Worth a resd
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Anonymous
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Worth a read:
Patience is the Most Important Attribute in Developing Soccer Players! Hello Parents and Players, Patience is by far the most important ingredient to developing technically proficient and accomplished soccer players. It has been my experience during the last 25 years of coaching club, high school and ODP players that parents and players lack patience and measure success in ways that run counter to the player development process. Parents and players focus on game results as their primary indicator that their kids are becoming better soccer players. When the truth of the matter is that one superior athlete at 10, 11, or 12 years old can determine the outcome of any game. Players all develop and mature athletically, technically, and tactically at different rates of speed. The players who will develop over the long term are the players who attend training, work hard, pay attention to detail, and compete to become better over time. This process takes years and those that exhibit patience during this soccer development process will reap the benefits in the long term. There are no shortcuts, no magic formulas, and no need to compare players. Those that work hard over time and dedicate themselves to the craft of becoming soccer players will succeed in the long term. Those that exhibit the correct training habits and are patient will develop beyond your expectations. Please take a long term approach and look at your soccer players long term work habits as the key to their success and above all exhibit PATIENCE during this long term process. Below is an excellent article by John O’Sullivan that focuses on having patience and I highly recommend that everyone read this well thought out and written tome on the soccer development process. Thanks, Kevin Smith, Girl’s Director of Coaching O’Sullivan: The missing ingredient in North American soccer talent development In 2005, the coaches at one of the English Premier League’s top youth academies held one of their semiannual meetings to decide upon which players they would keep for the upcoming cycle, and whom they would let go. As they were evaluating their players –many of whom would go on to star not only in the EPL, but internationally as well – they were stuck on one particular 15-year-old boy. He had been a good player when he first entered their academy, but recently he had grown a bit and was no longer scoring well in their physical testing, nor playing like he had a few years earlier. In fact, the once-speedy player was now only the seventh-fastest kid on the team! These incredibly qualified and highly respected coaches were torn; some wanted to keep him and offer him a scholarship to continue his training; others thought they should let him go. It was touch and go. To break the tie, the coaches brought in their chief scout, a man named Rod Ruddick, to help them decide. Ruddick was the scout who had found the boy play at age 9 and had first invited him to join. He also had a hunch that the player was going through a difficult time as he grew, and that soon the kid he remembered would reemerge. He cast his tie-breaking vote to keep the player. Within two years the player would make his first team senior debut for the club, and become the youngest international player in his country’s history. In 2007 he was transferred to Tottenham Hotspur for a fee that eventually became about $10 million, and in 2013, that speedy winger proved that the staff at Southampton were right to keep him, as he became the most expensive signing in world soccer history when he was bought by Real Madrid for more than $131 million. His name was Gareth Bale. The story of Gareth Bale, and other late developing athletes such as Danish international soccer player Simon Kjaer, Michael Jordan, or NFL quarterback Steve Young, are worth retelling because they beg the question, “Would these kids have made it today in the United States?” Would we keep a player who seemed to be declining in ability? Would we keep a player that did not help us win today? Can we identify not just the talent that shines bright, but the talent that whispers? Currently, in many places the answer is no, we would not keep a player who is not helping right now, because American youth sports is missing the most important prerequisite of talent development. PATIENCE! With our endless obsession for winning and younger and younger ages, and the accompanying cuts that go into forming select and all star teams at ages as young as 7, we have created a system that goes against all the science and best practices of player development. That science says that children develop at different rates, and the best way to let the cream rise to the top is keep as many of them around as long as possible. Yet we do the exact opposite in our quest to win today. We select talent instead of identifying it. We focus on today instead of tomorrow. We pick the biggest, fastest and strongest kids, focusing on athleticism instead of technique, grit and coachability. We get rid of kids who don’t help us win in the short term. We celebrate team achievements at pre-pubescent ages, as if that has anything to do with long-term athletic development. We hold kids back from playing up with a developmentally appropriate age group, instead keeping them so they can dominate – and we can win – at a younger age. In a nutshell, we put the needs of team success over the needs of individual player development, and put winning now ahead of individual long-term player needs. We have lost our patience to develop players because we can get away with it. In the US, we are blessed with such huge numbers of athletes across a variety of sports. We can do a lot wrong and still compete on the international stage. Yet the world is catching up in sports we have traditionally dominated (baseball, track and field, basketball). In sports that we are newcomers to, such as soccer, countries such as Uruguay and Portugal, with