What Do You Coach?

WHICH DO YOU COACH…The Game, The Team, or The Player?

I have to admit that I too have been a part of the system I am condemning here.  But we can all learn to be much better than this.

Of course, the answer to the title question depends on the level of the game.  Coaching varies tremendously from a senior professional team, to college, to youth.  The problem comes when we see so many coaches at the youth level who only know, or are only aware of one way. “You can’t coach young players like professionals.”   It sounds simple enough, but what does it mean?

It means that we can’t just coach the “Xs & Os” to young players so that they can survive the game.  If that’s what’s happening, then they are just not ready. Like crushing up yucky medicine in yummy ice cream, we have to learn how to feed the game to young players and stop blaming them for not being good enough.  It’s as if we have made winning too important to wait for players to learn how to do it. We must adapt the game to suit them so that they learn it at their pace.  We need smaller numbers, smaller fields, and less external emphasis on winning.  The desire to win must come from the player rather than from adults telling them how important it is.  Young players have to be ready to digest what we feed them in order to thrive.  Right now in the U.S. we force the game on them, and make no mistake, they are choking on it.

One example is the restrictive action of assigning specific roles to young players.  It might help the team win a game if the best defender is sacrificed to man mark the other team’s big threat, but what have the players learned?  It is just too one-dimensional for the early stages of their development.  They need to be encouraged to explore and discover without fear of failure. The bigger problem is that the players will want to do what wins and they will not push back when they get boxed in to the strict structure of performing a role.  They just don’t know any better.  And parents don’t often see the danger.  How could they?  When their child performs their assigned role well, the team wins.  What’s not to like?  –But there is more to learning than grades.

There is far too much complexity in the decisions that a player must make in the flow of play, to rely on doing what they are told.  The mature high-performing player must become self-sufficient, self-reliant, and self-motivated.  To get them there, we must encourage young players to explore and invent. We also have to realize that very few players will be comfortable with that initially.  They want to know what to do and they want you to tell them.  Tough love means that we have to give them room to figure it out on their own.  And when the game result is kept in perspective, this is the good kind of pressure (Eustress).  It helps us grow.  Soccer, in its highest form, is a vehicle for self-expression. Finding ways to reveal to the player what is inside of them, while nurturing the unique qualities that each has, is the pinnacle of successful coaching.  Self discovery is the goal of the learning process.  However, the competitive nature of our current soccer “education system” does not allow sufficient time for learning.  Whether real or perceived, there is just too much on the line.  Imagine sending your child off to school every day to be tested but not taught.  If the results of the tests are important to your child, they will find a way to compensate for what is missing.  On the field, players develop these skills of compensation in place of real soccer skills. Or worse yet, out of frustration, tell themselves that they don’t care, sadly extinguishing their competitive spirit.  This is what happens to so many of our soccer players when we send them out to compete without the proper foundation.  So why do we allow this to happen?  This destructive process starts out so subtly that we are largely blind to it.  Then when experience becomes noticeably painful, which it does for so many kids, they quit.  And we blame the kids?  It is at this point that families turn away from soccer and never look back.  It is at this point that everyone sees the harm, but the team just replaces the player and gets on with it.  That’s the way it is and the way it has been in American youth soccer for decades.

We can and we must do much better than this.

There is a growing epidemic in this country…..an addiction to ego that is ruining our soccer players.  The current youth structure encourages us to prioritize short-term results over long-term development.    We see this as many youth coaches and even whole clubs are falling over themselves to attach their name to “winners”.  Be it a winning team, or the player who got a scholarship, or even broke through to play professionally when the club had very little to do with the team or the player’s success.  Unfortunately, when winning championships is the driving force behind the coach or even the whole club, it is catastrophic to developing real quality players.  Winning has become too important to be left up to the players.  First of all, in the rush to the trophy table, there is usually an enormous amount of recruiting that goes on.  So much so that the players who finally get to lift the trophy are completely different than those who originally set out on the path.  The originals are the casualties of a system based on competing (winning) rather than learning.  “No child left behind”?  Children are systematically left behind.

It looks something like this:  It starts at age 7 or thereabouts.  The parents of some of the better local players begin to recognize some talent in their children and begin to form a team to compete at U-9.  This is a mix of friends, schoolmates, etc.  Over the next two years you play in a league, have some fun and might even cap the year off with a weekend tournament where you drop about $800 per family and the kids walk away with the fond memories of running wild all over a hotel.  All fun and games for the most part, with the occasional sideline outburst.  It’s social, it’s fun.  Even the mild to moderate abuse of referees is a bonding agent for the families.  With all of the money that is beginning to flow out for some of the so called “professional” trainers, new uniforms to replace the perfectly good old uniforms, etc., parents want and deserve more for their money.  Of course, they want the best for their child.

—  Now what comes next is perplexing.  People want to look at the past year or two and take the next logical step…but where does it lead?  “Okay, the team is decent but we want to be better.”  So a few of the currently weaker/smaller players are cut and replaced with some early physical developers.  Now you have a “FAST big kid” up top and a “BIG fast kid” in the back who “can really boom the ball,” and a goalkeeper who can punt and maybe has some athletic ability.  Now the housecleaning is done …and away we go.

