soccer club)

Manchester City soccer fan Chris Atkinson was so excited that his team was going to sign Brazilian soccer star Kaka, he strolled over to the local tatoo parlour and had Kaka tattooed on his chet.

Unfortunately...Kaka never signed with Manchester. But another Brazilian star did, Robinho. 

Off went our young fan to the tattoo parlor. Now he had Kaka and Robinho among his roughly 25 tattoos. 

Alas, Robinho skipped town to play elsewhere.   Atkinson wass rather bummed, but he's got a solution. He says when he has kids some day, he'll name them Kaka and Robinho. 

Unfortunately...the kid thing may take a while.   Currently he does not have a girlfriend.  Go figure.

When you and your son both know "good job" is phony

I came across a recent interview with former US Men’s Team star Tab Ramos.  I remember those great USA teams he had with Claudio Reyna (see the Amazon link on the right for his book, I highly recommend it!) and others in the 90's.  In the article he had a lot of great insight on the direction of youth soccer development…OK, Here’s the “But”:  the tone of his comments about parents bothered me, perhaps because I heard a similar tone from my own son’s coach not too long ago.

When adults reach for a label to stick on another adult is pushes the sides apart.  Tab does that with the “over-protective” moniker, saying parents’ comments are irrelevant to him, and saying parents need to stick to saying something like "good job".  Why is that bad?  Because Coaches need Moms and Dads, and Parents need Coaches.  More accurately, our kids need both.  I've mentioned this to friends who are coaches or parents as a “triangle of responsibility between all three.  

If any line of the triangle is a conflict or the line doesn't exist (one side just ignoring the other), it distracts and stresses the player.  Many parents worry about this potential for conflict, and so in the interest of keeping peace they allow coaches to silence them and make them feel that if they are actively involved with their child they are automatically "over-protective" or a "know it all" or whatever.   This creates a situation where coaches sometimes don't feel a need to be respectful with their players' parents.  It's humorous to think that we are the customers in this relationship (we pay, right?), yet it's a business with a sign on the door that says  "the customer is always wrong"!

I'll be fair, parents say some dumb things about coaching.  If a parent said "our coaches only care about the A-team winning", a coach in our academy-level program hearing that would justifiably take offense.  Why?  Because, like Tab’s comment, it's a cheap-shot oversimplification of the complexity of what they do.  Parents who have been around know that coaches of a good size academy program with multiple game-day squads have a hundred variables they are trying to match up on any given weekend.  The variable of wanting to win a certain game, while never a bad thing, is just one among many and hopefully is not the ultimate priority.  

The point is, Parenting and Coaching both require lots of juggling (excuse the pun), and have complexities that you can’t fully understand unless you live it day to day.

Parenting a youth athlete is more than just getting him there on time (OK, I'm working on that one) and saying "good job" on the car ride home, as Tab seems to indicate.  There are commitment, character, and sportsmanship issues, often expressed in the effort we see in our child, that I did not sign away each month when we sign our check.  The things that go beyond soccer, the life lessons, are still well within a parent's domain and parents should not let a coach or a teacher influence them to neglect this responsibility.  Comments after the game by parents about technique and tactics generally just antagonize a kid, lesson learned there from years of being my son's rec coach!  And as our kids grow, we are more and more out of the loop to comment on technique anyway- they are moving beyond that stage and we should be glad they are.  But there are two other issues in particular that coaches and parents should recognize as a common responsibility:

• Focus and Effort:  by showing these, the young athlete demonstrates a respect for themself, as well as dedication in using their God-given talents to the best of their ability.
• Discipline and Sportsmanship:  by showing these, the young athlete shows they understand they do not act alone but are part of a greater community.  They understand that selfish or lazy behavior can let others down who have put trust in them. 

