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The Natural Mistake Good Youth Soccer Coaches Make

“Winning is not everything? What a bunch of crap.”

I remember uttering those words in my mind many, many years ago after listening to the usual coaches’ meeting before the season started. I thought to myself, “If winning isn’t everything then why do they keep score and why does this youth league have tournaments at the end of the season?” When I walked out of the meeting I knew that EVERY coach had the same thing on his mind. They were already planning their “killer tactical plans” for their U10 soccer team.

Now, when I say many years ago, I will also let you know that this was the first year I saw a coach with a “cell phone” on the field. I thought he was carrying a purse at first. Turns out it was a large black bag containing a phone that would “magically call people through the air’. I am sad to say that things haven’t changed a whole lot. While there is a strong movement in the right direction, it seems that so many of us are still making this same mistake.

Think of this mistake as a process, kind of a ‘life cycle’ that many good coaches go through. Remember most of us start out as bad coaches. (As well as parents and players.) We don’t really know what we’re doing, we just know we are trying and get to a certain point. Along the way and through the years we just kind of figure it out. We go through coaching education / certification, watch videos, read books, watch other coaches and rely on what we learned as soccer players. Eventually we become pretty good at what we do.
The problem that evolves in this pattern is the natural cycle of the parent / coach. We generally start out with our children at a young age. We teach them basic technical skills and focus on the simple things. We expose young players to the game by having fun, but at the same time teaching the basic skills that make them a skilled “individual player”.
Now the little ones start to mature, the season roles on, and here is where the poison starts to trickle in to our coaching, Human Nature.
To help explain I will start with the old story of the scorpion and the frog.
One day a scorpion was sitting on the edge of a creek. He wanted to cross but knew he couldn’t swim. He saw a frog about to cross the creek and said, “Hey frog, will you give me ride across the creek on your back?” The frog looked at him and said, “No Way! You’re a scorpion. You will sting me and kill me.” The scorpion looked at him and said, “You’re obviously not a smart frog. If I sting you while we are crossing the creek, we both drown.” The frog thought about it for a minute and figured out the scorpion was right. The scorpion hopped on his back and away they went. About half way across the creek the scorpion jammed his stinger in the back of the frog. The frog looked at him while they were both ‘going under’ and said, “Why did you do that? Now we both are going to dye.” The scorpion looked at him and said, “I just couldn’t help it. I’m a scorpion and it’s my nature.”
“Human” nature is close to the same. It is the one thing that is very hard to change. Nobel Prize winner James Watson said, “We are trying to understand what our genes are programming us to do. We should accept this and not deny it. Don't ask us to behave in ways that go against our human nature.”
However, to be a truly great “youth” soccer coach we must learn how to overcome our desire to win, or at least win at all costs, which really is a natural behavior.
Our job as “youth” soccer coaches is to teach young players individual skills and make sure that these skills are not only taught, but also repeated to the point that they become instinctive to a young player. We should make sure the young soccer experience is fun and well rounded.
Moving a weak offensive player to the forward position is easy to do when you are up 6 to 0. However, making this move when the game is 2 – 3 is seen as suicide by many. If you are not allowing rotations on your young teams, you are doing the kids a disservice.

Spending a great deal of time on technical skills is easy at first. However, when we start to lose games we feel we are weak on tactical strategy and we have a tendency to make practices all about tactical work. The much needed “technical training” just seems to disappear.

Here are a few things that add to this difficulty.
1. Parents, a HUGE contributing factor, want their child to be on a “winning team”. If a team is losing all their games, it’s not their child’s weak technical skills that are the problem. It is the coach and his game plan that is causing us to lose.
2. We as coaches / humans want to win or be successful in the eyes of others. Unfortunately this is often based on what people see as the “public grading” or the win / loss record.
3. We often don’t sit down with ALL the people involved and communicate what our goals are for the season. If only a few parents understand that we are not there to win but to learn, then it simply will not work.

A truly great “youth” soccer coach understands his job is to teach his young players individual TECHNICAL skills. Our job is not to teach a 10 year old extended tactical vision for the game, but instead give him mastery of the tools that it takes to play the game. The creativity and vision for the game will only truly come once this process has ended and they can focus on the GAME as a whole. It’s hard to be “creative” when you keep tripping over the ball while dribbling.
Yes, we do give them some basic vision points for the tactical side of the game. However, it does no good to try and teach them a play that has one player feeding in a ball 30 yards, while another player receives it and finishes, if neither can complete the basic skills to make this play happen. Many of our technical foundations are thrown out the window when the season starts. We start focusing on scrimmages, set up, positioning and plays. We start lecturing 9 year olds about the “thirds of the field”, forgetting that all they are looking at is the ball at their feet.

