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Travel Soccer teams around NOVA let's discuss
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Anonymous
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Some kids are natural born athletes. These are the kids that get ahead in sports. If you don't have an athlete on your hands, who cares? Any club will work.
Any real coach will tell you, they want a child who did not play a single year round sport until they were older. You are doing your 8yr old a horrible disservice keeping them in a single year round sport. They will not develop a wide range and that certainly does not create an athlete. Football in the fall, basketball in the winter, lacrosse in the spring, and fun camps in the summer. Whatever, pick your rotation, but if you really want your child to develop physically and not suffer injury, diversify them. |
Anonymous
I disagree to some extent. The advantage of playing a club/travel sport for a good but not gifted athlete is that they can then be in a position to have developed skills and game awareness/experience sets that will allow them to make and play on a team over a better athlete who lacks that same skill set. Soccer is one of those technical skill set sports where it takes a long time to develop the necessary skills. It is a matter of degrees, of course. A kid with very limited athletic abilities will struggle in any sport even with the best coaching. I do agree though that kids should participate in a number of sports and activities to determine which they like (and from a parent perspective -- which they have some potential to excel in). Kids tend to like sports they perceive themselves being good in, but athletic kids can be good in a large number of sports. The trick is to find the ones that they can be good in and that they like. That is not always easy as they may like a sport because their friends like it or are on the team with them, but that is only a temporary thing. I also think it is important to not get wedded to a particular sport just because a parent or older sibling played or plays. We were talking recently about my daughter's u14 soccer team and where all those girls are now. Many of the kids are playing soccer in college now, but several are playing other sports as well -- golf, cross country, swimming and lacrosse. |
Anonymous
And from an orthopedic perspective, it's good to mix things up. Lots of overuse injuries these days at young ages. |
Anonymous
\ I think that is overstated. Where you are seeing "overuse" injuries today are pretty much where you always have seen them -- sports with repetitive motions that put strain on muscles and tissue. Examples: Pitching in baseball, swimming (shoulders), tennis (elbow/shoulder, Cross country (shin splints). |
Anonymous
It's certainly worse in baseball and tennis, but it's also something to consider in soccer: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3070508/ (And I'm all too familiar with cross country overuse injuries!) |
Anonymous
You are seeing not only more of these injuries, but at a younger age and it only gets compounded as the kids get older because no one wants to take time off because they might lose their edge. Some kids on my son's soccer team left high school nearly crippled after starting year-round play as 9 year olds. |
Anonymous
| If you look at LTAD models (e.g., for Canada), it's interesting to note how much they differ from the approach many youth soccer clubs take. Today we push young soccer players too much too soon. While it's evidently possible for young soccer players to develop an overuse syndrome in which one side of the lower body atrophies (because only the right or left foot is used so frequently for unchanging soccer tasks), more worrisome, I believe, is emotional burnout. We want our kids to be hungry for the sport at age 12, not flinching inwardly or exhibiting chronic "stomach butterflies" after years and years of training and an over-emphasis by parents and coaches on winning. I know that nothing will change . . . |
Anonymous
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I am not a doctor or expert on soccer injuries. I have done some reading on the subject because I have a daughter who plays (she is currently playing in college). Thankfully she has, to date, avoided any serious injury (knock wood), but it can feel a bit like Russian roulette at times when it comes to ligament tears and concussions.