If the work rate isn't there in a match, no one benefits from a parent giving a phony "good job."  Straight talk should not be done when emotions in our kid are high, and that is usually the case when you are still on the grounds or in the car afterward.  And lets clarify that if parents have that negative, "nothing's good enough" tone and excessive micro-management of their actions, like my own father did, kids tune out and their influence on them is lost.    So with care not to do those things, the message must be delivered and not deferred for too long.  The child needs to reflect on it while the memories are fresh and clear.

I finally learned through experience from coaching my son's rec teams that I had to stop giving unsolicited advice.  I was pretty intense as a coach: encouraging, but intense.  A season or two before I stopped coaching his teams (when he "graduated" to the academy program) I saw that I sometimes drove him crazy with my over-analysis.  It was enough for me to tell him and the rest of my family that I was imposing post-game rules for myself - I wouldn't give him my analysis of the match unless he wanted to talk about it.  It was incredibly hard to keep my mouth shut, but I got better at it.

But is it really always wrong or damaging for parents to talk with their kids about technique or tactics?  I think our kids are capable of more maturity than any of us adults sometimes give them credit for.  As our kids get older and more experienced in soccer, they are exposed to lots of different ideas, techniques, and tactics.  They have different coaches in different leagues and seasons, and they watch a variety of high school, college, and pro matches as well.  A mom or dad's soccer talk with their child, used with discretion and timing so not to antagonize them, is just another voice (a voice at times other than DURING a match, of course, that is distracting even to adults!).

Kids develop maturity when they are allowed to navigate through what they see and hear from multiple adults and apply what works best for them.  Building maturity and decision-making skills in a youth athlete are goals that coaches and parents have in common, and are lessons that extend beyond the field.  Parents and coaches won't be as successful achieving that goal as partners if we just abide by some silent truce between us.  My son and his U11 teammates have a quickly developing  "bs detector", and giving them true observations is a way to treat them like the young men they are becoming.  Our kids can handle more of the "raw truth" with each season, and they can also increasingly sniff out bs if adults serve it up to them.  As long as parents and coaches don't get on a power trip, a few differences of opinion among us won't scar our kids.

In addition to the rules for myself that I mentioned, I made a few rules for my son for that post-game period.  I did not allow my son to vent negative comments about officials or bad-mouth an opponent.  Mainly, I didn't want him to fall into that "victim" mentality" after a loss or tie.  That rule started when I noticed my son sometimes obsessed about bad or missed calls after a loss, so I just  said that stuff is off limits right after a game.  Doesn't mean I didn't agree with his opinion, just that I wouldn't jump on the "blame" bandwagon with him.  I also have topics that I may discuss with my son's Mom that I would not include him in, it would be inappropriate.  So a coach shouldn't assume that if a parent is agitated and brings up an issue that the parent has also "pissed in the well" and made negative comments to his child.  We can go back to my triangle and see, there is a line across the bottom of the triangle that does not include the player.


Instead of saying parents should "stay out of it", coaches would do better to simply ask parents to "stay out of the results business."  There is a very important difference in focusing on a child's effort versus focusing on the results they achieve.  Here is a scenario:  a child just mishit a potential game-winner.  The parent says loudly and publicly, "why didn't you keep your head down, you weren't even close."  Contrast that with a parent who has seen his child looking lazy in marking opponents or moving too slowly to keep up with game transitions.  The parent tells his child, "I could tell the other team really wanted that victory, when you play a team like that you can't be out there walking around if you want to win."

There is a big difference in the methods of those two parents.  But because the similarity is that in both cases the parent tells the child something they don't want to hear, the fine points of difference between an enlightened and an ignorant parenting strategy are lost on others.  They see the child's negative reaction, and assume they are both a case of too much parental involvement.

