An interesting thing happened one day. It was hot, mid nineties and humid. Outside we placed a large sheet of canvas, put goals on them kept the hose running and the kids cooled down on a splash court. As the kids filtered back inside the gym they stayed barefoot. The game going on was a pick up game of 7 v 7 in the gym to futsal goals (3 x 2 meters) with a soft play practice volleyball. This ball is very soft, it is very safe, and the kids had discovered perhaps the most surprising teaching moment of my career.

We have all seen it, the kid who breaks away through three defenders, facing the goalie they drill a perfect strike right into the the keeper's belly button. So this lefty, faster than a jungle cat, broke free and nailed that play volleyball at a good 50 mph right...into the smiling face of a six year old.

For a second I was worried. But the 6 year old was smiling even larger now, he had just made a save vs the best shooter in the gym.

"Finishing can't be taught," this is coaches speak for "I have no idea how to teach it."  Current methods  put kids in situations to replicate the situation, and pare down the decision making process "Low to the far post, high to the near post." We train functionally, with pressure, with loading, conditionally, and still the highest level of skill in players, putting the ball in the net, remains a general mystery.

So the lefty turned the corner again, this time he took something off, but he still pinged it, the little 6 yer old stayed active and went for it, deflecting it away at the last second.

The gym went crazy, this goalie was hot!

Now the lefty comes again, but this time he saw the keeper cutting off the angle, a very soft chip. The six year old, slow to recognize the vector backpedaled late, the ball dropped just over both arms outstretched, no chance to jump the 6 year old picked the ball still smiling...he know it took a great finish to beat him.

In a "Finishing environment" their are two antagonists, the keeper and the attacker. Perfect learning situations involve simple to complex game theory.  It starts out with the very rudimentary "I am just hitting this as hard as I can." 99 percent of our players are in this category.  But to progress you need the problem to progress. In typical systems the keeper is the variable.  Most teams have one keeper who does only a so so job of staying active as players are in close, they are too smart and don't feel like getting hurt with a size five ball from five meters into their stomach.  Certainely they can not keep this up for the hours and hours required for a player to repeat lots of chances.  On top of that keepers at  9-12 years old they are not keeper sufficient enough to require anything but a mediocre finish to guarantee that the ball goes into the net. 

So at the wheelhouse of learning U7-U13, We don't have situations real enough to reward high level finishing.

This is where the ball came in.  It made every keeper great. Even a six year old stays active at the final finishing moment.  This requires the shooter to present a better solution in order to solve the finishing problem, not just any shot will suffice, it has to be finished, and with this ball, that is what the kids do they chip, tuck, slide, power, roof, drag, back heel, rainbow, to get the ball into the net.  They are becoming finishers.

Kids are smart...here is a good example of them teaching us.  I could easily have commanded that a regular or futsal ball was used that day in the gym. They wanted to use that ball to learn something more!  They knew before I did, though they could not articulate it, they understood that this ball would teach them finishing.

So my great learning moment was not how the ball helped to create finishers, but how the environment helps come up with the right questions.  Without those questions there are no great answers, no genius, no invention.

Three  lessons:  1) get a ball like this, it's fun and the kids love it. Then collect as many different balls you can and see what is learned from them.  2) let kids pick the ball rules and parameters of the game. They are smarter then we are.. 3) The environment is everything, mess with it, have fun with it, take care of it.  

12 resolutions for 2012

Here are my 12 resolutions for players for the new year.  I will follow up with a more in depth blog post on each of these topics, but for now here is what we are thinking about in 2012...

1. Have more fun
Everyone wants to have fun, but fun is allusive and sometimes poorly understood. As kids we enjoy fun through "play," but as adults we find fun through "work."  As we age and grow in sport the transition from play to work is sometimes difficult, but important to conquer.   When kids tell us it's not fun any more, what they are really saying is they don't understand how to make the hard work fun.  Studies in youth hockey have found that the time spent in free play (pond hockey) as kids allowed them to carry on to the hard work of deliberate practice as adults.

2. Play everyday
Guess what? It says nothing about where and what level. Expand your opportunities by enjoying every game.  Learn how to set up game with small groups, and learn how to enjoy yourself on your own, imagine, create and dream. Free play is the world's greatest training system.

3. Keep working on skills
Don't stop when most do at 11.  Keep working on your skills everyday.  Professionals do.  Cantana was known for spending time before and after MU training at a wall working on receiving and turns.  Turns out the skills dictate tactics, and tactics are limited without skills. Free Play technique as kids/ deliberate practice technical training as adults.

