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".