only a small percentage of our population, are producing higher-quality players and equal or better teams. Why? A variety of reasons to be sure, not the least of which is because they have the patience to develop talent. Our biggest obstacle to patient talent development is our obsession with winning. I have met many coaches and clubs that tout their focus on player development who then proudly posts a picture of their 8 year old state championship team on their website. To produce these “winning” teams, we cut kids from our programs in elementary school, essentially telling them they are not good enough. We form “A” and “B” teams at 7 or 8 years old, and lock in kids to teams for an entire year, even though players this age can change so much in a month or two. And who gets cut from these pre-pubescent teams? Usually the kids who were born more than six months after the arbitrary calendar cutoff are the ones who are let go. They are at a disadvantage through puberty because they are a little bit smaller, a little bit weaker and slightly less mature. A few months can make a significant difference prior to their growth spurt (for example, a 13-year-old boy has a six-year developmental age swing, meaning he could have the body of a 10-year-old or a 16-year-old!). If you want to make it as a youth player, you have a far greater likelihood of being selected to a top team if you are “old” for your age. (To be fair, this is not just an American problem. In England, most youth soccer academy players are born in September through December (age cutoff is September 1) while in Spain (January 1 cutoff), most are born January through April.) Talent identification is certainly not easy. Take for example retired Manchester United great Paul Scholes, of whom his future manager Alex Ferguson said, after watching him in a youth game, “He has got no chance – he’s a midget.” At age 16, Scholes struggled with asthma and injuries. He was technical and creative, but athletically he was behind the others. As his academy director Lev Kershaw stated: “He was a little one. He had asthma. No strength. No power. No athleticism. No endurance. ‘You’ve got a bleeding dwarf,’ I remember somebody said to [former youth team coach] Brian Kidd. ‘You will eat your words,’ said Kidd. If Scholes had been at a lesser club, they would have got rid of him and he would probably not be in the game now. We stuck with Scholes, a wonderful technician.” Over the next 20 years, Scholes played over 700 games, scored over 150 goals, and won over 20 league championships, cups and two UEFA Champions League titles. He became arguably the best player of his generation, earning plaudits upon his retirement from every top player in the world. All of this only happened because Manchester United’s youth setup had patience. American coaches need to practice this same patience. Let all your players play; it you pick them, then play them! Understand that development is not a straight line, and that kids will have good periods and bad ones. Know that not every child learns just because you taught them something; teaching and learning are not the same thing. Stop being in such a hurry to pick “elite” teams and take the time to develop more players instead of a select few. The list goes on and on. Now I am certainly not casting all the blame on coaches who are in too big a hurry. Parents, you need patience as well. The sky is not falling when your son or daughter does not make the top team at 9 years old. In fact, most sports organizations I know have a 75 percent turnover rate on their top team from age 11 to 18. The vast majority of the players in the “A” group at age 10 will not be there in five or six years, so relax. Actually, be glad. Your child is far better off being one of the top players on a “B” team then sitting the bench on the top team. He needs to play. Winning championships does not matter much to a kid who played no part. If a young player is not injured, and making a full commitment to attend training, he should be playing! If he is not playing at least half a game, you really should consider another team, because the one you are on is not concerned with everyone’s development. Parents also need to be patient with coaches. Coaches have a tough job. Your child does not get 100 percent of their attention, they get 1/16 of it, or one divided by whatever number of kids is on the team. They will not see every little thing you do. Great coaches will also push your child out of the comfort zone, and perhaps even make her unhappy once in a while. That is their job, because it promotes learning. Your child needs to play different positions, she needs to have different roles, she needs to both start and come off the bench. A youth team that has the same coach for 10 years is not a team that is developing players; it is embedding them in roles and a level of comfort that hinders development. Learning does not happen overnight, and takes a variety of forms, so embrace change, be patient and let it happen. Parents, one day you will look back on your child’s youth sports experience, and the things you will be thankful for are unlikely to be the U11 Joe Smith Super Duper Elite Cup championship. They will be the lessons your child learned from both good times and times of adversity. You will be thankful for the lessons your kids learned from being surrounded by positive adult role models, not the ones who only focused on the now. You will look fondly upon the times your child struggled and overcame obstacles, the friends she made, and the positive memories that sport can bring. You will be thankful that you had the patience to take the good and the bad, and to let your child develop as children do; not in a straight line, but in a squiggly, messy, line, improving, struggling, failing, moving on, and all the while on a journey with an unknown destination, but a well-charted path of both success and failure. If we truly want to be a country that develops talent, instead of churning through it and getting lucky that we have enough players to still compete at the end, then its time to start developing talent the right way. It is time to practice patience. Because the next Gareth Bale or Paul Scholes might be on your team, huffing and puffing, stumbling and failing, and not yet showing signs of future greatness, yet bursting with talent just waiting to blossom. All they need is time! All they need is patience! |