4. Play close to home
No need to seek out the greatest and best. Time and again around the world the greatest players have arisen from their neighborhoods.  Meanwhile all efforts in the S have focused on separating the gifted and Talented

5. Don't separate by level.  
Best players under the best coaching is a bunch of non sense.  No one knows who the best players are so you really want to separate them?  Tom Byer, a New Yorker considered the pioneer of grassroots soccer in Japan, believes that the best players improve by focusing on the players underneath them.  Let the kids play with their friends and leave em alone.

6. Don't be concerned with tactics. 
Tactics, as Cruyff said, are what you need when you don't have the players.  So because you are going to be one of those players, keep working on that part. The rest will take care of itself.


7. Forget about Talent
Develop a growth mindset, that is acknowledging that accomplishments are attained from effort (not talent). This means EVERYONE can get better, good, great and beyond with effort.

8. Practice scoring.  
Small goals develop dribbling and passing, finishing takes a big goal and keeper.  This is the beauty of futsal, the space is tight but the goal is big and still requires a final finishing action. Of course active goalies are difficult to come by.  In other cultures the goalie problem is solved by placing the new kid in goal, this assures that every young player is trained in goal first, thus the game has plenty of keepers to keep their game going.

9. Remove the physical.  
Address the physical, but it allow to grow as a facilitator of Technique, not as it's own weapon. Do everything with a ball. Physical is finite, skill is infinite. Focus on the one with the biggest upside.

10. Get comfortable. 
Be careful about pushing kids outside the comfort zone.  They will just get anxious and play like it.  Coach Wilmer Cabrera said it best "Our kids are just not comfortable on the ball in tight spaces."  He was right on that and wrong on his remedy: "I think our kids need to be pushed out of their comfort zone."  Does anyone else see the problem here?  Over and over again it's been shown that kids don't learn under pressure, that's for adults, and the 17 year olds that Cabrera were training were neither adults or bound to get more comfortable by continually pushing them out of the comfort zone. Instead do everything and try everything with a ball.  Invent things, do what you like, dribble, score, shoot, run, turn jump and spin with the ball, don't let anyone take it from you.  That's how you get comfortable, not under pressure, that comes later but until then try just about everything.

11. Leave the Marshmallow on the Table.   The self control exemplified by the famous "marshmallow test'" (see the earlier post "Don't eat the Marshmallow") points to the importance of addressing emotional growth and it's importance to later well being.  Self control turns out to be a very high predictor of adult success, the good news is we can improve on self control. Teaching ourselves how to think so that we can outsmart our desires will help us develop into a happy adults and soccer player

12. Dream.  I love this one.  When we dream we dream of lavish plays, flashing beauty on simple form, of last second winners against all odds, of the last second goal in the World Cup final, of the diving header, the bicycle kick.  The Dream always comes first, keep it up. More important than you will ever know.



Just missing the list again this year:
 Soccer, ever the karma inspired leveler makes sure that the harder we try the more we are humbled.  Here is a short list of things that are NOT important.

• Increase speed of play  Kids should dictate the pace not the coach.   High speed practices are great, but not so much when they are pushed by the coach. 

• Play up an age group unless there is a plan this generally is a mistake.  Do what you can do and do it great. By pushing up age group(s) you naturally get to the point where you can't "do" it anymore thus losing practice experience. 

• Play for an elite team  There is no such thing in youth.  Best to save your elite play for when you are 25 and in the world cup.  Until then just play and learn.

• Play in an elite league  The travel alone takes time away from play and learning.
  

• Play for an academy If you go to an academy, make sure it's about schoolwork, not soccer, the term "Soccer Academy" has become an albatross.

Let's win the World Cup in 2022

Read this amazing article.  This is just a little of what it takes to win the world cup one day...


By Melissa Segura,  SI.com

 NACOGDOCHES, Texas -- Soccer makes Victor Rivera sick, and this is a man who once made sure that every minute he wasn't selling tacos he was coaching soccer, and when he wasn't coaching soccer he was watching it, and when he wasn't watching it he was playing it -- that is when his bones, lungs and middle-aged body would allow. But not now. These days there's only one condition when the sport doesn't hurt so much: when the boy he once affectionately called one of his bolillos (his white ones) takes the field -- something Clint Dempsey will do when the U.S. plays England on Saturday in the World Cup.