Now, let me talk about a scenario closer to home, and one that Tab Ramos actually hit on:  a parent commenting on playing time.  A parent noticing that his son is sitting out a lot is not necessarily an obsessive, over-protective parent.  It canalso be a parent that has worked hard with his child to get them to demonstrate commitment and effort, and now wonders about the reciprocity in that child-club relationship.  I brought something about my son's playing time after a tournament, and I knew the danger was that I could be pegged as a Dad who obsesses about time and stats, which I don't.  I often don't even know when the half will end when someone asks me!  It was not obsession, but simply that concern that pops up in any relationship about give and take.

My son sensed I was irritated about something in that instance, and he asked.  I told him I just didn't understand why he got so little playing time at the first tournament when he had played and contributed a lot with that same squad in the fall.  I added "Look, your coach mentioned something to me about being late for a couple of warmups, and that is my failure, and I am going to have to fix that.  But I'd just like to know if there is something else.  Have you been giving it your all in practice, are there things you could help me understand?." 

I got a well thought out answer from my son, and he actually opened up about where he felt he had "slacked" a bit in some practices and how a couple times he had been confused about a certain skill that other kids picked up more quickly, and a couple of kids teased him about.  I found this similar to some things we had worked on with his school due to his ADHD, so I asked him to show me one of the moves that had stumped him in practice.  He took a ball out and worked the skill several times on the living room floor.  He used some skills he's learned from tutoring: if something like that had him feeling "inferior" he could always find somewhere, such as at home, where he could work it at a slower pace and break it into simple steps that helped him to nail it down. 

My son's response had a maturity that impressed me.  Funny thing, he had an issue that was bothering him over that same week or two, but it was different from the playing time issue that had bothered me.  With him, it was that the team he played on in the second tournament was a mix where it was very difficult for him to find guys on the field to work with.  He mentioned that his pairings up top at forward meant that most of his passes when working an attack just resulted in his teammate losing possession or missing a great opportunity to strike. 

I told him I knew that player rotations were good for the overall squad and it's a basic academy concept, but that I understood his frustration since sometimes it results in big differences in teammate skills.

About a week later, my son came to me without prompting, and just said, "Hey Dad, you know how I told you sometimes I felt I slacked in some practice drills, well I'm not doing that, I'm working at everything.  And the team stuff doesn't matter, I know that I can play awesome whatever team they put me on, it's fine."

Perfect outcome, and most importantly my son found a new maturity in looking at practice and teammates, and a hidden cache of passion for the sport that I'm not sure he knew was in there. 

So, as coaches ask us to trust them, sometimes they need to trust us parents.  When we act like idiots and shout things like "shoot, shoot" from the sidelines when our child is at midfield and has an opponent in his face, we cut our chances of that, for sure. 

As young players grow, we Moms and Dads must move away from the Barney days of "it's all great" and find opportunities to talk about things with our kids on a more adult, or young adult, level.  We need to let them drive it, let them indicate what they are ready for, and keep OUR opinions out of it, but raising an issue about effort, teamwork, or sportsmanship when appropriate is a key part of parenting a young athlete.  Sometimes the simple "good job, you tried hard" comment isn't reality, and it's in those situations when real parents step up.

College Soccer is our 600 pound gorilla, so let's embrace it (him)

I’ve read some comments by soccer writers that express fear that the aggressive recruiting of South American players by European clubs will contribute to the decline of the “beautiful game.”  How?  Well, the thought is it breaks up the tight soccer culture in those countries by encouraging in-country clubs to develop and market their best players for export.  If these export markets favor a more physical game and place less value on some of the technically-skilled creativity that South American soccer is known for, then the homegrown style of play and players with traditional South American style get pushed aside.

In this scenario, clubs and their directors of player development become more like Wall Street bankers as they try to fit their players to what they think will be most valuable on the world soccer market.  Of course, every country seeks ways to create an export surplus (get more money selling things to other countries than you pay out to buy their stuff).  With a bad economy worldwide and a lot of poverty in the South American communities where many players come from, the transfer fees that can be brought in for a player mean a lot to these clubs and communities.  On top of that, many of these players send money from their salary back home to help support family members.  It’s probably not an overstatement to say that the money exchanged can mean life or death for some in the community.