Anonymous
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^^^^
I'm gonna save RSD the trouble here. Thank you for sharing, and I'm sure your intentions are good, but in the future, it would be better if you would just post a few quotes from the article, along with a link, rather than copying and pasting the whole thing here. The reason is that the income of the authors of such content is dependent on how many people view it. Advertising dollars are driven by clicks, and the author gets no clicks when people just read it on here. It's a good article though, and you can add players like David Villa, Salah, Jordi Alba, Kante, Vardy, and Greizman, to the list of those who were benched or nearly passed over at some stage of their development. It's along list. Almost as long as the list of the "best big stars" that never made it. |
Anonymous
| Is it better to post the link? |
Anonymous
Yes, I think if you copy a few quotes it's fine, but then if you also post the link then every time someone follows it the author gets credit for the page views. I had never thought of it myself until RSD brought it up a while ago, but since hardly anyone ever reads print media anymore, the only way journalists or other content producers get paid is through the internet, and mostly that means advertising dollars I think. |
Anonymous
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Speaking of reading a books about youth soccer, I just finished this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Desperate-Soccer-Moms-Dads-explosion/dp/0984135308 No affiliation, just an interesting perspective on youth soccer. |
Anonymous
| Good read with good reminders a, thank you. |
Anonymous
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May not be the original source, but I'll give this a try:
smithsoniansoccer.com/patience-is-the-most-important-attribute-in-developing-soccer-players/ |
Anonymous
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This is also a fantastic read.
http://www.rocketbirdlondon.com |
Anonymous
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I have read these articles in the past. I have been told the same thing by family members that coached and played for decades.
I am seeing it start to play out with my older child, 13 (u14). It's so true about a 6-age span---where kids at this age can look anywhere from 10 to 16. Some of the kids we play against have mustaches and are thicker/testosterone....and some look like my 10 year old. I also see some of the players that were ignored/lower teams have worked their way up and are playing better than a lot of their peers that started out on top at age 8. The real challenge in this day and age is getting your kid to stick with it when they get frustrated if they are smaller size and just as good or better technically and tactically---but aren't of the 'kick and run' style. Since the sport is so big in this area and there are so many kids playing--getting put on a low team at age 8/9 is essentially a death sentence because it is very rare the kid from a 5-6th team that can jump that many teams. They tend to promote one team at a time--or just take a similar player from another Club so as not to mess up the apple cart and have parents complain why one kid got moved up and not theirs. Keep it fun. Try to shelter your kids from the crazy sidelines. And, if your kid truly isn't being noticed the way they should---it helps to have totally unbiased/impartial judges of this--you may need to move them around. Parents need to look objectively. I have certainly been honest when I see kids of a higher level on a higher team at that point and time in development. I am okay with that. It's when it is clearly not the case that you have to examine Club culture and/or coach and realize they all will never all appreciate the same style of player. That's not bad and it's not personal. It's just the way it is. Kids have to work through that. |
Anonymous
I think patience is what youth soccer misses the most in the US. We want wins and championships from the U12 and under set. We judge quality on this alone no matter at what cost. The average US soccer player stops playing soccer in HS/by HS---when other countries are just starting to evaluate their players --17/18/19, we see ours as done. There are many famous FIFA players that were not top players in the early-mid teens, but blossomed later. We just don't keep to the same timetable. There are many FIFA scouts that say they won't even seriously look at a kid until he's at least 17. Before that, you can't tell how they are going to end up. There is at trend of taking young African kids to Europe, but then throwing them out when they don't materialize. Many articles have been written about how hard it is to get right which players will be the best in early adulthood. Barring the few soccer genetic freaks like Messi and Pele and Ronaldo, etc., for most players it's a journey. There are so many players in Academies around the World that will never make it to a first team. |
Anonymous
What real mechanism is there to keep kids playing beyond 17/18 years old in the US though? |
Anonymous
None. This goes hand and hand with the development problem. There is only incentive for good little kid players for parental bragging rights about what color team they play for. By 15, most of them won't be playing anymore. |
Anonymous
| That’s why we need to extend the structure up to U23 |
Anonymous
And play where exactly? People don't stop playing because there is no longer a "U" designation that fits their age. They stop playing because there is little to no reason to play beyond a casual rec/adult league environment if playing in college is not an option. |