Dempsey bounced into Rivera's life and started raiding his fridge in 1995, not long after Rivera's teenage sons, Victor Jr. and Franky, moved 140 miles north of Houston from Chicago, where they had been living with their mom. "Are you going to make some chicken quesadillas, Pa," 12-year-old Clint would sometimes ask, peeking around the refrigerator door as Rivera returned home from a day's work at the family's taqueria. Clint had found a second home here, next to the expanse of grass where the boys dropped shoes and t-shirts as makeshift goals and played hours and hours of the beautiful game. So what if three tree stumps were in the middle of their field? They'd make them defenders.
While Clint dominated with his footwork, Victor Jr. countered with his speed. When Franky once slipped by Clint's little brother, Lance, for a game-winning goal, Clint turned around, pushed his brother and yelled, "Why did you let him score?" Rivera couldn't help but peek in on these games. Intense? Yes. Even with flip-flops on the grass as goal posts. But was it enough? He didn't think so. He'd grown up playing rough-and-tumble in his hometown of Zamora, Mexico, and knew that getting better meant getting beat -- and not just by each other. Thus began the remarkable journey in which a a kid from Naco-nowhere (the name some use to deride the East Texas town) would one day land on the game's biggest and grandest stage.
Dempsey grew up in a town in which the Hispanic immigrant kids would tell stories of men with fantastic names, like El Magico from El Salvador and Argentina's Maradona. When the East Texas sun beat the boys down on the pitch, they'd retreat to their friends' trailers to grab popsicles and wolf down Salvadoran pupusas. There they'd watch as their friends' fathers and uncles gathered 'round, beers in hands, screaming at a soccer game on the Spanish channel.
Dempsey's big brother, Ryan (five years his elder), pestered a family friend into letting him play on a team in a nearby Mexican League, and where Ryan went, Clint followed. He watched Ryan head in goals against men twice his age through the thick of smoke from the grills cooking fajitas. Fans lined the field, merchants, too, selling paletas from their hand-pushed carts with bells on them and horchata. "When you'd go to Mexican League it's not like you're just going to a game. It's like a party," Clint would later recall.
Organizers looking to build an offshoot of the Mexican League in Nacogdoches told Rivera, no. Absolutely not. Though they were looking for teams, he didn't need to bring a group of 14- and 15-year-old kids to play with the grown-ups. "Do you want to get them killed?" one organizer asked.
"Trust me," Rivera told them. "I know the kids and I know how they play. You're the ones who are going to get hurt."
He eventually recruited enough adults to please the organizers but was intent on getting Victor Jr. and Dempsey into games. They played at fields -- more like dirt plains interrupted by the thickets of grass -- with names like Under the Bridge, because of the South St. overpass in the distance, and Las Joyas (the Jewels), because the field had stadium lights that shined like diamonds in the Saturday night sky.
Victor Jr. and Dempsey had just started high school, and while they were skilled, they were going against men twice their age and some double their size. A handful had played in the Mexican professional ranks with teams like the Pumas in the Primera Division before injuries or economics sent them northbound, looking for work. They didn't know what to make of these boys and tip-toed around them that first game, even if the 6-0 drubbing that Victor Sr. recalls didn't reflect it.
The boys left the field downtrodden, discouraged. "You're learning, right?" Victor Sr. told his crew. "Remember that you're faster than them." Dempsey, unafraid, undaunted, ran the field, setting up plays he knew Victor Jr. would finish. Their team drew closer in the second game and lost the third by just one goal. It won the next game, and the next, and suddenly the opposition that once tiptoed around the boys pushed, elbowed and kicked them like they would've any other opponent. Except Dempsey. He had it worse.

