DEVELOPING PLAYERS AND WINNING?

By Roby Stahl, Boy's Director of Coaching
Ohio Elite Soccer Academy

The student is…

The most important person in our program.   Without them there would be no need for us.

Not a cold enrollment statistic, but a flesh and blood human being with feelings and emotions like our own.

Not someone to be tolerated so we can do our thing, They are our thing.

Not dependent on us. Rather, we are dependent on them.

Not an interruption of our work, but the purpose of it.   We are not doing them a favor by serving them.   They are doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do so.

“We must teach children to think for themselves.   They are the future of this country”

Eleanor Roosevelt

…Otherwise, it is the white, suburban influence that rules.   And sadly, size and strength continue to be a most noticeable feature of those teams.   A rumor circulated at the end of the tournament that one of the players of the Academia Venezuelan U-12 team (they were beaten in the final by England’s Manchester United) would be staying on in Dallas, going to high school and playing for a club team.   No one I spoke to could confirm the rumor but all seemed inclined to believe it.   Why?

Because the player involved was, by far, the biggest member of the team. “He’ll make someone a better coach”, was one comment.

No point in ignoring the fact that size is frequently the deciding factors in youth soccer.   It can only be countered by clearly superior ball skill. The sort of skill that Manchester United and most of the Mexican U-12 teams showed.   Difficult skills to acquire.   Or to teach, if we think from the coaching perspective.   How much easier to rely on size.   In the older age groups, size becomes less influential, but the skills, not having been worked on, are now fatally absent.   There is a tendency to overemphasize tactics.   But the absence of ball skills limits the options, and the only tactics that have any hope of being successful are inevitably negative and defensive.

It doesn’t need spelling out that this is not a sensible way to ensure player development.   The idea that youth soccer is all about winning is disturbing enough.   But that it should be about giving a coach a winning record is almost obscene.

Youth soccer should be about skill development and young players coming away with a good feeling about themselves, their teammates and about our wonderful game in general.   There are many lessons to be learned that have nothing to do with the end result of one game.   Players, coaches and parents need to look at each individual game and training session and their relation to performance goals, not outcome goals.   Outcome goals are often not entirely under the player and coaches’ control.   The final score of the game is influenced by many factors: absence of a key player, illness, weather, field conditions, calls by the referee, playing against a better team, a player for the other team having a great game, etc.   Performance goals are stated to give you control and take responsibility for your own development.

Coaches and players need to set goals for practice and competition.   Practice goals let you take responsibility for what you “get’ from practice sessions.   Practice goals are often critical to the achievement of competition/game goals.  

Note: if you expect to do it in a game you must be able to do it consistently in training.   You perform the way you practice – if you expect to compete at 110%, you have to practice at that level most of the time.

Try and remember what was important to you as a child.   Remember that teacher that was special to you in elementary school?   They probably were demanding and taught you lot of new things.   Can you remember exactly what your grades and test scores were?   If you are like me, probably not.   Like in early schooling, your child will forget about the wins and losses, but will retain the new skills and tricks that your coach is teaching them.   This helps ensure success as they mature.

I was teaching a youth sports psychology class at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia a few years back and asked the question: “How long after the game does your child remember weather they won or lost?”   The answer given was, “Until they get that first ice cream cone”.   I asked next, “ How long do you remember”?   The answer was, “for years’!

My definition of a good coach is that individual who accomplishes two things.    First, they instill a real passion for the game of soccer in their young students, causing that student to work on their skills away from training (a novel concept for some).   Secondly, they prepare their players to succeed at the next level.   That next level might mean preparing to be successful within the ten year old age group or making that jump from junior high to high school, or from high school to college.   Notice that nowhere in that definition did I mention winning.

Please understand that as an athlete and coach, I hate to lose!   I would rather die than lose at anything I compete in.   It has taken a long time to learn to control my emotion during and after the heat of battle.   So I am not condoning losing.   There simply needs to be a clear understanding of when winning and losing is important and when it gets in the way of proper education and development

I stood on the sidelines at one of the state cup games in the spring and watched as a goalkeeper’s father had a comment for everything that his son did.   It seems that nothing was done right.   If the boy made a save and then kicked a ball that fell short of the halfway line, he heard about the right way to kick.   Some great goals were scored against that goalkeeper in the game, many over his head as they were playing in full-sized goals and he was all of four foot tall.   The father’s response, “come-on, you’re not giving it a good enough effort!”   During the second half, I watched more of the same, but the boy now started to ignore the father, which enraged the father even more.   Can you even begin to imagine the pressure that this young player was feeling?

By putting such an emphasis on the win-loss record, we are creating a generation of players and coaches who are afraid to take a risk, due to fear of failure.   I have always thought that soccer is the perfect game for children because they learn to run, jump, and explore the limits of their bodies in a fairly non-threatening environment.   One week your child may be the hero, scoring the winning goal.   The next week, he or she may score an own-goal causing the team to lose.   No matter what, they made that decision their self, and they will learn from the experience.

Thomas Edison failed in his first 7000 attempts to create the light bulb.   When ask how it felt to be a failure, his response was, “ Failure?   I’m not a failure.   I now know 7000 ways that don’t work”.

The four major points of soccer are found in the technical, tactical, physical, and the psychological realms.   Of those, the physical is the easiest to develop therefore most coaches’ work on this.   Many of the traditional soccer power are revising their youth development policies and putting even more emphasis on skill development.   Interesting that here in the US that our point of emphasis is on how many games the team, coach, or individual has won.   We have never held our coaches accountable for developing players.

At recent ODP meeting I asked the top players what they thought the college coaches work on in preseason training.   The overwhelming response was on technical development.    They were shocked when I told them that it was fitness and developing the team’s overall style of play.   The college coach expects you to have the prerequisite level of skill or you will be sitting on the bench, or find yourself out of the team altogether.   At this level the coach is being held responsible by his athletic director to win.

For all those youth coaches out there, that spend time developing players, rather than counting your wins, God bless you.   You are my heroes. My hat goes off to you, because you have your priorities set straight!