We had a supply and demand issue a few years back involving South America that has some peculiar similarities.  When we (North Americans and Europeans) first got worried about deforestation in the Amazon and other rainforest areas of Central and South America, we approached South Americans with an attitude that the problem was they were supplying too many products that caused loss of rainforest areas.  We spent most of our efforts telling them what they couldn't do to earn income for their families, but little effort on identifying how to share responsibility or educating our own folks about being smart about our demand and use of those products.  We loved exotic hardwoods, coffee, beef, and other products that caused the deforestation, yet we forgot that if we didn’t ask for so much of it, they wouldn’t cut the forests down to provide it.

I’m not bringing this up to analyze what is going on with South American soccer players.  I even doubt that transfers of these players to European clubs is a danger to the Latin soccer style.  What I’m interested in is looking at what forces shape youth soccer development in the USA, since supply and demand forces affect us too.  The differences are big, and relevant to how we can support and even influence the sport as fans.

OK, so what forces of supply and demand influence youth soccer here at home?  A few players each year will go directly to pro clubs: MLS or Internationally.  But the number of players who go to college programs is enormous compared to that.  Also, very few clubs with youth players in the USA have any transfer fee rights if a pro club comes knocking, so demand from pro clubs is much less likely to influence youth development programs in the way it does in other countries.  Part of this is due to our “pay to play” setup in the USA versus the recruitment-based approach taken by European or South American youth development programs who are oriented toward sending players on to professional contracts. 

Also, while colleges don’t pay transfer fees to youth clubs and don’t pay salaries to players, they have scholarship money.  We moms and dads like scholarship money…a lot.  Think about it this way:  if you had to make a bet with your child: a 1 in a million chance that he gets a multi-million dollar pro contract but if he doesn’t he lives in poverty, or a 1 in a hundred chance that he gets most of his college education paid for and can get a good job, where would you want to “bet” your child?  We may hear about the superstar Brazilians who make it, but for all those that don’t, they have few job opportunities.

So really, the college game is the 600 pound gorilla that influences youth development in the USA.  If we want our style of play and our soccer culture to go in a good direction, that is the pivot point for the whole thing.  Unlike in other countries, the big influence here is not foreign pro clubs, domestic pro clubs, or even the national teams, its really the college game.

But when I read articles and blogs about soccer, it seems like there is so much focus on how the national team or the MLS will influence the growth and direction of the sport here.  I’m going to say that we have misguided ourselves.  Yes, it all matters – TV ratings for World Cup games influence advertisers to spend money on soccer broadcasts and sponsorships, MLS success can give kids a local pro team to root for and stars to follow, etc.  But the way the college game is played, its continued health and creation of scholarship opportunities, and the types of players in demand at top college programs will be the single biggest influence on both youth programs below it and the growth and success of MLS clubs and national teams above it.

When I watched last year’s College Cup winning Akron squad, I was excited about the style of play that was dominating the NCAA tournament.  I saw crisp and rapid passes, players who were really confident on the ball and used lots of surfaces of their feet, and a lot of play with the ball on the ground.  That is a description that would fit Barcelona pretty well.  No surprise, that Akron squad placed a record 5 players in the first round of the MLS draft.

Was what I saw just a flash in the pan?  The year before, I was very unimpressed with the play of then-champion Virginia, it looked like that overly-defensive, slow, plodding, long-ball stuff that can give the college game a bad name and put fans to sleep.  I hope I saw an emerging style in that Akron squad, a style that will come to dominate the college game.  As fans, we each play a very small role in the overall demand side of our soccer economics, but what if we all did our best to get behind and support the college programs that get us excited, that show us a game that is inspiring and skillful to watch?  College soccer’s influence on the future of the sport is overlooked by many, but it’s evolution may actually hold the key to moving the sport to the next level in the US.

