Grow Your Brain with Futsal: An Interview with Daniel Coyle

By Anna Edgerton

BERKELEY, Calif. (5-20-10) – The number one question for any coach is how to cultivate the best players possible without killing the love of the game. How do you design a practice that develops talent, simulates real game situations, and gets everyone involved? To find out I asked Daniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code, who argues that it is actually possible to “grow” talent. For those soccer coaches whose players were probably not kicking in the womb, this is excellent news.

(Daniel Coyle.)

For Coyle, Futsal is the “perfectly designed game” to develop soccer talent. Many of us Futsal aficionados could have told you that already, but in The Talent Code, Coyle presents both scientific and empirical research to confirm our enthusiasm for soccer’s smaller sister. In this book he explores the idea of “deep practice” and the effect that constant repetition has on the neurological development of an athlete or artist. Without getting too deep into the science side of the story, it turns out that through constant repetition one can actually grow a kind of insulation called myelin around connections in the brain to make them fire faster.

When I suggested to Coyle that repetition in practice also develops muscle memory, he claimed that physically there’s no such thing. “Muscles are actually really dumb,” he pointed out. “Muscles are like the wooden part of the puppet. The action is with the strings.” These “strings” are the connections in the brain, and the faster information travels through them, the better you perform. More of the right kind of practice means more myelin to transmit neurological signals even faster.

For a soccer coach, this is where Futsal comes in. According to Coyle, there are many qualities of Futsal that make it the perfect tool for deep practice—and developing that all-important myelin. Because it is played on a smaller scale, with fewer players and a ball that has 30% less bounce, it naturally provides players with “perfect feedback and lots of quality reps.” Although the fundamentals are the same, the significant differences between Futsal and outdoor soccer make it the ideal setting for maximum learning with minimal coaching.

To illustrate this point, Coyle cited the example of board sports—skateboarding, surfing, snowboarding—because there is no coach to explain how to get it right. People learn these sports by repetition, by figuring out what works and what doesn’t, so that “the sport teaches you what to do.” This makes the learning process much more meaningful, because every mistake becomes a teaching moment and every success builds “a pokerhand of possibilities” to use in the future. Add to this the intensity and competition of Futsal, and you have the perfect training tool for building a better soccer player.

For example, consider the depth of soccer talent and range of ball-handling creativity that comes out of Brazil. It’s no coincidence that almost all Brazilian youth play Futsal for years before they ever touch an outdoor ball. For one, there is less space required for a Futsal court than for a soccer field, and organizing a game is “cheaper, faster and easier.” According to Coyle, it’s “the perfect confluence of circumstance and culture” in Brazil that makes Futsal the norm for young players, resulting in some of the best professionals in the world. In the first chapter of his book Coyle says, “since the 1950s Brazilian players have trained in a particular way, with a particular tool that improves ball-handling skill faster than anywhere else in the world.” That tool is, of course, Futsal.

(Kids playing Futsal in Brazil.)

Although this sport is rapidly gaining popularity in its own right on an international scale, like all things soccer, it is slower to catch on in the United States where coaches are used to sculpting players with drills and conditioning. However, Coyle argues that “the sport sells itself.” After investigating the Brazilian scene, he brought a few Futsal balls back the United States and “just threw them into the high school pick up games. The kids loved it.” Because it’s basically condensed play, which is the best kind of deep practice, anyone who enjoys soccer will be a lot more enthusiastic about playing Futsal than running suicides down eternal lines of cones. Not to mention, Futsal will grow your brain. Talk about the perfect sport!

For more information on Futsal as “deep practice” and The Talent Code, see Daniel Coyle’s website at: thetalentcode.com

Predicting success in football and teaching: newyorker.com

Read this, then imagine running a club and cutting 11 year olds at tryouts...

Predicting success in football and teaching: newyorker.com

Get off your butt

Epigenetics and why you it's important that YOU get out and play. The Sins Of The Father . . . DAVID EPSTEIN, SI May 17, 2010

LISTEN UP, COUCH POTATOES: ACCORDING TO THE SCIENCE OF EPIGENETICS, HOW PARENTS ACT INFLUENCES THE BEHAVIOR OF THE GENES THEIR CHILDREN INHERIT

You had the talent to be a sports star, but you lacked the discipline. You couldn't bring yourself to go to bed early or pick up a barbell instead of an Oreo. On the bright side, your kid gets to start from square one: He or she inherits your talent but not the repercussions of your lackluster approach.

Or maybe not. Research in the growing science of epigenetics—which, among other things, looks at how genes can be switched on and off—suggests that your actions could have genetics-related consequences for your child. Better think twice before pounding down that next cookie.

