What would I do different as a youth soccer coach now?

If I were to “coach” youth soccer with what I know today vs. what I knew when I was coaching, I would do things differently.

Rather than participating in organized leagues and tournaments, I would spend my time finding and organizing all-ages pickup games around town for the kids to participate in with kids from soccer cultures.

I think 2 hours a week of that would do 10x more good than the model of club training, games and tournaments within skill bands that is typical of youth soccer.

My “10x” estimate comes from playing against teams with kids from soccer cultures. Usually the score was, or could have been (if they didn’t let up), 10-1. Those kids were coaching and communicating with themselves on the the field.

The kids on those teams weren’t superstars. They were just competent in soccer’s skill and tactical basics by age 8 to 10 like American kids tend to be competent in baseball’s or basketball’s basics by the same age, for the same reasons — they have games and activities in their home lives that spur the development of those basics while having fun, so when they come to the team environment they have the basics to build on.

That doesn’t mean that they all become elite players. It means the same as when when 8U baseball teams play against kids with beginner skills equivalent to a 5U tee ball team, it will be a blowout. The 8U may look like superstars, but they aren’t. The just have more of the basics.

I remember watching tee ball games and thinking they should be scored by the number of outs a team can make at first base, because that is a rarer occurrence than scoring runs. The kids did not have the ability to consistently field the ball, decide where to throw, throw and make the catch at first base in the time it took the runner to get there. A typical game may have 2-3 outs at first and 25+ runs.

But, by age 8 or 10, most kids have played enough ‘catch’ with parents and friends in their yard, have to have improved their consistency on fielding, throwing and catching to 80 or 90% or better, and getting the out at first happens most of the time when it should.

The key problem with soccer in the U.S. is that most kids never get much in the way of something equivalent to ‘playing catch in the backyard.’ So, you wind up with older players that aren’t much better than where they were when they started, which I wrote about here.

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What’s the difference between competitive and rec soccer

As I was learning soccer, I had a tough time telling the difference between rec and competitive. But, I finally learned.

For competitive players, organized soccer is a small part of their soccer world. They’ve learned 5-30% of what they know about soccer in organized soccer. The rest comes from home, friends and their own interest.

For rec players, organized soccer makes up 80-100% of their soccer world.

Soccer clubs package and sell rec soccer as competitive soccer to parents, so a lot of kids are playing rec soccer, but think they are playing competitive.

Parents can’t tell the difference. Same uniforms, backpacks, cleats, officials, soccer fields, coaches, trophies and costs. The coaches have the same licenses and probably played college or semi-pro, somewhere, even if you never heard of the college or team.

What is different is what is played on the field.

In rec ball, most of the game is 50/50s, turnovers and incomplete passes.

This results from lacking the basic skills of trapping, dribbling and passing the ball because rec players only have a fraction of the cumulative repetition they need to build the muscle memory and foot-eye coordination to be competent since they rarely practice on their own.

In competitive, most of the game is the team working together to keep the ball with high pass completion and building on basic passing patterns and working into more complex patterns to try to get a shot.

This results from players being competent with trapping, dribbling and passing the ball because they have enough cumulative reps in their lifetime to have built the muscle memory and coordination.

There is much more to soccer than these three skills, but you need these to get there and rec players never can get there because they can’t do these three things.

Imagine baseball if the players can’t catch or throw. Imagine basketball if the players can’t catch, dribble or pass. It would look like much of ‘competitive’ (expensive rec) soccer in the U.S.

Rec players are the players I wrote about in the previous post. They fell in love with playing, but never fell in love with the ball. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if all they want to do is show up and play, save yourself time and money and keep them playing in the local rec league.

The good news is, from my perspective, the effort to become a competitive player isn’t immense. It’s amazing what some practice can do.

The bad news is that rec players won’t do it.

Bang for your improvement buck: Love for the ball vs. love of playing

One problem with the way organized soccer works in the U.S. is that it gets kids to fall in love with playing soccer without falling in love with the ball.

The problem is that they love to play it, but they don’t love to practice it or have too many thoughts about getting better.

