"if a had to pick one single reason for my love of sport..."

If I had to give one single reason for my love of sports it would be this: I love the tests of the human spirit. I love to see defeated teams refuse to die. I love to see impossible odds confronted. I love to see impossible dares accepted. I love to see the incredible grace lavished on simple plays—the simple flashing beauty of perfect form—but, even more, I love to see the heart that refuses to give in, refuses to panic, seizes opportunity, slips through defenses, exerts itself far beyond capacity, forges momentarily of its bodily habitat an instrument of almost perfect will. In all my life I have never known such thoroughly penetrating joys as playing with an inspired team against a team we recognized from the beginning had every reason to beat us. I love it when the other side is winning and there are only moments left; I love it when it would be reasonable to be reconciled to defeat, but one will not, cannot; I love it when a last set of calculated, reckless, free, and impassioned efforts is crowned with success. When I see others play that way, I am full of admiration, of gratitude. That is the way I believe the human race should live. When human beings actually accomplish it, it is for me as if the intentions of the Creator were suddenly limpid before our eyes: as though into the fiery heart of the Creator we had momentary insight.

- The Joy of Sports by Michael Novak

Little Hawks

A new coach once looked at a Blackhawks program, seeing the players perform fimiliar step overs they commented dismissively "well, the moves are generic aren't they?" In a way that is true, there is nothing new under the sun and for Blackhawks or Coerver to claim a movement or special skill is missing the point. The movement is an external manifestation of what is going on in the brain. Once the movement is completed the player then assesses how it went. It was cool! It was fun! I did it! The important thing is not the physical movement, it's what happens in the hearts and minds of the young kids as they recognize that they are in control. If you don't understand that you will simply force feed kids something you want--not what they want. What is important thing is building an early love of learning and enjoyment with the ball. Feelings are important to learning. This is why Little hawks and Blackhawk programs are successful: They prioritize the person as they build the player from the inside out.

This is priority one with our youngest players. Next, we set about designing a curriculum that provides opportunities for growth. Dr. Marianne Torbert of Temple University has identified three interrelated concepts that when applied to play activities enhance and increase the growth and development of children. I teach these concepts to our developmental and Little Hawk coaches to consider in developing and executing training sessions:

1. Expansion --anything that increases the number of potential growth experiences.

Reduce lines, lectures, waiting. Provide many opportunities to work and learn with the ball. For little Hawks this means as much time with the ball as possible.

2. Equalization --equal opportunity for kids of all experience, gender, size and level. Children have the right to participate in activities at their own ability level.

Allow for different levels of challenge to match the different abilities. How do we do this? All our games provide repetitive opportunities without exclusion. If we play knock out for instance, we allow the players to come back into the game with a special skill activity. It means no exclusionary games.

3. Interactive Challenges. Players participating at their personal level contribute to the growth of other players who may be a level above or a level below.

This is very important and rarely understood correctly. . Almost everyone understands part of the getting something out of it by playing "up" players see a faster level, they are nudged to speed up and grow their game. The misunderstanding is that only you cannot learn anything by "playing down." Perhaps the greatest dribbler of all time, Garincha, integral in the world cups of '58 and '62 for Brazil would take his ball to the school yard to practice with children! Of course he was probably keeping the ball in the face of 100 kids making the task complex, but he must have gotten something important from those kids.

Playing at a level below is the most misunderstood and perhaps the most integral piece of player development. Think street. As a youngster you must at some point step on the field for the first time. Someone on that pitch is a level or two (or three!) above you. They accept you on the field. They act as mentor, leader, keeper of the game. If they are playing against you they will beat you off the dribble. They will practice the most difficult tasks against the lowest level players, learning what they can do and taking risks.

Kids who understand this get more practice, create a larger repertoire of movements, recognize the recurring situations and tend to rise to the highest level. Unfortunately the opposite is true. Often kids will drop out of games with younger kids, to them it's lame, it's not their fault, they lack the capacity to create and only enjoy competing, because they have nothing to learn they are bored and the game is not fun. These players often struggle when they get older as ball comfort and creativity becomes more important.

The Achievement of this concept is a critical element for successful youth coaching. All teams have players with a wide range of abilities, and it's the responsibility of the educator to stimulate growth of each player. Providing activities that pose interactive challenges enables each player to participate at their own level while stimulating the growth of other players with whom they interact.

How do we do this? The game of Crab soccer is a good example. As the game progresses, players of lesser ability become the first additional crab while the players of greater ability find the dribbling challenge increase as more and more players become crabs. They get a more complex challenge to match their current ability level.

Build the player from the inside out then provide a healthy, safe and nurturing environment with plenty of opportunities to learn and grow. The hard part is the execution. It's not easy to make this all happen and it's taken me many years striving to get it right. As a wise old Swedish coach once told me about teaching kids:"it's good work, but it's hard work."

To read more on the topic of youth development follow my Blog called "Joy of the People," at joyofthe people.blogspot.com

"The beauty of Ajax at its peak was like the beauty of thought."

Ajax, Cruyff and Vasovic

By Velibor Vasović, the first 'Total Soccer" Sweeper. Your patience will be rewarded, one of the best articles on the beauty of the game I have read.

