Thursday, January 8, 2009

Youth Soccer Laughs

My name is Mark and I, like other parents have coached my kids in recreational soccer for the past 6 years. This last year I focused on my 9 year old son's team and my assistant was my brother. It was nice because I was able to coach not only my son but my nephew and several of their friends. Throughout the season there were more than a few hilarious stories I wanted to share. The reason being, we all seem to get too serious when coaching at this age, including me. These stories put it all in perspective as do the photos.

The first game of the year. We had practiced on and off as a team for roughly 3 weeks. We had a variety skill sets and players, or should I say characters. The goal for the first game for 9-year old boys was to get them to spread out and play a team game...learn the positions regardless of the score. Keep in mind this is the first year these kids are able to play goalie and needless to say everyone wanted to play goalie. We started one kid, who we will call James at keeper the first half, and played the rest of the team with two forwards, one midfield and two defenders (6v6 is tough). The first 10 minutes was hilarious in that me and my brother were yelling instructions out like it was the world cup...luckily we caught ourselves and mellowed out but in that time a couple of funny things occurred. The one and only midfielder was running up and down, and side to side - he was wiped out waiving his arms to come out in less than 5 minutes. The keeper was bored out of his mind, so we decided to substitute him at the 15 min. mark. So during the first substitution I grabbed the three players we pulled out and huddled them together to draw on a white board the positions we were playing, leaving the field coaching to my brother. I had no idea what was happening on the field. My brother is yelling instructions, trying to help the kids in a calm manner. He looks over behind his shoulder to get my attention and says "You need get back up here, they aren't listening to me". One of the boys named Dillon who was standing next to him looks at him in the most calm way and says "Yup...they never listen to the assistant coach". I started laughing and give my brother a hard time to this day about it. So I step up and ask him what he was telling them and in my genius just simply repeat it but louder....brilliant.

At this point we have the keeper replaced with a new one that seems to be more engaged. The old keeper James is bouncing up and down to get in the game, so I asked him where he would like to play and he says Striker. I was thinking great "Striker - he knows the position". So we put him in and for the next 10 minutes he wandered aimlessly around the field, sometimes on defense, but rarely up front where we tried to teach him. In fact he wasn't even near the ball most the time. So we pull him out and I ask "Do you know what Striker is" and his reply "No". So, we focused on getting him to go after the ball. The only way we could was to invent a new position for him, called PacMan. He didn't know what PacMan was so we explained it as fast as we could and that we wanted him to gobble up the ball when it was in his area. It worked! So well that he proceeded to steal it from our own players. So next break, we had to explain what Ghosts were within the PacMan game, that you wanted to avoid them at all costs, and in his position the Ghosts were our own players, avoid them. It worked and we used this throughout the year with him, with a chuckle of the thought of him telling his parents what position he played during the game. Ultimately it was a fun time with James and we nicknamed him PacMan. He actually developed into quite a good player by the end of the season.

The point being, depending on the age these are just kids and the game needs to be fun. Our goal was to develop the players individually, as well as on a team basis, but all along the way making it fun. Ultimately, the kids learned, had fun and many have now gone on to player development programs.

Mark D.
www.learnsoccerdrills.com