The Monster Under the Bed, and Other Distractions

How long do you wait to talk straight with your child after a match?  If you are like me, the praise for a well-played game flows easily, but I get this guilt about mentioning something that I observed after a poor outing, probably a good thing, because emotions need to settle first.  Parents must particularly avoid the stereotypical car-ride-home-armchair-quarterback-advice syndrome (known as crhaqa syndrome, the only known cure is heavy traffic, which takes Dad’s attention away from the game).  However, our boys will soon be young men, so to me it’s phony to just ignore the uncomfortable yet important lessons in every game.

Let me be clear, unless your child is at U8 or below you should already have delegated the skills issues to the coaches.  I kick the ball once or twice a week with my son, watch an occasional practice and see his games on the weekend, but even with that level of involvement his coaches know his skills better than I do, and we don’t know exactly what the directives were to them for a match, what they wanted them to work on, etc.  We also know how painful it is to hear a parent criticize their kid by stating the obvious, like “you shouldn’t have passed that ball where they could intercept it” or the like.  So no, I’m not talking about the mechanics of the game or dwelling on a mistake that your child may already be dwelling on too much.  I’m talking about conquering fears and tuning out distractions.

Let me explain.  In my son’s second game today, I saw a distracted and maybe even a bit fearful boy, definitely not the guy I’ve seen play the game so well so many times and put in hat-trick performances this season.  It made me rewind the tape in my head to my days playing youth sports and my own fears and distractions and bad games.  I remembered another life lesson that came from a sports field.  I remembered how important it is for our kids to learn to conquer the monster under the bed.

Prior to high school I played lots of soccer and at least a couple seasons here and there of lots of other sports.  But until high school I had only played one season of Pop Warner football, and didn’t play running back, my dream position.  I wanted to test myself.  I had friends who played, and I loved playing pickup games in a yard or in the street, why not?

So, I joined the freshman football team in high school, and after initial practice and pre-season, I made it to starting tailback for the first two games.  It was tough and the coach was tough.  One time in an intra-squad scrimmage, I remember dropping a screen pass on the left flank when I was wide open (hey, a wide receiver I was not!).  Coach had just rolled that play out to us, and was pissed that I blew it.  He stopped the scrimmage, grabbed me by my facemask, screamed some unprintable things that included “when you are open, catch the damn ball!” just before throwing me to the ground by my facemask and telling me to run some number of laps before returning to the scrimmage.  But that didn’t deter me.

I scored the first touchdown of the season in our home opener on a right-end sweep, play 2-4-8 in the playbook.  So many years later, I can still see a replay in my head, the safety and I racing for the corner of the end zone, and me diving in just before him.  Then I got severe bronchitis (I had it about five years earlier, too, and both times were miserable).  I was out of school and out of practice for almost two weeks.  I had too much time to doubt myself, too much time to think, and also stressed about catching up with classes.  Could I find the resolve to go back out on the field and compete for my spot?

When I returned to school, I met with coach and told him that I needed to quit.  He tried to change my mind, telling me I was important to the team, but the monster under the bed got the best of me:  “you’re not really that good a running back”, “you are not fast/strong/big enough”, “it will be too hard to get back in shape now”.  I turned in my pads, and still hate the thought of that day 30 years later.  Sure, I was new to football and still had other sports to play, but the point is I let that voice of doubt from under the bed keep me from going for it.

There were plenty of sports that I played as a kid where I wasn’t great.  I remember wanting so bad to be a pitcher for my little league baseball team when I was 11.  I usually played outfield – I’m left handed so if you aren’t going to play pitcher or first base, out you go.  Pitching went pretty well, then once at practice we were playing a pickup game against another team and my coach was standing in as umpire.  I threw a high fast ball a little too high and caught him in the chin with it.  I found myself playing outfield after that!  I’m sure there was more about my lack of control with the ball than that one pitch, but that was the one I remember, obviously.  