At the turn of the 19th century, French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed a theory of evolution that said animals quickly adapt to their environment and pass the adaptations along to their progeny; for example, giraffes acquired long necks because their ancestors stretched to reach leaves high on trees. But Lamarckian evolution was eclipsed in 1859 when Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution by natural selection, which says traits are acquired over millions of years as random genetic changes that happen to be beneficial are passed on. Today, however, the idea at the heart of Lamarck's theory—that our choices can affect our children's genes—is making a comeback.

Your behavior will not change the sequence of your child's DNA, but it might change the action of certain molecules—called epigenetic marks—that attach to DNA and signal genes to turn on and off. Consider a study, published in 2008, of adults in the Netherlands whose mothers had suffered through a German-imposed food embargo in the winter of 1944--45. Six decades later, those whose mothers were in the early stages of pregnancy during the Dutch Hunger Winter had fewer "turn off" signaling methyl molecules attached to their IGF2 genes than did their siblings. The IGF2 gene is a key component in growth and development, and the study may help explain why children of mothers who experience famine during pregnancy have a higher risk of developing obesity, schizophrenia and diabetes later in life.

Studies now under way should further illuminate the epigenetic link to sports prowess. In one study published last year, rats that exercised regularly and rats that didn't were twice thrown into beakers of water. On the first go-round, all the rats struggled vigorously to swim and attempt to escape the beaker. A day later, when they were again put into the water, the regularly exercised rats displayed better stress-coping mechanisms: Instead of clawing at a glass wall they could not climb, these rats, having learned from the previous day's experience, conserved energy by floating. When their brains were examined afterward, researchers found that the exercised rats had altered epigenetic marks that in turn affected gene expression in a part of the brain that helps form memories. "Exercise has a great impact on the brain, not just the muscles," says Johannes Reul, one of the researchers and a neuroscientist at the University of Bristol, England.

Perhaps one day a similar epigenetic explanation of memory will help us understand why great cornerbacks don't get beat the same way twice.

Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1169443/index.htm#ixzz17lbSbpWO

From 4-4-2, The Talent Myth

This article appeared in the December 2010 issue of FourFourTwo magazine.

THINK the world's best footballers are born rather than made? Matthew Syed, three-time Commonwealth table-tennis champion and author of an acclaimed book on talent, Bounce, begs to differ.

You only have to compare a Sunday league game with a Champions League tussle at the Nou Camp or Old Trafford to see the importance of natural ability in football. At the local park, you see players trying awfully hard, chasing around the pitch and even nailing the occasional long pass, but you see little of thrilling quality.

In the top European leagues – particularly among the best clubs – you see something quite different: touch, feel, finesse, vision, the ability to hit an inch-perfect pass across the field into the path of an team-mate. These are the things that elevate football, to those of us who love the sport, into something approaching an art form, like chess played at speed.

Talent is the word we use to rationalise this schism between the best and the rest: the idea that sporting stars are born with greatness encoded in their DNA. How else to explain how Lionel Messi can perform with such creativity? How else to explain the sublime consistency of Paul Scholes? How else to understand the sheer accuracy of David Beckham’s free-kicks?

It boils down to the idea that sporting excellence is reserved for a select group of individuals – winners in a genetic lottery that passed the rest of us by.

But what if this seductive idea is all wrong? What if our deepest assumptions about success in football – indeed, in life itself – are entirely misconceived? What if talent itself is not just a meaningless concept, but a corrosive one, robbing ourselves and our children of the incentive to work hard and excel?

"It is practice, not talent that is driving patterns of success and failure"

I first started asking these questions when examining my own journey in table tennis. It was a journey that took me from suburban Reading to the top of the podium at three Commonwealth Championships. Like most high achievers I put it down to god-given talent; to things like speed, guile, adaptability, agility and reflexes. Sometimes I would marvel that I had these skills in such abundance that they were capable of elevating me beyond hundreds of thousands of others aspiring to that precious top spot.

But could it be that my success was not about talent at all, but simply about hard work and opportunity? Could it be that expertise in football and table tennis, or indeed anything else in life or sport, is a consequence not of innate skill but of thousands of hours of practice? Could it be that all of us have the potential to stride the path to excellence?

After all, what is talent? We all think we know it when we see it. As a coach at a leading football academy told me: “Any decent coach can spot a talented player. It is something about the way they move, the way they cushion the ball, the way they see the opportunities around them. When they have all that, you just know in your guts that they have the potential to make it to a professional level.”

But how does the coach know that this player, who looks so gifted, hasn’t had many hours of special training behind the scenes? How does he know that the initial differences in ability between this youngster and the rest will persist over years of practice? In fact, he doesn’t, as several studies have demonstrated.

A ground-breaking investigation of British musicians, for example, found that the top performers had learned no faster than those who reached lower levels of attainment: hour after hour, the various groups had improved at almost identical rates. The difference was simply that top performers had practised for more hours. Further research has shown that when top performers seem to possess an early gift for music, it is often because they have been given extra tuition at home by their parents.

