My Start In Soccer

“It’s Time to Get Ready for Soccer”

I was playing in the yard at my friend Kenny’s house one day when his father came out putting a stop to our fun.  “It’s time to get ready for soccer.”  He said.  Kenny played on a team and Mr. Ken was the coach.  Not wanting to end our day I asked if I could come along to watch.  “Do you want to join soccer?”

— It sounded like such a commitment.  I would love to say that I fearlessly jumped at the chance, but the truth is that I backed away.  I was a baseball player.

[I loved playing baseball.  In our old neighborhood, my dad had started a league for all the kids.  I say a league, but I think it was pick-up baseball every Saturday morning in the schoolyard.  Kids showed up, we practiced a little, played a few innings, then everybody walked home.  It was fun.  It was free.  It was easy.  Just kids playing a game.  Between baseball and shooting baskets (trying to) on the neighbor’s hoop in the alley behind the house, my brother and I stayed pretty busy.]

“What’s soccer?”  I asked.

— I just wanted to watch.  At that time I was your classic early-developer.  By seven years old I was already fairly tall and strong.  I had good coordination and was very fast.  My dad played college football, but was also a very good baseball and tennis player.  I enjoyed playing most sports and was pretty good at any where speed was an advantage.

Mr. Ken wouldn’t budge.  “You can come to the game if you join soccer.”  Which I rightly understood to mean that if I didn’t, then I couldn’t.  I guess his point was – why watch when you can play?  Well, there were no winners that day because I didn’t feel good about asking my parents for $10 without any notice.  So I didn’t ask.

You read that price tag correctly, $10.

That’s what it cost to sign up to play a season of soccer in 1978.  I did sign up the next year and by then Mr. Ken had most of the eligible neighbors playing too.  Including my brother, seven players from the team plus the coach all lived within about 100 yards of each other.  It was great.  We even got a pair of tube socks to keep!  And, as luck would have it, a coach who cared about the game and about sharing it with kids.  We were very fortunate in a lot of ways, all the kids in the neighborhood would play every sport you could think of in the street out in front of our houses.  Touch football, wiffle ball, curb ball (we invented that one to suit our curb), broom ball -which graduated to street hockey, and yes, even soccer.

(We needed a little more space for baseball so we played in the field behind the houses.)

We used minimal equipment, made up rules modifying the games to fit our surroundings, and just played.  Every couple of weeks you would have a little fist fight over something then went right back to playing an hour later or at most the next day.  No conflict was ever bigger than the desire to play, so we resolved everything ourselves and parents rarely had to mediate.  Organizing our play and even the occasional fights were no big deal.

…What was a big deal, which I had no clue about at the time, was that I had a critical advantage in my athletic development.  Without this one thing nothing else would really have been possible.  Was it speed?  Size?  Desire?  No.  These things are certainly helpful, but the one thing I had that was most important was (drumroll…) — access.

I had ACCESS to:

•  PLACE to play – backyards, the street, the schoolyard
• PEOPLE to play with – my brother, neighbors, my dad
• LOW COST – to participate in the league and no cost in the street
• EQUIPMENT – we kept it simple and needed very little

“An APPLE a day keeps the doctor away.”

Access to these things is crucial for the growth of healthy kids and healthy athletes. I was very fortunate to have parents who allowed me to pursue what I liked to do without pushing me to try everything that I might be good at.  Baseball and soccer were the only organized sports that I ever joined.  I liked them the best.  By the seventh grade I was playing on travel soccer and baseball teams (travel meant 30 minutes away in those days).  I was enjoying soccer more, so I chose to stop playing baseball on a team.  I still played in the schoolyard because I liked baseball, but I was all in on soccer.  For me, it was and is the greatest game.  I played for some good coaches, some not so good, some poor coaches, and even a few excellent ones.  And I learned from each of them.

What I have learned from looking back at the process is the importance of access.  The common denominator among the world’s best soccer players is that they lived within walking distance of where they played soccer.  Whether it was the street, the park, or Ajax’s stadium across the street in the case of Johan Cruyff, access was and is tremendously important.

Whether you are a player, parent, or coach, think of what you can do to increase ACCESS for yourself and others without spending one dime.  Minimal cost is important because kids need to be able to take the lead on their own in planning and organizing play.

Think about this and talk about this.  We have a lot of smart people out there.  These are our human resources.  We are much too quick to throw money at problems in this country.  I’m beginning to think that our soccer problems are nourished by money.  We keep feeding our money to these problems and they grow and multiply.  Let’s think, look at our past results and learn our lessons.

We should try “growing smaller” for a change, instead of striving for ever “bigger and better”.

Swap the satellite view for the microscope…to see the details that really matter to find effective solutions.

Mike