Coaches’ Corner 2

Youth soccer tournaments should be a time to celebrate both childhood and soccer. Instead, they have become a strange sort of festivity worshiping the pagan god Neuroticon. At these gatherings, adults sacrifice children’s emotional well-being in an almost baccichal frenzy, and the beauty of the game is debased and transformed into a vehicle of wrath, a channel for the pent up fury of narcissistic individuals raging against the dying of their youth. (Full disclosure: I used to be like some of these foaming-at-the-mouth, misunderstood prophet-coaches of soccer, that often times got extra bonuses from sadistic parents).

This whole absurdity most end. And, like with everything evil, it will only end until we shed the light of reason upon it and conscious adults step in to protect the innocence of our young soccer players.

The good news is that today we possess a wealth of knowledge that clearly illustrates to us the mechanisms and processes of child-development and learning. We must integrate this knowledge to our methods of soccer training. It will help us understand, empathize with our players and allow us to find ways of igniting the passion for soccer, that even if sometimes it blinds us, it is a life force; a passion that, if properly nourished, will blossom into a life-long love of the game, which should be the ultimate goal of the soccer community.

The first step in this process is to engage in conversation: open mindedness not required. Early on, all we need is to acknowledge the existence of another approach. The good intentions of the people involved will do the rest (as insensitive as I was with my players in the past, I always had the best intentions in mind towards them, as I’m sure other coaches have as well). The acknowledgement of a new way or style of coaching is hard to assimilate because we don’t get expose to it enough. However, the momentum is there, and a movement is underway to challenge the military type of harshness that characterized the old way. And coaches are starting to take a second look.

The most important thing is to understand that the new approach is not weak, but humanistic; it is not undisciplined, it merely promotes creativity; it doesn’t get players off the hook, it simply makes them find their level of commitment; it is not disempowering coaches, it only frees them from the old mold. And, in addition, it is the culmination of educational achievements that span over a century of study and research.

I hope that coaches here at New Mexico Clash will give it a chance; the ones that are doing it are already enjoying the benefits of the new approach while their players are experiencing a surge of love for the game. When kids that are ten years old come out of retirement because of the new way of being approached by their coaches, it is a clear indication that we are definitely up to something good. Perhaps we are nearing the stage of soccer development in this country where we stop burning out our youth players. It is inhuman that we force more than 80% of youth soccer players to stop the game in their early 20's. Lets come together and change this horrible statistic.