We played every day. This was just after the war. When it rained we played in the cowshed. The cow stood in the rain and watched. Six or so kids in four square meters: you learned precise passing. We played with anything that was round. Mostly tennis balls; one boy's family had an old box of tennis balls. You developed great technique trying to dribble tennis balls. The acoustics of empty stadiums were very beautiful. When a single bird called out, you heard it from wherever you were. In the early morning, or after matches, when the lights were out and the sky was black, you heard the wind in the grass. In the Dutch leagues then, the stadium superstructures were skeletal and intimate. The advertising panels were like old friends and smelled of wet wood. The empty balconies overhung the stands, so that stray papers blown from above were snared by seat backs below. When you took a ball out to the middle of the pitch and struck it once, the thump filled the entire space. The thump seized something in your chest. My name is Velibor Vasovic, and for eleven years I played football, first for Partizan Belgrade and my national team, and then for Ajax. For eleven years I played for money, I should say; football I played my entire life. My brother played with his friends, and when I was old enough to stand I started joining in. I began in goal but could never stay there, and was always running after the ball and upsetting everyone and ruining the game, and eventually they made someone else goalie. We played every day. This was just after the war. When it rained we played in the cowshed. The cow stood in the rain and watched. Six or so kids in four square meters: you learned precise passing. We played with anything that was round. Mostly tennis balls; one boy's family had an old box of tennis balls. You developed great technique trying to dribble tennis balls. At the 1954 World Cup in Switzerland, in the group matches my brother played against the immortal Hungarians with their bright red shirts--Puskas, Kocsis, Hidegkuti--the team that had humiliated England 6-3 and 7-1 just months before. "What was it like?" we asked upon his return. We had followed the match on the radio, but the announcer had been at a loss to describe what he was seeing. Crowded around the countertop of the local bar, we'd been informed that Kocsis had entered the penalty area, and stopped, and turned. Then God had been invoked, at a high volume. Followed by a tinny roar. So when my brother returned, one of the heroes of our 2-8 loss, it was as if we had and hadn't been there; as if we did and didn't know what brilliant football was truly like. After the game he'd traded shirts with Puskas. He showed the shirt around the bar. It passed from person to person like Achilles' shield. An old man wiped his hands before taking it. We had to ask my brother our questions many times. Everyone had his own theories as to the secret of the Hungarians' game. Was it their skills? Their tactics? Their size? Their speed? And what was it like in the West? I thought about his answers when I first came to Amsterdam and saw Johan Cruyff play a thirty-yard cross on a dead run so that the trajectory bent away from the stunned goalie's attempt at a deflection. The ball dropped lightly in front of the right-winger's boot. The right-winger put it in the back of the net as though he'd just happened by. This was in 1966. Ajax's coach and club president both had seen me score our only goal in Partizan's loss to Real Madrid in that May's European Cup final. I was to be the rock around which Ajax would build its defense. Understand: it was quite a change from Zagubica to Amsterdam in 1966. What was rebelliousness in Zagubica then? Old farmers fondling their donkeys in public. Civil disobedience was refusing to roll out of the lane once you fell over drunk. I arrived in Amsterdam soon after their Liberation Day and thought on the ride in from the airport that there'd been a coup. A revolution. An invasion from space. Thousands of young people were surging about the center of town, arm in arm, singing and shouting something. My interpreter, the Yugoslav wife of a Dutchman, explained that they were shouting, "We want our Bolletjes!" Bolletjes turned out to be a breakfast snack. It was an advertising slogan. Why were they shouting this? They were bored, she told me. Thousands of young people chanting this absurdity! Groups shouted it back and forth to one another. The police stood by, polite, their hands clasped in front of them. We were imprisoned by the sheer numbers in a large plaza called the Leidseplein. My interpreter apologized for not having anticipated this Nit seemed serene about the delay. The taxi driver rested his forearms on the wheel and every so often shouted something good-naturedly to those who stood on his car's bonnet. When our taxi was stopped, young girls pressed their cheeks to my window glass as if the car were an infant relative. Atop a statue of a civic leader, a man dressed as a shaman performed antismoking rituals--he crushed packs of cigarettes, or put cigarettes in his mouth and then broke them and threw them away with wild gestures--while the crowd chanted, "Bram bram! Ugga ugga! Bram bram!" What did "Bram bram! Ugga ugga!" mean? I wanted to know. My interpreter shrugged. "Bram bram. Ugga ugga," she said. She identified a small man atop a flagpole as Johnny the Selfkicker, who talked himself into a trance and threw himself from high places. Many of the people in white, she explained, were the Provos, anarchists who looked upon playfulness as the key to a better world. "Playfulness," I repeated, and she answered, with some defensiveness, "Well, you needn't say it like that." Understand: I am not political. Everywhere I've gone, people have nodded when those words have emerged from my mouth, as though they understood. And then they've gone right on with plebiscite this and student movement that. "Vasovic doesn't give a rat's ass about anything," Michels, Ajax's coach, used to say to the reporters and my teammates. It was his highest praise. He meant other than football. My interpreter that day had been proud of her adopted country. Her face suggested that I was like a visit from a backward relative. She asked about my hometown: what was life like in those hills? It all seemed so wild and remote. "That was a quiet shithole," I told her. "This is a noisy shithole." The taxi driver asked her a question, and she answered with the word for "welcome" in my language. "Welcome," he said to me. "He's speaking to you," my interpreter told