So your U-13 team has the fast big kid that scores goals…and the big fast kid that stops goals.  And both the big fast kid and the goalkeeper kick the ball long (the logical path of least risk) and the team wins.  Now, not only does the team win, the team and coach develop a reputation for winning that will be exploited at next year’s tryouts.  A few parents are quietly concerned about the lack of playing time for their child.  Most say nothing, while the bravest few who express their concerns, are dismissed by the coach who tells them the team had to go for the win.  Of course the coach recognizes “the importance of emphasizing development instead of winning”.  You can read all about it on the team’s website.  But when the team’s record is the measuring stick…it is hard to argue when you’re winning.  But what is success?  Success is helping the player navigate the path of self discovery, but instead we are happy with the win.  And so the players, who use (or rather are used for) their physical abilities to win games, will likely be replaced within 2 years. The next wave of young athletes at their peak will be brought in as those who have not had the proper attention paid to skill development fall behind the pace… and the team just motors along.

—  Now your U-15 team, at least yours for time being, has become the team to beat. You had big numbers at try-outs and the team has added players who have better athletic ability and soccer skill. This is not to mention the fact the coach and club have gone to great lengths to advertise, advertise, advertise.  Not necessarily to grow the club, just to reward your winning ways by replacing your child with an updated version.  Congratulations on creating that monster team,… it has just devoured your child.

A few players may weather this storm but many, if not most, do not.  Too many players are out of soccer before turning 15, never to return for fear of reliving the bitter experience they have just been through.  Instead of a lifetime of enjoyment, their attempt to embrace the beautiful game has left a scar.

If this sounds familiar to you, then I am very sorry.  It may have been your child who was set up to fail and then blind-sided — used for what they could bring to the team temporarily or exploited by the coach and then cast away.  Worse yet, your child or you, the parents, were most likely blamed for the failure.  I can’t tell you how many times I have heard someone refer to that myth that kids lose interest in soccer around age 14.  We take the fun away from the kids and blame them for not liking it … and we have the nerve to refer to what happens in youth soccer in America as a “Development System”.  I have grown to despise that phrase.  It’s right up there with “Academy”.  I thought that word was supposed to have something to do with learning.

Now I am certainly not trying to suggest that the tens of thousands of coaches and volunteers involved in youth soccer are deliberately torturing children.  Their intentions are mostly good and the decisions they make probably seem logical under the constraints of the current structure.  But how long will we continue to ignore the pattern in the outcome for so many children who want to learn about and play a game?

In case you were wondering, I was the big fast kid in the back as I was growing up.  I was cut from a team at age 14 and almost didn’t recover, not from the disappointment but from the late start on my technical skill work.  In my case, I believe I had mostly very good coaches who cared about the game and cared about kids.  But I was rewarded and valued for being big, strong, and fast at that time.  I played on competitive teams and my best assets were my physical abilities and will to win.  That’s what I brought to the team and that’s what the team and the game brought out in me.  But the problem is that someone will always be bigger, stronger, and faster — and as a young player I simply did not recognize the value of skill development.  Skill had not made me successful, it was my size and speed, so naturally that is what I saw as important.  How many kids out there really know what is best for them?  That is a level of maturity we cannot expect from a young player.

—  Fortunately, I loved to train and spent the next three years kicking a ball against a wall every day.  I was one of the lucky few who made it into a D1 school and went on to play pro, but it took me more than 15 years to gain perspective on what had happened — and I do this every day.  It has been 25 years since then and the situation has only gotten worse and more widespread.  What is most important to know is that my playing days were long gone before I was able to understand this.  I don’t believe we can reasonably expect any player, parent, or coach who is immersed in this process to be able to see it happening.  I hope to raise awareness that this is in fact what happens to an enormous number of our young soccer players.  The ultra-competitive nature of the youth structure is guaranteeing that this will not only continue, but continue to accelerate.

It is critical for every youth soccer player to learn to master the basic skills.  We must recognize that children probably don’t care any more about developing their skills than they care about eating vegetables.  They want the result of those skills.  Kids want to play well, have fun and win. They want to win every game, they want to win the championship, and let’s face it….they want to win the race to the car after the game.  And thank God for that, because the competitive spirit is something to be embraced.  Obviously the object of any game is to win.  However, we play games because they are fun.  The skill behind coaching young soccer players is in creatively and effectively disguising the functional skill development in the “costume” of fun.

So getting back to the initial question…  “What do you coach?”

The game is a thing.

The team is a thing.

The player is a person.

If you coach youth soccer, coach the child… and the player will appear.

Anything that can be taught can be re-framed to fit an approach that is more engaging, more fun, and therefore more effective.

Let’s re-think our teaching of the game so that it starts with skill.

For some ideas on how to achieve this please see our PRODUCTS page.

Mike