I still have the first place trophy from that little-league baseball team, and the fact that I played outfield instead of pitcher for that team because of my crappy pitching doesn’t bother me at all.  I can look back at it, laugh at the funny story, and know I tried my best but just didn’t make the cut.  So I’m here to say that going for it, trying your best, but not reaching your goal will not bother you five years or even five days afterward.  It won't.  But letting your doubts creep in to the point where you don’t go for it, that sticks with you, and you hate that you can't get that chance back.

I know we parents are our kids’ number one fans, we have seen those times when they are just brilliant, and we call or tweet grandma about it.  But it’s a very rare child that doesn’t also get those periods, hopefully brief, of self doubt.  If we are attentive as parents, and approach our kids carefully when we see it, we can help them get past it.  Kids sometimes don’t know that we adults have gone through the same things as them, so it’s important to tell them our own stories in dealing with that stuff when we were young.  I sat with my son tonight, and told him the story above, about how I regret to this day that I did not conquer my fears and put my football pads back on and take the field.  I told him that at times today it looked like he doubted himself and was hesitating a lot, or trying to dump the ball off as quickly as he could after he received it.  I said I wasn’t telling him that stuff to criticize him, I just wanted him to know that if he was doubting himself, it happens to everyone, and I hoped he knew that I thought he was a really gifted player and had no reason to doubt himself.  I told him I hoped he could learn from my experience.

He sat, listened and nodded, and then we hugged before he went to bed.

Tim Howard's Courage

Tim Cahill & Tim Howard, 2010

Think of Tim Howard on the field as starting goalkeeper, either for the US Men's National Team or his pro club Everton FC. A pillar of strength, right?  Shouting orders to defenders, charging into the crowd to grab a corner kick out of the air, diving to make a punching one-handed save on a hard shot.  You would not think that this is a guy that lives daily with an incurable disorder, one that he was diagnosed with when he was 10 years old. 

From that young age, he was teased by other kids for the body twitches, the ticks of the head, or sounds that he would make that are the major symptoms of the condition he has, something known as Tourette Syndrome. Playing soccer and basketball were Tim's escape from feeling sorry for himself or worrying about trying to hide what he had been born with. On the field, it didn't matter, he learned to focus in the moment of the game. When talking to a group of kids who also have Tourette's, Howard recently said, ""Mentally it took a toll. Not just from other kids who didn't know better and would make fun of it. It took a toll trying to hide it, and so I stopped trying to hide it. And when I stopped, I learned I could manage it, especially when I was on the field. It was the place I could go where nothing else mattered, just me and the ball. It was my sanctuary."

 

At the age of 20, Howard was voted MLS Goalkeeper of the Year. 2 years later, Manchester United paid $4 million to get him traded to their club. Even after proving his abilities, adults who should know better still made fun of him. Writers at newspapers in England thought Manchester's Manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, had lost his mind: they wrote articles that called Howard "disabled", "retarded", and even worse things. Living in a foreign country, being insulted in newspapers, how did Howard respond?  He focused on his job, and was named Goalkeeper of the Year for the English Premier League in 2004, and became the first American to win the British FA Cup.  Those who had been taunting him started to shut up.

While Sir Alex still maintains a friendship with Howard and Howard has kept his house in the Manchester area, Ferguson had brought in Dutch star keeper Edwin Van Der Sar before the start of the 2005-2006 season.  So Howard was loaned to Everton FC in 2006, and signed a permanent contract there in 2007. In the 2008-2009 season, Howard set the Everton club record for the most clean sheets (shutouts) for an entire season. With season after season now of outstanding performances for Everton, Howard is often cited as one of the top keepers now in the Premier League. Tim Mulqueen, a longtime goalkeeping coach for US national and U-20 teams and a friend of Howard's, sums it up well, "With all his great ability, the best thing about Tim is that he has the heart of a champion. No matter what happens, he'll fight through it." 

This post was written by Brian Herbert.