me. I lit a cigarette. I don't like being scolded. "This is a time of great change in Holland," she told me, as if that should affect my smoking. "Is the currency stable?" I asked. After that she gave up on me. After a few minutes of silence, the taxi driver made a remark, and she answered in a way that evidently made him sad. Johan Cruyff was political. The same day I was introduced to Dutch politics I was introduced to Dutch football. I sat between the club president and my interpreter and watched an Ajax home game against PSV Eindhoven. I drank many beers. I noticed their left-winger, a blank-faced beanpole with endless stamina. He ran for ninety minutes and looked at the end as if he could have run to Maastricht and back. And he ran with purpose: he continually set up Ajax's offense, flew down the wing, touched off chaos in PSV's penalty area, created space for himself and his teammates. He was envisioning whole geometries while his opponents scurried about like moles. He was a Pythagoras in shorts. I was told he was nineteen. Then I was told I needn't worry about him, because left wing was the position of the club's best player, who wasn't playing at the moment. I started to leave. I told the interpreter, "Tell the president that if they have anyone better than this guy, they don't need me." They caught up to me halfway to the exit and returned me to my seat. I met with Cruyff after the game. He had the same blank expression while he toweled off. His teammates were showering. His towel was the size of a facecloth. At that point the players still had to wash their own kits and provide their own towels and shampoo. I heard the interpreter mention Partizan Belgrade. Cruyff nodded. He led me back out to the pitch, intercepted a ball boy heading in with a net full of balls, and lined them up at the eighteen-yard mark from the goal. There were nine of them. The interpreter and club president trailed along behind us, making remarks that he chose not to answer. While I watched, he tucked his hair behind his ears and struck each of the first five balls in line precisely against the crossbar. Then he stepped away. In my street shoes, I did the same with the four that were left. Blank-faced Cruyff smiled, and the interpreter and club president burst into applause. When they stopped, Cruyff turned his attention to the club president. They talked, and I felt the need for more beer. The interpreter explained that Johan was always agitating for something. "What's he want?" I asked. "Oh, you know," she said, embarrassed. "It's always something." Cruyff spoke to her in a low voice. They looked at each other. "He wants me to tell you what they're talking about," she said miserably. It turned out he was asking why officials were insured on foreign trips and players weren't. Why coaches got meal money and players didn't. She seemed aware that this was a poor strategy for attracting me to change teams. He had what he called his List of Grievances, she confided. His willingness to be a pain in the ass appealed to me. And only the Dutch had a short transfer period in those years, so they were my ticket to the West. The club president knew that as well, so after sitting around a rented room for three days, I signed a contract for half the sum for which I'd been asking. The Dutch carried on like the Sermon on the Mount, but their hearts were ledger books. Merchants squeezed each guilder while giving change. Does it make you nostalgic? my brother wrote. It makes me feel like I'm home, I wrote back. He worked twelve-hour days on one of the recently consolidated collective farms to the south. His career had been destroyed by a clumsy tackle. That first morning out on the practice pitch with the rest of Ajax, longhaired boys nodded greetings and included me in their loosening-up drills. The sun warmed the little canals and cows in the distance. When the coach arrived and blew his whistle, the longhaired boys formed two lines and proclaimed their objective with a little poem: Open game, open game You can't afford to neglect the wing. And then went back to what they were dong. A hand-printed translation was provided for me on an index card. I was introduced. Practice began. Few remember that before Ajax became Ajax, Holland's football record in internationals had been the equal of Luxembourg's. It took all of us--coach, Communist, and longhaired boys--all of thirty minutes that first day to realize that what we'd collected was a group of people who thought about space. The ultra-aggressive football in which players switched positions and rained attacks from every angle was worked through and worked out on that pitch over the next three years. It was a collective. During rest breaks we all talked. We all listened. Suppose we tried this? What happened when we tried that? We started letting midfielders and defenders join in attacks, and saw the ways in which forwards would have to support such flexibility by flowing back to cover. Position shifting came easily and provided opponents, once we started playing matches, with a chaos of movement and change with which to deal. The first Dutch word I really learned to speak was "switch." We built our moves from the back; the goalkeeper only rarely kicked the ball long, instead clearing it to our defenders, and the team moved in set and improvisational patterns from there: if someone came back for a pass, someone else broke downfield. In possession we made the pitch as large as possible, spreading play to the wings and seeing everything as a way to increase and exploit space. If we lost the ball, the same thinking was used in reverse. We talked about space in a practical way. How could you play for ninety minutes and remain strong? If you were the left back and you ran seventy meters up the wing, it wasn't so good if you then had to run back to your starting position. If the midfielder took your place, it shortened the distances. Even then I could see that it was very Dutch to look for the simple solution. And to find the biggest thrill in the even simpler solution. Cruyff was the genius at this. Good players always found ways of receiving the ball in space, but Cruyff while playing saw where everyone should be, or go. He was three moves ahead, and the moves were all about shaping space. From above--from up in the press box--it was a lesson in architecture. When we spaced ourselves properly, it suddenly became very quiet. No noise. You heard only the wind. And the ball: the sound it made on the foot, the sound that made clear where it was going, how hard, how low, and how