Careful what we wish for

My position is this: street soccer is the most natural educational system that can be found."
--Rinus Michels, FIFA Coach of the Century

Watch any 6 year old dribble a ball. They will keep it under their knee, they generally keep it close, and they love it. By the time they are 13 they can't run with the ball without it jumping three steps ahead of them. Why? I think that as coaches we train that ability out of them.

Watching kids develop in free play I am seeing different skills cultivated, sometimes in direct opposition with the accepted teaching principles. Here is one example of a technical/tactical elements that certainly questions what and how we coach young kids.

1st defender. Kids at the Joy of The People center when first introduced to free play last year would stand flat footed on the floor, as an attacker moved near (they rarely even moved to the ball!) the youngsters (mostly u9 and u10's) would take a big, no, HUGE swipe at the ball, as if they were going to break the leg of the attacker. Generally the attacker saw it coming and would skip by leaving the kid with a big whiff.

I desperately wanted to correct the situation, but it was free play and therefore it was not my role and I left it. This continued throughout the winter.

Then a funny thing happened. They made it work for them.

Toward the end of winter we put together a team of those free play kids for a futsal tournament in Prior Lake. Seemingly recognizing the situation in front of them as if it was just another of a thousand games they have played at the center, the JOTP kids played with absolutely no fear, enjoying themselves as they moved through the tournament winning there group. They played with a lightness, and calmness, and they took lots of risks. They qualified for the final against a a team from a club that generally dominates tournaments like this. Lining up for the final the other team sported matching bags, warm ups, and uniforms. The JOTP kids showed up in spray painted t shirts they made the night before--and they could not have been prouder. But there was a bigger difference between the two teams then their kits and gear. It was their defending skill.

In the final the opposition played impeccable first defender. They got low, they moved their feet, they shut down penetration, shots and crosses. They were well coached.

Here is where it got interesting. Somewhere along the winter, in those hundreds of hours of unstructured play, those frozen, lazy feet, those crazy swipes at the ball, had transformed into smart, darting feet of pickpockets. The big swipes at the ball were still there. But, now
sometimes they were getting beat, sometimes there was a foul, but most of the time the JOTP kids were stealing the ball, tapping it behind the surprised dispossessed attacker and moving deftly around to pick it up and attack as if they had done it thousands of times before. Well, they had. The kids had spent the winter wanting the ball and going after it, and somehow they figured out a way--and luckily the did it before it was coached out of them. Those many hours of free play had not developed classic first defenders, it created ball thief's.

Like the street basketball player that can strip you of the ball when you dive for the basket, the JOTP kids, nurtured like the street basketball players, had the correct accumulation of practice of stripping the ball off of dribbles. When that basketball player is at college, the college coach can spend five minutes explaining how to play first defender in basket ball (stay low, shuffle feet, belly button toward attacker, etc) It takes 5 minutes to learn first defender. But, it It takes a lifetime to learn how to steal the ball.

And, perhaps more importantly, the reverse is true: if you are not playing against defenders who get in close, very, very close, then that player will not have a chance to train against realistic and mature defenses. Attacking skills will work against athletic, and fast, but not against the resourceful and unpredictable skills cultured on the street.

This has implications at the highest levels. When the USMNT U20's were swept and held scoreless last year by what was essentially a U16 Brazil team, US Coach, Wilfred Cabrerra, lamented the lack of comfort on the ball against the Brazilian defenses. "It's not great news, he said, "but we must get more comfortable with the ball against that type of close proximity pressure."

During the Futsal final The BIG CLUB kids had this perplexed look of hey, where is their first defender? Can they come that close? They had never seen kids come for the ball like that. They looked like they had never practiced against anything but first defenders who stayed low and did not dive in. They lost the ball as they tried to penetrate, and became more tentative. Meanwhile the JOTP kids were not swayed, they attacked whether they had the ball or not. The JOTP kids won the game.

Free play allows skills to grow that otherwise may whither at the hands of well meaning coaches, first defender is just one example. Of course we want our kids to be smart defenders, but maybe with kids there is no smart and no dumb, just a learning process that sometimes can be hard to watch but given time and care can produce amazing results.

Get your kids to explore and expand on play, build more and more of it into every practice. Recognize something new. Try to celebrate each new idea and encourage kids to expand on it. Set up times and spaces where the kids can go on their own. Let them learn like the last generation learned baseball, football, and hockey, at the neighborhood parks in a free play setting. If we do that we give each and every kid a better chance to grow, learn and love the game.

TK