What I have not seen in person, or in detailed injury statistics, are examples of "overuse" injuries in soccer. By "overuse injury" I mean an injury that develops simply from repetitive motion or part of the body. Again, I think we are familiar with some of the more common "overuse injuries" such as a sore arm from pitching, rotator cuff stuff from pitching or swimming, tennis elbow, wrist and shoulder issues, shin splits from distance running. Soccer has such a range of movements even with running that "overuse injuries" should not be occurring. I would also say that over development of a particular "side" should never occur as coaches will focus on having players develop ball handling and shooting skills with both feet. A couple of provisos -- I am confident that fatigue related injuries do occur in youth soccer if players over train and over compete. Parents need to watch that and reel kids when necessary. I also suspect that practicing headers, without carefully watching proper technique, AND carefully limiting the number of practice attempts by each player, could cause concussions. Practice corners, but don't have the same player head in 5 in a row. Even with good technique that is asking for trouble. Coaches need to be smart about that stuff. As for "burnout", athletic kids can play lots of different sports and be good at them. What should never be a problem is for a kid to say "I want to do something else". Parents and kids should never be married to a particular sport to the point where trying something else is not feasible or allowed. One of the nice things about soccer in particular though is that there are so many levels of play that in areas like nova that a kid and family can easily find a team that works for them. Don't want to play ECNL? Fine -- lots of local clubs can provide a much lower key experience at substantially lower costs in time and treasure. |
Anonymous
I think that's where picking the right club can help. My child's clubs each have an explicitly stated philosophy of deferring to the season's sport. The clubs associated with her winter and spring sports expect the kids to be participating in a fall sport in the fall and to miss practices/games when fall sport events happen during the fall, and so on. They actively support multi-sport athletes. |
Anonymous
Great post. When you really look into the "overuse" literature, most of the injuries are exactly those you mentioned. Indeed, a lot of the leading medical research right now is done by a doctor being paid by the US tennis association. When you look for hard data on the types of specific soccer injuries, you find very little - perhaps some foot injuries, but nothing that you wouldn't get from any other sports with lots of running (and those same injuries are much higher in actual runners). So the risk of overuse injuries is very much related to what sport is being played. In comparison to other sports, soccer poses less risk of overuse injuries and as a result I'm less worried about having my child play it year-round. But like you suggest, when s/he no longer enjoys it or just wants a break, I won't pressure them to continue. |
Anonymous
Repeating the link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3070508/ Excerpts: track athletes and soccer players incurred stress fractures to the tibial shaft and pubic bone. In a recent investigation of Norwegian soccer players, the rates of overuse injuries were 0.2 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.1, 0.4) and 0.4 (95% CI = 0.0, 0.8) per 1000 player-hours in 6- to 12-year-old boys and girls, respectively.50 An increase in the incidence of overuse injuries was noted in an older cohort (13–16 years old) of boys (0.7, 95% CI = 0.4, 1.0) and girls (0.7, 95% CI = 0.3, 1.1) per 1000 player-hours, with the relative risk (RR) of overuse injury calculated as 2.9 (95% CI = 1.3, 6.4) and 1.7 (95% CI = 0.6, 5.5) in older boys and girls, respectively.50 In addition, 87% of the reported overuse injuries resulted in time loss from soccer that ranged from 1 to more than 21 days. Similarly, LeGall et al51 investigated the incidence of soccer-related injuries in elite French youth players and found that those younger than age 14 had more injuries during training sessions (ie, practices) and more growth-related overuse injuries, whereas older athletes more often sustained injuries during games. Overuse injuries accounted for 17.2% of all injuries and were mainly classified as tendinopathies (n = 108, 9.4%), osteochondroses (n = 72, 6.3%), or other overuse (n = 19, 1.6%). In a follow-up study of adolescent female soccer athletes over 8 seasons, overuse injuries accounted for 13.4% of all injuries. |
Anonymous
If you understood those statistics, you'd understand that they are consistent with my post. |
Anonymous
| I think it may depend on how you define overuse injuries. Some pediatrics researchers see ACL injuries in high-school-aged female athletes (all too common among female basketball and soccer players) as overuse injuries. I don't know if that's the right way to look at it, but I feel pretty confident that it's not in the best physical or emotional interest of a child to play competitive soccer year-round. Remember, too, that athletes who specialize early, peak early. How does it help a child to dominate her peers in the sixth grade, only to fade by sophomore year? The sports-science research about youth athletic development is out there if parents want other options than simply signing up for 10 years of nonstop travel soccer training and tournament play. Clubs could lead on these issues. Instead, they pressure nine-year-olds to play indoor soccer in winter and go to camps all summer. |
Anonymous
Basically -- less risky than having a 10-year-old throw 100 curveballs a day, but still something to bear in mind. |
Anonymous
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See -- perhaps boring to many, but I like these kinds of discussions. I am likely a frustrated scientist at heart.
Unfortunately I cannot find a free copy of the Norwegian study although I would point out that the conclusion is that youth soccer is a very safe sport. The cited French study you can find on-line. The study group there consisted of 119 female players ages 14 to 19 who were essentially the French womens' youth national team. According to the study they practice together 2 hours a day 5 days a week for 39 weeks each year, and they played about 30 matches in that time period. That would not be a schedule that any youth team would have in the U.S., including any college team. That training intensive schedule would be what you might expect from a college team during soccer season which would be from say mid August to the end of October (longer if the team makes the playoffs). Per the study, there were 83 overuse injuries in that 8 year period and the most common were tendonitis and ankle impingement syndrome attiributed to insufficient healing and/or improper technique. (Given the level of players -- probably it would be playing on a sore ankle and then needing to take some time of to allow for better healing.) Again -- the thing about soccer is that it does have a wide range of motions. There is lots of stopping and starting which can be combined with contact so injuries are certainly going to happen, but not so much from "overuse". Again though -- as the parent of soccer players you do have to aware of what is going on in training and how your own kid is feeling. Playing on a sore ankle is not going to make it better, and it risks making it worse. |