fast. Suddenly football was not about kicking one another's legs anymore. Fans at our matches came away feeling they'd seen something they could see nowhere else on earth. You guys really have something going, my brother wrote back, after I wrote him about what was happening. My parents: they were political. Their Partisan unit during the war had both an antitank rifle and a mimeograph machine, and my mother had lost two frostbitten fingers dragging it over some ridgelines in heavy snow to keep it from German hands. God forbid. The whole tide might have turned. They each produced for me a wry little smile when I came home, a wildly excited seventeen-year-old, to announce I'd be playing for Belgrade. I hadn't understood why until I realized that they were smiling at the PARTIZAN on my shirt. When I was ten, I asked to be included in the confirmation classes that my uncle, a pastor, was going to conduct for my brother and two cousins. I think I believed that that, at last, would make me a part of the family, or at least a part of a common cause. My uncle agreed to interview me, to measure my suitability. The interview was held in the presence of my grandmother. I failed to answer a single question. My collapse caused my uncle and brother considerable amusement, and my grandmother none at all. When the Germans came, my parents enlisted in the first Slovene brigade to be named after a poet, in their case, Cankar. ("The people will write their destiny alone/Without tuxedos, or the beads of priests.") They fought illiteracy by giving begging children pencils and paper instead of money or candy. They disseminated periodicals like "Death to Death!" and "Today's Woman." They lectured on the relation between spontaneity and ideology. They used doors for blackboards. They stayed frozen and hungry. They stopped at doorways from Stajerska to Koruska and sang the old Slovene songs to pry some bread out of the shuttered homesteads. Sometimes they were allowed to sleep in the barn. My grandmother was my mother's mother. Her father had been a minor railway official and had died of typhus. Her mother had been widowed with six children, my grandmother the last of the six. By the time I knew her, she had her little bit of jam each morning in a spoon that had to be cleaned just so the night before. She described her son-in-law as someone with a good memory but no depth. Our father always smiled when she said so. It was hard for us to imagine him as having shot Germans. He was pleasant and gentle, if not always direct. Before the war, he'd worked late into the night, under a feeble lamp, to enable imprisoned comrades to mull over the most recent literature and prepare themselves for the battle outside. My mother had made lists and tea and helped him with the phrasing. They saw themselves as in battle with the medieval darkness and fury in the souls of our backward peasants. They believed the Party and the movement were very special, and that people within the Party and the movement were very special. They were convinced that they had a scientific ideology. Misery and despair were all around them, and the more unbearable life became, the closer they were to the new world. Implementing decisions was not sufficient. Anyone could do that. They had to transform themselves so that at any time all of their actions could be measured in terms of the interests of the revolution. The role of history's observers had seemed undignified once history had pointed the way to final freedom and brotherhood among men. A person about to leave prison suddenly becomes loved by everyone. And he feels the same about those he is leaving behind. Quarrels and hatreds are forgotten and forgiven, and he says goodbye warmly and directly, as if nothing had ever happened. The night before my departure for the West I wept and waited for the dawn. While I made tea and watched the sun rise, my mother and father brought my belongings--a suit and a few other things, packed and creased and smelling of mothballs--to the door. My lawyer came with me to get a big shot to sign the necessary final papers. In the corridor where we waited there were several frantic young men. I registered little of the train trip to the airport. Willows and alders along clear streams. Colors and smells overwhelmed me when I stepped off the plane at Schiphol. Women in spring coats and hats, strange fashions. My translator met me with a hug, though she was a pretty young woman. I rode to the city in a stupor. A far-off bridge, suspended on an invisible thread. A university. A square in front of it. I was left in my new flat to tidy up after my trip. I wandered to the back garden. A branch full of purple blossoms hung over the wall, and from the window of the house next door a young woman was shaking rugs. In my own language, I told her I was a persecuted student. I asked if she would lend me a rug to lie on. She smiled. My eyes filled with tears for my father. What hadn't he thrown underfoot and sacrificed? He'd built himself a life that, for the sake of an idea, had buried itself. A life surrounded by spite in a godforsaken, frightened little town. They thought they were doing it for us, and for our children. But this was the world of their imagination, and they'd pictured it falsely to us, and we at first hadn't wanted to believe things to be different. Michels was the perfect coach for me. He required fantastic discipline. Even with the assistant coaches he was like an animal trainer. He told me I was his favorite player because I couldn't ask him questions. He told us all that when we came to the stadium, we were the numbers on our backs. When we left, we became people and he could talk to us. Each night I went home satisfied to my flat with its one chair. I never understood why you'd play a game in which you lost four kilos of your body weight for nothing. When you put on the shirt and laced up the boots, you had to win. Otherwise you might as well stay at home and watch the television. With such an attitude I was very helpful to the Dutch, who were not naturally ferocious. If there was an art to defending, they were blind to it. They prized Technique and Tactics. Courage, will to win, speed, size: none of that aroused much interest. So during training sessions Michels did all he could to develop aggression. We played games in which he acted as the referee from hell, calling the fouls with such enraging one-sidedness that our nickname for the matches became the Bloodbaths. He made sure we lived only football: he got our salaries raised, so that Cruyff could leave the