How school soccer hurts soccer culture in the U.S.

This 3Four3 podcast with Jordan Ferrell as guest is a good listen with some key reasons why soccer languishes in the U.S.

One of those reasons is found just past the 38 minute mark and comes just after host, John Pranjic, describes his visit to a sports club in Europe where sports fields surround an athletic club where parents can do spin classes, lift weights or play basketball while or grab a bite or drink at the club’s restaurant while their kids are at soccer training.

Pranjic says:

It felt like a community. It felt like those people had ownership in the club. That’s something we could replicate in the United States, and nobody’s doing it.

Ferrell adds on (emphasis mine):

…honestly, we’ve just moved the sport club into the academic world and that’s killed it because once you finish from an institution, you’re an alum, and alum move in different places and the ones from the community who aren’t alum aren’t as invested.

I described how the fragmentation of school sports hurts the soccer culture in the U.S. in this post. Here’s a snippet:

In the Netherlands, the youth teams in their clubs play on Saturdays and the adult teams play on Sundays. The youth players often attend the adult games. They know the adults because they practice near them and are coached by them, so they want to see how they do.

In the U.S., clubs and school sports fragments this experience. Eight-year-old’s in the U.S. aren’t coached by 15-year-old’s who play for the high school team and they aren’t interested in watching the high school games to be like them someday, because they don’t know them.

In the U.S., the players’ bubble is their individual team, or maybe the club’s top team at their age level, not a senior team.

So, high achievers are content with being ‘best on their team’ and not having a good role model to demonstrate what a complete player looks like.

I’d add that in the Netherlands the player’s bubble is the adult senior team. Rather than being content to beat players of their own age, they set their sites on how players on the senior teams play.

More in the next post…

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Winning doesn’t mean much if you aren’t any good…

…and a big problem with soccer in the U.S. is that there are many ways to win without being any good.

That’s true from top to bottom.

The MLS limits the number of good players on a team to even out the competition. It thinks close games attracts more fans.

Youth are separated into age and like skill groups where they can feel successful. The thinking is that winning keeps more kids interested longer.

The downside is that too many people win without being any good. That doesn’t help them get better because it isn’t clear that they need to get better.

Imagine watching a basketball game where players dribble the ball high and away from their body and turn the ball over frequently. Most of the passes they make get intercepted, and they can’t catch a pass. Players with the ball dribble past them easily.

This is what soccer in the U.S. looks like to me: too many players don’t even have the basics. I think a reason is that there’s a lot of winning and incentive to learn the basics.

The point of sports should be to win. But, it should be about winning by being good, not by watering down the competition.

One small example of this is juggling. Players and coaches alike have pleaded their case to me that practicing juggling is unnecessary. “It’s just for show,” they say, because you don’t use it in a game. “Work on the stuff that you actually use,” they say.

It is true that you don’t need to practice juggling, if you only play against others who also don’t know how to juggle.

But, when a juggler and non-juggler go into a 1v1 or 50/50, I’ll put my money on the juggler coming away with the ball.

“Coaches are overrated”

The following is from a recent 3Four3 podcast with guest Mike Woitalla of Soccer America.

Here Mike discusses an observation from working with kids in a Soccer Without Borders program, which helps children of immigrants to the U.S. participate in soccer (from about the 30th minute).

What I really enjoy about these Soccer Without Borders kids is that their skill level is incredible. They’re from all over the world. A lot of them are from refugee camps in Africa or Asia, a lot of them came from Central American countries.

And very few of them were ever coached and their skill level was just absolutely incredible, simply from playing, which kind of confirmed what my belief has always been, that coaches are overrated when it comes to the technical part of soccer. Brilliant soccer comes from kids playing and exploring on their own terms.

I agree.

This is Tom Byer’s point of what culture, and only culture, can do.

But, what we consider to be incredible technical skill is as normal for folks from soccer cultures as throwing and catching baseballs and shooting hoops is to us.

I made this point to a fellow coach and friend. He played HS basketball.

We were coaching a group of soccer players who did nothing with the ball on their own outside of practice, making progress on basics, like receiving the ball, very slow.

I said to him, “Basketball coaches have it much easier.”

He asked, “How so?”

I responded, “Did your basketball coach have to take up so much time in practice working on basics like this?”