"People went out to hurt him," says Alex Romero, an El Salvador player many around the league feel could have played on his country's national team if life had dealt him a different hand. Victor Jr. also flustered his opponents but scored with the straight speed. He may have scored on opponents but Dempsey embarrassed them, sometimes with a mean stepover and other moves he'd collected all those years watching Spanish-language soccer broadcasts with Ryan. Dempsey would score a goal and run around the perimeter of the field, looking at the fans, yelling "Whaaaaaaaaaat's uuuuuuuuuuup?"
His mother, Debbie, sat on the sidelines as he ran around in celebration, wishing under her breath, "Please, come back. Don't be doing that. You're going to be killed."
The more Dempsey dominated, the harder his opponents fouled him. Debbie, a nurse in Nacogdoches, had been called in to surgery occasionally when men with strips of cardboard tucked into their socks for shin guards ambled into the hospital with broken ankles and legs caused in the relentless league.
Over the years, she and her husband, Aubrey, a railroad worker, had scrimped to raise the thousands of dollars Clint needed to play in select soccer leagues 200 miles away in Dallas. They eventually bought a 16-foot-camper to nix the hotel bills they would have had to ring up staying in Dallas and all the other outposts where the select teams played. Debbie visited her loan officer so many times to squeeze out just a little ... bit ... more for Clint's uniforms and travel money that he began lecturing her on how to manage her money.
And after playing in Dallas all day in a traditional American select soccer system, Clint would dash off in the evening to play Mexican League, where opponents side tackled him -- cleats up -- and on at least one occasion spit in his face. "Why do you have to do all these fancy tricks," the man who spit asked Clint in Spanish. And if any player jumped up to fight Clint, Victor Jr., like always, was there to help.
Once Clint and Victor Jr. led Zamora to the Nacogdoches Mexican League's first championship, Debbie and Aubrey pulled the plug. "The next year they weren't going to let those 16-year-old boys win," Aubrey said. Besides, all the money and miles the Dempsey poured into showcasing Clint in the select leagues was starting to pay off. Letters from schools like Notre Dame, SMU and scores of others started crowding the mailbox. Did Clint really want to risk injury in a Mexican League game?
The boys had already steeled themselves the way Victor Sr. hoped. Now it was Clint recruiting Victor Jr. to play on his team in Dallas. Making the cutthroat club was no problem for Victor Jr., but making the payments was. Even a scholarship to defray the $2,000 or so in club fees wasn't enough to bridge the budget gap between what single-parent Victor Sr. wanted to do and was able to do. After just one year of club soccer -- the place where all the college coaches could see you -- Victor Jr. left the team.
"That killed my brother," Franky says. Victor Jr. made the best of it and joined an elite club in Nacogdoches, but college recruiters didn't travel that way. While Clint waded through offers from top Division I programs before deciding on Furman University, where the U.S.'s Under-20 player Ricardo Clark played, Victor, Jr., Nacogdoches High's leading scorer, was all talent and few offers. It looked like Division II Ouachita Baptist in Arkansas was his only way.
Clint would always tell his family that success is largely about being in the right place at the right time. Sometimes the inverse of that is true, too -- that tragedy is sometimes all about the wrong time, wrong place.
A U.S. National Team coach checking up on Clark at a Furman game couldn't help but notice the creative, innovative play of Dempsey. Shortly thereafter, Clint received a call-up to the U.S. National Team's U-20 team while Victor Jr. received a call of his own. Back to Nacogdoches. His girlfriend was pregnant. Clint then began running the baselines for the country while Victor Jr. left school to work the factory lines at Nibco, a Nacogdoches manufacturer. Clint embraced his possibilities. Victor Jr. tended to his responsibilities.
Victor Jr. still held out hope, attending what he thought was an MLS tryout in Houston. It was more like a scam preying on Latin American hopefuls willing to scrap together $100 for a chance to live their ultimate dream as a professional soccer player. Franky says Clint told him he would try to get Victor Jr. a tryout with the New England Revolution, the MLS team that picked him with the eighth pick in the 2004 draft.
For Victor Jr., though, bills needed paying, diapers needed changing. He went to the police academy, figuring he would chase bad guys as a cop rather than brilliant passes from Clint. He had to play the pass life gave him.
On Sept. 5, 2005, the U.S. men's national team was fresh off a 2-0 win over Mexico and had just punched its ticket to Germany for the 2006 World Cup. Later that day, then-national team coach Bruce Arena would publicly name Clint to the national team roster playing in Guatemala two days later. Back in Nacogdoches, Victor Jr. took a group of visiting cousins target shooting. "What happened" was as about as improbable as a kid from Naco-nowhere taking two touches in the final minutes of a Europa League round of 16 game last March, against Italy's Juventus, with his back against the goal, angling to the sideline, before chipping the ball 20 yards away into the Juventus goal in what would be described as the biggest goal by an American in Europe. Just as physics determined the shot, speed, and trajectory of Clint's goal, so too did those same principles determine how and when -- at least as the police believe -- Victor Jr.'s ear plug fell out. And as he reached down to grab it, the gun went off. The bullet hit him the head, police say.
***
Eighty-two cars followed Victor Jr.'s hearse to the cemetery. Victor Sr. buried his son. Franky buried his brother. Both buried their sport. Watching, hearing, even thinking of soccer hurt too much.
All of Victor Jr.'s trophies -- including the one 1998 Mexican League Championship -- line a set of shelves in the Rivera's garage. There's a soccer tournament held in Victor Jr.'s name every year. Seven years after the accident, Franky still can't bring himself to play. However, on June 12, the Riveras will tune in and watch Clint play. "Clint keeps soccer alive for us," Franky, now 25, says. In some ways, Victor Sr. says he doesn't even need to really watch when Clint plays. "I know where the ball's going to go, where Clint's gonna pass it. I just imagine where Victor would have gone and there it goes."