printing works, Keizer the tobacco shop, Swart his haberdashery. Understand, though: he never scored the goals. He did his part, and we did ours. We couldn't believe, ourselves, what we held in our palms. Against MVV Maastricht in our first game we won 9-3 and I scored five goals. A defender! We scored 122 goals in the league season. Johan Cruyff, Piet Keizer, Barry Hulshoff, Ruud Krol, Gerrie Muhren: they were all unleashed, with me, on Liverpool in the fog in the second round of the European Champions' Cup on the seventh of December, 1966. Together we remade the football globe. Liverpool barely deigned to look over at us during the warm-ups; the side was stuffed with demigods from their World Cup champion team of the previous summer. While we stretched, the fog rolled in, and the game was played in such a murk that the scoreboard operator, who sat near our bench, needed runners to let him know what was happening down at the ends of the field. He demanded confirmation when told we'd scored the first goal, and then confirmation when told we'd scored the second, and then, when the third went in, less than ten minutes into the match, he shouted at his runners, "Come on, boys, don't make up stories!" His words were reprinted in all the Dutch newspapers the next day. One front page, in letters large enough that there was room for nothing else, proclaimed: AJAX 5-1! Everywhere we went--shops, cinemas, schools, restaurants--those two numbers appeared. When we traveled to Liverpool for the second leg, everyone said that now we had their attention. Their coach predicted they'd win 7-0. We drew 2-2. An Amsterdam headline read: AJAX WINS, 2-2. Was there a connection between cultural and football revolutions? Reporters wanted our opinions. Keizer said no. Hulshoff said no. Krol said no. Muhren said no. I said no. Michels refused to answer. Cruyff said it was an intriguing idea. He spent postgame interviews talking about the Provos' White Plans. What did he think of Luud Schimmelpeninck's plan for free bikes all over the city? Poor Michels sat in his office, his elbows on his desk and his hair in his fists. He came out every so often to throw a Provo out of the locker room. They were easy to spot, all in white. And they loved Cruyff, who attracted reporters. "What's he on about?" Michels would ask someone standing nearby, jabbing a thumb toward a Provo. "He's saying that under New Babylonic circumstances, the lust for aggression will be sublimated into the lust for playfulness," Cruyff would explain. "Oh, for Christ's sake," Michels would say. Cruyff didn't spout such stuff, but you could see he believed in parts of it, kept an eye on it. He was intrigued by his own uniqueness. Whenever we set foot on a pitch, he was interested in revolutionizing the game. The rest of us were happy to settle for winning it. And yet at night, lying in my bed and hearing my neighbor still shaking her rugs, I'd envision my parents' faces and wonder if this were in some strange way their gift to me: Partisan tactics, Partisan strategies. In their war there'd been no front or rear lines, and encirclements had emerged and dissolved fluidly on both sides; superiority had been achieved not by numerical strength but by tactical resourcefulness. Survival as a Partisan had meant being creative about space. "Fascinating," Michels had said when I mentioned this to him. I'd brought it up on a bus when he'd complained to me about Cruyff. My Dutch was by that point sufficient for semicomic conversation. But all was well as long as we kept winning. We were becoming something majestic and invincible. One moment we'd be marked by two defenders; the next, completely free. One moment the pitch before us was crowded and narrow; the next, huge and wide. The brilliance of our passing was unassuming: the white and black of the ball against the blue of the sky. Against the green. Beautiful in its precision, and quiet and modest. No one danced or took off his shirt after such passes. Bad weather or rotten pitches meant different kinds of advantage. Keizer in a swamp of a pitch produced a goal by lobbing a high ball into the thickest mud where Turkish defenders, expecting a bounce, found themselves wrong-footed when the ball stuck. A Kuwaiti emir in the stands was so moved that after the match he gave Keizer the gold watch from his wrist. Against Panathinaikos in a downpour we spent the match playing passes into the areas of poorest drainage, knowing the balls would stop while the Greek defenders continued to overrun them. Following Cruyff's lead, we built castles in the air, while he appeared where most needed, always pointing, pointing, pointing: you go there; you belong here. He would have been happy on a pitch two kilometers long with no goals and nothing but beautiful waves of movement, streaming up and streaming down. Our perfection seemed to be automatic. Our instincts intimidating. We brought to bear on our opponents calm minds, immaculate technique, and visionary passing. The beauty of Ajax at its peak was like the beauty of thought. Cruyff became the young Amsterdammers' hero. "Our John Lennon," Keizer told me after a match. "Who's John Lennon?" I asked him back. I got furniture for my apartment. I sent money home. My brother was twice denied permission to visit. Cruyff's opinion was consulted on every conceivable subject: science, culture, technology. The present, the future, even the past. Modern youth needed to know what he thought of the past. Two months before I'd arrived, Holland's princess had married a German who'd served in the Wehrmacht. All of Amsterdam had found this the end of the world. One afternoon I found Cruyff giving an interview about that. Who knows with whom. Should the protesters have carried out their threat to put LSD into the water supply? he was asked. He turned to me. "What about it, Vasovic?" he asked. The reporter, bushy-haired with thick black glasses, turned with him, pen poised. "Should they have put LSD in the water supply?" "No speak," I told him, and dropped my shorts to change. The protests went on for much of the summer. You could watch on the television the Provos and student demonstrators, all in white, carrying their banners. And the police, all in black, waiting to beat them up. Help me, my brother wrote. Your brother's in need of help, my father wrote. My brother had developed a romantic rivalry with a lawyer named Tasa who'd turned out to be UDBA. That's your brother, my father wrote. Cuckolding the civil secret police. In a bar, drunk, he had railed against Yugoslavia's silence in the face