He thought about it for a bit.

“No. I learned on the driveway with my brothers. I had the basics before I joined the team. The coach just ran our asses off to get us in game shape and taught us X’s and O’s. If we didn’t know how to play, we wouldn’t have made the team. He wasn’t there to develop our individual skills. That was on us.”

I could see the veil lift and he asked, “What are we doing?”

After that, he texted me photos of kids he saw playing soccer on their own near where he worked, in a part of town that brought soccer culture from other countries.

He saw several groups of kids playing daily and it was a constant reminder of why our players struggled to complete more than a handful of passes in a game.

Winning matters

This tweet from Gary Kleiban got me thinking about winning…

Awesome, Ryan!
Winning absolutely matters.

This whole "winning doesn't matter" campaign by a certain demographic in the US is nonsense if one wants to develop competitors (in the game and in life).

If one wants to develop SOFT and recreational … fine.https://t.co/7epYef9PDB

— Gary Kleiban (@3four3) March 18, 2019

While most people in the thread after that focus on the importance of winning and how to balance player development with that, I was more interested in this part (emphasis added):

…if one wants to develop competitors (in game and in life).

Is a winning drive developed or innate?

I think it’s mostly innate.

Coaches build teams with a competitive drive primarily by selecting players that already have that drive already and then using that to their advantage.

This is the same in education with efforts to measure and reward teacher quality. Teachers that do best on these measures tend to fall into two categories:

1. Those who game the system to get the students best-suited to help the teacher achieve the quality measure in their classrooms.
2. Those who happen to get a classroom full of the best suited set of kids for the quality measure randomly.

Like #1, winning coaches become good at recruiting players with a competitive drive and desire to win. These players also tend to put in the most effort off the field to get better.

Not to say that good coaches won’t help these kids get even better. But, probably not as much of it has to do with the coach as we all think.

A-students tend to be A-students no matter who their teachers are. Same goes with B, C, D and F students.

I encourage coaches who think they can develop the winning mindset to take over their club’s lower level teams.

I generally see coaches who try to keep their reputation up, keep a safe distance from these teams. Or, if they do need to take over those teams they will bring seed the team with a few of their higher level players to help the results.

That being said, I think coaches can help players learn how to process wins and losses, while having winning as the objective.

More to come on that.

College Admissions “Scandal”

The biggest news to me is that this is a scandal.

I think just about everyone figures that a wealthy person can buy admission for their kid with a generous donation to the school.

I’m perplexed as to why these folks didn’t just make a donation to the school.

Maybe they tried but the school’s asking price was too high, so they tried a scalper?

Or, maybe I just have it wrong and rich folks really can’t buy their child’s way in to a school with a generous donation.

If I recall correctly, my alma mater got a brand new basketball arena paid for by a generous donor right about the time said generous donor’s son was on the school’s D1 basketball team. I don’t recall there be a big hullabaloo about that.

Update: Given the revelation on how much Dr. Dre donated to USC to pave the way for his daughter to attend, I’d say the above hypothesis is correct. The asking price for direct donations to the university was too high, creating a black market for lower level folks to peddle their influence.

 

Number games in soccer

In the U.S., there’s more focus on numbers that don’t matter and not enough on numbers that do.

Many people are dumbfounded that a country of over 300 million people with millions of registered soccer players can’t turn out world beating soccer talent, while much smaller nations do better.

To be recognized by U.S. Soccer as a professional soccer league you must adhere to its numbers. Owners must have a minimum net worth, leagues must maintain a minimum number of teams and stadiums must have a minimum number of seats.

The MLS puts a good deal of attention on numbers like team salaries, the number of foreign and US National Team players on each team, to try to keep things fair.

At college and pro combines, there is a lot of attention given to measures of general athleticism like 40 yard dash and shuttle run times.

All these are examples of numbers that don’t matter much in contributing to the level of the top talent.

Here are some numbers that matter more.

One important number is how many kids play soccer and soccer-related games, on their own, with their friends, family and neighbors.

Another is how much they are playing and how many touches are they getting.

Multiply that difference out by how many weeks they play over how many years and that number will tell you why the U.S. doesn’t produce top-level talent.

You will discover that our top players have a fraction of the touches accumulated over their lives as top players from top producing soccer nations.