A true story from only a few months ago…
I happened to be at a field working with two young players. After the training and as we were heading out I notice that the local county rec leagues were having their evals for team rosters. I decided to sit and watch.
On my way over to the field I noticed Coach Tom was heading over as well. Coach Tom was a GREAT guy. Everyone liked him, including me, and he seemed to always have a smile. All the parents wanted their kids on Coach Tom’s team.
I greeted him with a hand shake and a warm hello. We started talking about many different things. I asked how things went for him last season and he proudly stated, we went undefeated and won the championship. (Between the local rec teams.) He went on to proudly tell me about his past three seasons and how his teams had lost only one game in three years and had only 15 goals against.
Then the subject changed to the local school teams. I saw his attitude change and he angrily stated that the school soccer teams were strictly political. “Some of my best players didn’t make the team and I know they were good.”
Well I sat and watched 300 kids run through their evals that evening. Many had been playing for Coach Mike for several years. It quickly became apparent why Coach Tom’s players weren’t making the middle school and high school teams.
They had been playing soccer for over 6 seasons and NONE of them had any basic individual soccer skills. I’m not even talking about refined; I’m just saying basic skills. Dribbling, passing, receiving and shooting were just terrible.
While Coach Tom wore his “badge of victories” proudly, his players showed the scars of neglected kids that were never taught basic, individual skills.
Unfortunately we see this quite often. Keep in mind Coach Tom loved his kids and loved to coach. Again, he was a great guy. In the eyes of many he was a great coach. However, his desire to “win at all costs” left young soccer players with a handicap that could last their entire soccer careers.

Coaches have a “natural human nature” to win. That DOES NOT make them bad people, just bad youth coaches. Most of us want to succeed at what we do; we just often define the “definition of success” incorrectly.
Until we can break this cycle of “winning at all costs” and pressured competition our kids will continue to suffer. Until the definition of “success” in youth soccer is redefined, there will be kids that are being set up for failure at the expense of adult winning.

Why can’t we do it?
In order to make this work EVERYONE has to “buy in”. When I say everyone, I mean everyone. There needs to be a strong message, preferably in writing that explains this trend and how EVERY person contributes to this problem.
Everyone one from the program director, to the coaches, the parents and the players need to understand the definition of a successful “youth” soccer program. A simple “parent meeting” at the beginning of the season is not enough. Often many miss it and many players will only have one of the parents attending. There needs to be a STRONG written summary of your goals and all should read, sign and return.

Everyone should realize that while “some tactical” education will be covered, it will be age appropriate and more on a general, basic and visual understanding level. It should be understood that younger player development will be largely technical based and competitive games are simply a place to try our newly learn technical skills, not a measure of results.

I will warn you that this is easier said than done. It often takes years of coaching before we realize what we are doing wrong. We when finally realize this mistake we now face the daunting task of “selling” this theory to inexperienced parents and coaches. (A job no one really wants.)

Youth soccer has finally been facing up to these problems around the world. Many international development programs and US Youth Soccer programs are slowly getting this message out to clubs, leagues and coaches. However, this powerful message seems to fall short when it comes to reaching the parents. Coaches must humbly face this reality and focus on moving this message to the parents. Without the parents “buying in” 100% this movement will fail.

I have had the pleasure of working with many soccer programs and players from around the world. It always amazes me at what a poor job the leagues do at communicating these critical points to parents, and coaches as well. A short parent meeting or “10 line” code of conduct will NEVER get this point delivered. Developing a “full and thorough plan” and getting 100% on board is the only way it will work.

You will always find some youth coaches that somehow justify themselves around this basic youth soccer principle. They will still wear their “badge of victories” proudly and debunk this essential and critical understanding. Remember they are not bad people, just bad for youth soccer. They can’t help it, it’s their nature.

"Sadly we as soccer coaches must come to grips with the fact that we are not training a winning team for our sake. Our job is to help young players by teaching them individual technical skills. We then graciously turn them over to another coach hoping they are better with what they have learned. Young players will remember a GOOD soccer coach for the rest of their lives. That is what we as coaches call our reward, not winning."

Coach V is the founder of the BTB Youth Soccer Studies program.

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