of the invasion of Hungary. It had been ten years ago, his nervous friends had counseled. He should let it rest. But my brother had mounted a table and balanced with his bad knee. The immortal Hungarians! Puskas in prison! I was able to arrange a return trip only at the end of the season. I spent the night in Belgrade and walked to the train station during the following dawn. Mist hovered above the woods and in the golden treetops. I needed clean air. I snorted like a horse and felt the freshness. I found my brother hiding in a town not far from our own. He was staying in a room with a metal worker from Bosnia, a poverty-stricken Muslim who'd moved in the hope of survival. The room was clean, with two beds, a woodstove, a small fir table, and a washstand. An alder shadowed the tiny back window. The metal worker set out tea for us and then disappeared. We embraced. Everyone liked my brother. He was an open, emotional man, so handsome that women turned to look at him in the street. He told me he'd read about the Liverpool match. We smiled and talked about the old days and the cowshed. He asked me to get him out. I wanted to know his financial picture. He had no financial picture. Our parents were in a terrible state, he confided. He was testing their faith in the Party's infallibility. It caused him pain to be doing this. Could I get him out? I told him I would try. Of course, I would try. We were silent, the fir table between us. He looked into my expression. It was as if I had said, What can I do? I'd brought money, hidden, as well as Other gifts. He accepted them all with a combination of apathy and good-natured fear. He'd never refused financial assistance. At the airport check-through a commissioner asked why I was not playing in my homeland. I told him I was spreading the glory of Yugoslav football to the West. While he looked over my paperwork, he said, "And your father's an honest man." "What makes you think I'm not?" I asked. Everyone around us looked up. He was unembarrassed. "I was talking about your father," he said mildly, holding out my passport. "I don't even know you." I wrote my brother upon my return to tell him how my attempts were proceeding. I heard nothing back. My father wrote a week or so later and mentioned nothing about it. He described instead how he'd felt during the Liberation: the muddle inside. The enormous happiness all around him--everyone on the street dancing and jumping--and he himself just walking through it all, feeling only a sort of heaviness. The Dutch meanwhile, as always, went ahead drawing their straight lines into the future. They were unsatisfied to simply win; they were determined, as well, to proselytize their beauty and goodness to the world. Their football was to be like their foreign policy: a light unto all nations. The Provos unveiled a poster with Cruyff at its center and the motto BETTER LONGHAIRED THAN SHORTSIGHTED. I felt accused by it. I avoided it. I avoided Cruyff. Then, before an exhibition, the trainer ran out of tape with the two of us still barefoot. He disappeared into the bowels of the stadium to search for more. Cruyff and I sat on facing tables, bobbing our feet at each other. His hair was longer than ever. He picked at an ear. He studied me like someone else's chess problem. He asked, "What's happening to your country, Vasovic?" "I don't know," I finally said, when able to speak. "You just went back," he said. "Yes," I said. "To see your brother," he said. "Yes," I said. "He was in some sort of trouble," he said. "Michels told you this?" I asked. "He didn't return with you," he said. "Is he here?" I asked. "Do you see him?" He looked around. He resumed with his ear. "He was a great player," he eventually remarked. "What's wrong with you?" the trainer asked me, when he finally returned. "He's been like that the whole time," Cruyff informed him. I played the worst match of my life. Afterward I just lay on the pitch. Someone asked for my jersey. Everything became less pleasurable for me. I had football intelligence, which had nothing to do with normal intelligence. The most difficult things in life were choices, as our trainer used to say. I tore a muscle in my thigh that would not heal. Running was now an application of fire. As the saint said, Pain was a holy angel, who showed treasures to men that otherwise remained forever hidden. My parents had stopped writing. My brother had stopped writing. It happened to be the case that certain things remained unsaid in their country, while they were expressed in this one. There was no point in discussing which was the "right" way. Each involved different people who acted as they had been inwardly conditioned to act. One sunny Sunday, soon after Queen's Day, which had been marked by mobs selling things on the street and drinking to excess, I took a throw-in at an exhibition game against Glasgow and caught the eye of a blonde girl with an overbite and tears in her eyes, and I stepped away from the ball and never kicked one again. What had she conjured for me? The young woman with the rug. My father. My brother. The overbite of a boy who'd played with us in the cowshed. Who is it that goes free when those he loves are not? Michels tried to work with me and reason with me for a week or so and then gave up. "Let him go," Cruyff said, witness to his final attempt. I got a job sweeping the new Cafe Het Station, which seemed chilly and fantastical. The huge bleak spaces of the adjacent bus station rose out the mist beyond every morning as I pushed my broom. On one occasion I even stepped away from a ball that rolled toward me from a nearby boys' game. Wasn't it so that even when we were laughing we were sad. In the last letter I received from my brother, he wrote that he was writing from the saddest of all prisons: his heart. Good thoughts, bad thoughts, perfect headers, crooked, dipping volleys from impossible angles, and envisioned geometries. Placid-faced neighbors and beer: all these become part of a great invisible sphere in which one lived and about whose reality there was no doubt. Those spheres keep us cosseted from pain. We used to sing in one of our children's songs about the angels, "Two to cover me, two to wake me," and guardianship by the invisible powers was something grown-ups needed no less than children. Therefore, I wrote my parents, one last time, you must not think me unhappy. What is happiness and unhappiness? It depends on what happens inside. I am grateful every day for those spheres inside--that I have them, that I have you--and that, all of that, makes me happy.