Doing some rough math, I estimate that the typical American soccer player has accumulated 200,000 – 500,000 touches by the time they turn 18.

That sounds like quite a bit.

But, I estimate that a typical player of the same age from a soccer culture has accumulated between 4 and 6 million touches.

How? They start at younger age, they play more each week, more consistently throughout the year and when they do play, they play in ways that give them more touches on the ball and touches that translate to better game play — most of this through unorganized play.

In soccer cultures, organized play is like the icing on the cake, the cake being the unorganized play the builds the baseline skill and knowledge.

This is the same with basketball in our country. Most of the sport is learned through unorganized play, and organized play is the icing on the cake.

In the U.S., for soccer we mostly just have the icing and no cake. (I heard this recently and thought it was a good description, but I can’t remember where I heard it).

Another theory I hear about the level of U.S. talent is that our top athletes choose other sports. The problem with that is not understanding that by the time a top athlete “chooses” a sport (say between age 10 and 14), it’s too late.

They will not be able to make up for all the missed touches.

The beauty of unorganized play is that we don’t have to wait for top athletes to “choose” a sport. It develops important skills of soccer for them without them knowing it, so that by the time they choose a sport, they have a good foundation to build from.

Tale of two teams: raise the bottom to push up the top

Tweet from Tom Byer:

It all starts by raising the bottom in order to push the top. The gap between the best and worst is like the Pacific Ocean. Close that gap and watch a Countries Elite Player Pool explode.

— Tom Byer •トムバイヤー (@tomsan106) February 20, 2019

The following example supports that point.

Setting: Sideline of scrimmage at youth soccer practice where I assisted.

Team One: Academy, top division team.

Team Two: Beginner to intermediate, but a year older.

If you judge the the teams before they scrimmage each other you might expect Team Two to dominate. They are older, bigger and look more athletic. A lot of the Team One players look bookish.

Once scrimmage begins, you quickly learn you are mistaken. Team One dominates and keeps the ball 90% of the time.

When Team Two gets the ball, they are lucky to get three touches before giving it back to Team One.

It’s like watching 6th graders (Team One) compete against 2nd graders (Team Two) in math. Of course, the 6th graders will look like geniuses, if you have nothing else to compare to.

But, Team One isn’t great, even though they are “elite” and win a lot.

They just have the basics down. Algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus are still to come.

Team Two represents the bottom 60-70% in my area and Team One the top 10%.

Comparing to traditional US sports of basketball and baseball, a team with a similar level of proficiency in either of those sports as Team One has in soccer would be low B or C level and Team Two would be in the bottom 10%, if playing at all.

Here are some key differences I noticed between Team One and Two players.

When players wait on the sideline to sub into scrimmage, Team One players work with the ball without being led. They juggle in groups, play 1v1, pass or dribble around backpacks and water bottles. They can all juggle 50 to 100.

Players from Team Two need need adult direction or they goof off. They think the academy players juggle to show off. “You don’t use it in a game,” they reason.

Team Two player have played organized “soccer for years.” They will tell you that, but they also exhibit no interest in discovering the sport on their own. They don’t see the need to touch the ball outside of practice and could barely name a single player on the local pro team. They are a step better than beginners, learning close to 100% of what they know about soccer through the team. They are often the first ones in their family to play soccer.

Team One also played organized soccer for years. But, its players are curious about learning to master the ball and game, learning about 90% of what they know outside of organized soccer through family and/or on their own. Many came from families whose parents played soccer, or have older siblings who play.

That’s what Tom Byer means by raising the bottom to lift the top. If Team Two had basic proficiency, they would push Team One harder to improve.

In non-soccer cultures the mindset is that kids learn soccer in organized settings with qualified professionals at the helm.

Byer’s suggests flipping that by expecting kids to learn the basics before they join a team.

That’s more like how we think of basketball and baseball. That’s part of the reason we start playing catch with kids when they’re toddlers and buy them Fisher-Price basketball hoops.

Parents expect more from soccer coaches than coaches of other sports. If their kid can’t make a basket, they encourage their kid to practice more.

That mindset is flipped in soccer. If their kid can’t score a goal, they ask why the coach hasn’t taught them how, yet, and start to doubt if the coach knows what they’re doing.