What’s not to love about playing? We make quite the production of it. Nice uniforms, nice fields, nice soccer complexes, officials and lots of folks cheering on the kids.

Even sideline toxicity sends the message that the kids are doing something important if adults get that worked up about it.

Why get better? They get to play either way, and occasionally, even if just by luck, they get to be the hero.

I agree with Tom Byer. Kids don’t quit soccer because of all the BS ‘the research’ points to. They quit when the kids who love the ball are kicking their teeth in and they realize they are years behind them and it would take years and effort that they aren’t willing to put in to catch up.

In other words, for all those years they loved to ‘play’ soccer, they never actually learned some of soccer’s ball basics.

Equal play time in youth sports, Part II

From Twitter (I’m Seth):

I used to think this. I’m not so sure anymore. I’ve seen kids have more motivation to develop when play time was on the line than when they were entitled to it.

— Seth (@OurDinnerTable) October 15, 2020

Yes. Expectations like try to control the ball, not just kick it. Got tired of coaching that from sideline, so I started subbing out when they got in a kicking rut. Soon they were telling me why I subbed them off. Worked better than anything else I tried.

— Seth (@OurDinnerTable) October 16, 2020

I wrote more about my experience here.

We overestimate how much development happens during games. We think it’s 80% of development when it really should be about 5%.

That overestimation makes us believe play time is more important then it really is, which is why coaches tweet about equal play time and parents might lose their marbles about it every now and then.

Organized games should be viewed like math tests. Tests aren’t the place to learn math skills. The learning happens while preparing for tests. The test is where you show what you learned.

If you did not prepare for the test, you might learn a few things while taking it, but just a tiny fraction had you prepared.

I think we would be much better off if we view organized games like that.

Bad News Bears Soccer

I’ve watched too many games over the past couple years of high school aged kids where the following passage from Tom Byer’s book, Soccer Starts at Home, comes to mind:

“Soccer is a passing and shooting game, but passing and shooting has to come after learning how to control the ball. And passing and shooting comes so much easier if you do that.

I watch kids’ teams play soccer and despair sometimes. ‘How can they be so bad?’ I ask myself. Most kids can’t even move the ball from one foot to the other.

What’s the problem?

The problem is people don’t know what the problem is.”

The problem is that there are basics of the game and these kids don’t have them and as Tom points out, nobody seems to notice.

They can’t receive, pass or dribble.

Most of their first touches turn the ball over and often put the opponent in a better spot.

Passing completion is less than 20%, which is mostly luck when it does happen, and too many passes are right to the opponent.

Balls are often dribbled directly into the defender’s feet and lost, without any visible attempt go around the defender.

Goalkeepers repeatedly distribute the ball directly to the other team.

The few scoring chances come at the tail end of strings of lucky events, rather than purposeful action.

It’s mostly 50/50 ball as neither team ever has possession of the ball for more than a few touches. In fact, it’s a 50/50 ball even if the ball is at the feet of a player.

The players have no idea how to communicate with each other beyond blaming others for their own mishaps.

Dumb soccer debate: Isolated vs. opposed training

Is there a sport that doesn’t require both?

Is there a sport where the amount of one or the other doesn’t depend on the current skill level, or whether the movement is new to player?

Is there a sport where skills aren’t first built in isolated training and then honed under pressure and in competition?

‘But, Ronaldo was created in the opposed training environment of street soccer!’

Has anyone asked him if he ever worked on new moves on his own, at home or on the sideline waiting for next, before trying them in out against others?

Here’s what I notice about those on either side of the debate.

Advocates of opposed training deal primarily with players who develop 95% of their skills away from training, at home or in pickup. Out of sight, out of mind. Since they don’t see how much effort these players put into those skills, they think all players have that level of ability or they think they got to that level of ability with their opposed team training environment and discount the effort the players do on their own.

The opposed training advocates also tend to straw man the “isolated” side of the debate as if the other side believes isolated training is the only thing needed. I haven’t seen anyone who believes that. Rather, they support progression from isolated to competition.

Those who advocate isolated training typically work with players that do not work on their own or play pickup to develop their skills and need a healthy foundation of isolated training to build muscle memory before working up to using in competition.