MN soccer

This is a letter I sent to DOC's around the state who at the time were having an online debate over player recruitment. I sent it in 2005, sadly, not much has changed.


FORMULAS FOR DEVELOPMENT

There is a saying that goes: you know you are a soccer coach when you lose 0-5 and you say "That other team is just not focused on development like us." or When you win 5-0 you say "Thank god we were working on development!"

Everyone wants to fly the flag of development. We have so many formulas for development that the State is now pulling itself apart. Despite all the good intentions I think it’s clear that the environment for the very best players, the place where 80 percent of of attention is focused, is failing. Recruiting, super and elite teams, poor quality (at the upper levels), are all just symptoms of a bigger problem.

We have narrowed our focus for so long,. No matted how we try to phrase it winning is emphasized over development. Clubs are occupied maintaining or gaining status, teams must focused on winning over development. Parents and players shopping for the best situation. Coaches forced to take shortcuts. We have created this monster. Recruiting is just the ugly offspring and perhaps the tipping point of action.

The sad thing is it’s all been done under the banner of good intentions. But as they say, the road to (you know where) is paved with good intentions. Everything wrong in this State stems from somebody's well intended idea of what they think will create the best players.

MYSA. (And, please don’t get me wrong, I am not casting judgment, I can see why these decisions were made, but now it is time to change) believes that there are not enough good players, thus promotion/relegation and small premier leagues.

Their formula for creating better players might look like this:




(Good teams + Good teams + average teams + weaker teams)
divided by competition = great teams . Great teams =Player development.

This puts the cart before the horse. The State is playing the role of developer when they should be playing the role of facilitator. Teams that fail, well the club retains the status, but the players go elsewhere. Teams that gain status attract players from the teams that fail. Great players are recruited, formerly good players are cut. We have created and generated players and especially parents ready and willing to move. The club is not important, the team and the status is important.

We have created a movable feast and the players are gorging. By the time they are 17 many players have changed clubs 4 times or more!

And, what is it? Players who move from club to club, the way I see it anecdotally, well, they forget how to play. Show me a player who jumped clubs 4 times who remains a dominant player. I have to believe that this can’t be good for their development.

Well if everyone is moving then what does a gentle push (recruiting) matter?

Another culprit are the Coaches and Parents of these teams marketing themselves as "select, elite or super," they also think that our players are not good enough. The argument is exhausting in it’s dogma, "the State does everything for for the bottom 95%, we need something for the top 5%. We are the answer. The best kids need to train together. We are the best, that’s why everyone hates us. They always hate the best. Come join us."

They believe they have the formula to making and being the best. It might look like this:



Best Player + other best players + great coach + challenging training + great completion = Player development.

The variable, in these coaches mind is the player. They need a certain supply to tip the scale. They need to find the right ones, they start at the top. This past year you had several "super" teams fall short at State Cup. What was the reason? Not enough good players. Nothing wrong with their formula, coaching was great, training was great, competition? Great. Just not enough good players. Let’s find more.

But of course this means cutting a few that no longer fit their plan…but that’s another story.



THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS

From my perspective the formula for developing players might look like this:




Good Player + better players + weaker players + fun + training + friendships + hardships + care + excellent coaching + learning + time + humility + patience = Player development.

This is the hard way. This way takes lots of time and care. This is nothing different then what you are all doing. But when someone offers a shortcut, well it must be hard to resist.

How can a super team achieve this?

They can’t. This can only be done by the club. By the team, by the player by the person. The player comes from what you have on the inside. This is the importance of the club. The club and us as DOC’s job is to care for the development of our kids. This is the role of the clubs around the world.



