Advice to your younger soccer parent self

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yes, there are kids with private trainers at age 5. So what. They will be on a top team probably easily until U12-U13.

But when they recognize that they put in all of that work alone and they are only marginally better than a kid who played outside doing hopscotch and playing on the monkey bars, building speed and agility playing freeze tag and building the same muscles groups as the kid in the gym, their mind and ego will be fractured and the mind is 99% of the game post-puberty when the physical advantages level out.

This reminds me of the David Epstein book about the merits of developing as a generalist, and how IMO competitive soccer is not a closed/predictable environment like golf, chess, or music (where Tiger Woods-like early specialization has its advantages) and more like tennis where the Roger Federer approach leads to better odds of success.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes, there are kids with private trainers at age 5. So what. They will be on a top team probably easily until U12-U13.

But when they recognize that they put in all of that work alone and they are only marginally better than a kid who played outside doing hopscotch and playing on the monkey bars, building speed and agility playing freeze tag and building the same muscles groups as the kid in the gym, their mind and ego will be fractured and the mind is 99% of the game post-puberty when the physical advantages level out.

This reminds me of the David Epstein book about the merits of developing as a generalist, and how IMO competitive soccer is not a closed/predictable environment like golf, chess, or music (where Tiger Woods-like early specialization has its advantages) and more like tennis where the Roger Federer approach leads to better odds of success.

I don’t see a lot of other countries developing kids as soccer generalists though.