WE MUST DEEMPHASIZE STAUS AND SELECTION AND FOCUS ON DEVELOPMENT

I attended the recent English FA course in Chicago. They shared some of their own player selection data. FA wanted to see what kids had joined their academy system. They checked all their Data and found a very high percentage of their kids with older birthdates (if memory serves, their cut off date was September 1) Their was a predominance of kids born in September, followed by October, then November, etc., with very few kids selected with August, July and June birthdates.

They were surprised by this data and wanted to check it against English born kids playing professionally in England. What they found was that the pattern continued. The number of professionals with September and October birthdates greatly outnumbered those born in July and August.

The rewards given at an early age due to the advantage of being months older than competition had apparently had a significant part in selection and advancement into the pro ranks. Similarly, the disadvantage of a late birthdate tends to discourage kids and affect selection. It does not level off until at least 23 years of age.

They recognized that they are missing a chance to develop many, many of their kids. What is the point of this? Well this is one of the many pitfalls associated with selection.

Selection in itself is an intuitive notion that does not accord itself with reality. Player selection is inexact, therefore it should be minimized.

John McEnroe’s father, once told his son at 13 that if he were to win this certain match against this certain ranked opponent that he would become the number one 13 year old in the Nation. He told his dad, "I don’t want to be number one at 13, I want to be number one at 21!"

We do the best we can, but the best players at 13 are never the best players at 21. In the meantime we foster drop out and burn out with too much too soon. We miss chances to develop kids because of an over competitive youth system that rewards winning over development.



CLUBS MUST CREATE A PLAYER CENTERED ENVIRONMENT

Players are important. It is important to play with friends. To learn and grow together. It is important that the best players stay home where others learn from them and they learn the responsibility of being the best, and the leadership skills that go with it. It’s one thing to be the best player. To be a great player you need to make other players better. And guess what? That’s what the players want. They want to play skillfully, they want to lead, they want to make others better.

England brought the game to Brazil. By the time the English came back 40 years later Brazil showed them their style of soccer and changed the game. Did Brazil spend the time putting together select teams to send to England and worrying that they were not good enough? No, they just played for the love of the game. Players were developed out of that love.

We must grow soccer in this State by building that love for the game and remove everything that detracts from it. We can’t concern ourselves with how we are doing at regionals. We are too focused on that goal. Everything that builds the love of the game should be promoted: clubs that develop, fun, self selection, Festivals, pick up formats, small sided, U9-U11, C1 and C2 leagues, State Tournament, quality of play, healthy competition for older kids, excellent training, character development, humility, patience, the appreciation of joyful, skillful play.

Things that need to be addressed: Player recruitment, itinerant players, super teams, unhealthy competition, the red herring idea that winning soccer is good soccer.

I agree this State has a generous supply of DOC and coaching talent, but are we doing with it? Are we focused on the right things? As Clubs what role do we have? If we care about our kids, if we want to see them love the game, play until their knees go, come back and coach, build the passion here in the Sate.

Ted Kroeten
DOC Blackhawks
june 2005

Cruyff is the man

Johann Cruyff believes modern players lack basic skills


Team concerns

"What I notice particularly is that policy-makers in football are never really concerned about individuals, all they're interested in is the team as a whole. Yet a team consists of eleven individuals who each need attention. I often wonder if we're making the most of the qualities players have to offer."



Physical fitness

"Today's football is completely different especially when it comes to the physical aspect - the players are in better physical shape, which is probably the result of all these coaching courses. There's nothing wrong with having fit footballers, but their technical and ball skills have not grown at the same pace, and that's all too apparent when you watch the game these days."


Wasted knowledge

"It seems to me that a wealth of practical knowledge is being squandered, in grassroots and amateur football as well as in top-flight football. If you want to be admitted to a coaching course, you need a good basic level of education, but many footballers lack such a solid basis because they turn professional at 16, and then after a long football career it's really hard to go back to the books and start studying again."



Football first

"But on the other hand these experienced players already know everything there is to know about football. Too many of them are lost to the further development of the game and I think that is simply ridiculous. A football career should become much more important as a criterion for being admitted to a coaching course."



Unnecessary studies

"There are some former top players who take these courses and do so because they want to become trainers and coach professional teams. But they shouldn't be bothering with books on medical subjects - after all, the coaches of AFC Ajax, FC Barcelona or Arsenal FC all have their own staff of medical professionals."



Too much theory

"These coaching courses are much too theoretical and this is what you see reflected in the basic technical skills of the average player. My generation put in a lot more hours playing football after school than kids today. These days all the football kids play is at their clubs, so the clubs need to work seriously on basic skills. You hardly ever see a young player who can use both feet, for example."



Basic skills

"We really need to pay attention to the basic skills: passing, stopping a ball, heading, kicking. If we fail to do so, it won't be long before no one will want to watch football any more."



Coaches' responsibility

"I watch all football, but I have to say I rarely find it interesting. I see way too much pinball football. The ball just goes to and fro, with teams unable hold on to it. There are very few players who can dominate the ball - mostly it's the ball that dominates the player. The coaches and trainers ought to take that to heart, as they are the ones responsible."