Not convinced? Then consider the remarkable bias in the birth dates among top players
in various sports, something discussed by Malcolm Gladwell, the American author.
At one point in the Premier League in the 1990s, for example, there were 288 players born between September and November, but only 136 between June and August.

Why is this? If success in football is all about having the right genes, are we to infer that individuals born towards the start of the year are more talented than those born in the latter half of the calendar? Or, could this bias be caused by something quite different?

In fact, the answer is quite simple. The eligibility cut-off for youth football in England is September 1. This means that a player who turns, say, 11 on September 2 could be playing alongside a player who is almost 12 months younger. This represents a big difference in physical maturity at such a young age. Coaches respond by picking the older boy for the first team, not because he is a more skilful player, but because he is a little older.

But this means that the older boy gets access to more and better training sessions, he plays in more matches, he works with better coaches. Within a few years, a large gap in skill has opened up between the two players – not because the older boy is “more talented”, but because he has had more training because of an arbitrary cut off date for age-eligibility. To put it another way, it is practice, not talent, that is driving patterns of success and failure.

In international football, where the cut-off date used to be August 1, one recent junior world championship boasted 135 players who were born in the three months born after August 1 and just 22 born in May, June and July. Today the cut-off date for international junior soccer is January 1. In the Czech national junior football team of 2007, an astonishing 19 of the 21 players were born between January and June. None were born in the last three months of the year.

Of course, adherents to the talent myth will dismiss these statistics. They will point to child prodigies – boys and girls who reach world-class levels of performance in their teens – as proof of the importance of talent. Surely these youthful performers have been blessed with amazing skills; skills that have enabled them to take a shortcut to eminence? Or have they? A closer inspection reveals a very different story.

“Success is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and love of what you are doing”

Tiger Woods was considered a miracle golfer when he became the youngest winner of the US Masters in 1997. “The most talented player of all time,” was the assessment of one pundit. But now consider that Woods was given a golf club five days before his first birthday; that by the age of two he played his first round of golf; that by five he had accumulated more hours
of practice than most of us achieve in a lifetime. Far from being a golfer zapped with special powers that enabled him to circumvent practice, Woods is someone who embodies the rigours of practice.

Precisely the insight that applies to Messi, Beckham and all the other top footballers who seem to have got to the top in double-quick time, as a quick glance at their autobiographies demonstrate. Beckham, for example, would take a football to a park in East London as a young child and kick it from precisely the same spot for hour upon hour. “His dedication was breathtaking,” his father has said. “Sometimes it seemed that he lived on the local field.”

Beckham’s dedication has never wavered. Describing his work ethic in 1994, two years after his Manchester United debut, Sir Alex Ferguson was almost breathless in admiration: “He watches the senior players, practises all the time, his quality in the use of the ball is fabulous, and he works all the time on his technique.’ Similar eulogies have been made by team-mates at Real Madrid, AC Milan and LA Galaxy.

Take any top footballer and the same story just keeps repeating itself. Here is Messi: “With hard work, anything is possible. I can assure you that you can dream and that dream can
be achieved.” Here is Pele: “Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.”

Cristiano Ronaldo, another of the world’s top players, completes the picture. When Jose Mourinho joined Real Madrid he was astounded by the work ethic of the winger. “He has an amazing way of working,” Mourinho said. “After seeing it up close, it is impressive for a player with the status he has that no-one works harder than him. Because of the way he works, it is easy to demand from others what I want in regard to the dedication to work.” And so it goes on.

The illusion of talent arises because we only see a tiny proportion of the work that goes into the construction of virtuosity. If we were to examine the incalculable hours of practice, the many years ingraining excellence, the thousands of baby steps taken by world-class performers to get to the top, the skills would not seem quite so mystical, or so inborn.

“The idea that skill hinges on practice rather than talent makes a mockery of the way coaches think about success”

Extensive research has shown that there is not a single top performer in any complex task who has bypassed the 10 years of hard work necessary to reach the top. As Beckham put it: “My secret is practice. I’ve always believed that if you want to achieve anything special in life you have to work, work and then work some more.”

Of course, none of this is to deny that some kids start out better than others; it is merely to suggest that the starting point we all have in life is not particularly relevant. Why? Because over time, with the right kind of practice, we change so dramatically.

It’s not just the body that changes, but the anatomy of the brain. The region of the brain governing spatial navigation in taxi drivers is substantially larger than for non-taxi drivers, but it did not start out like this. Rather, it developed over time with years on the job. Similar results will doubtless be found when brain imaging tests are carried out on professional footballers.

It is not just the brute quantity of practice that matters, of course, but also the quality. A key question for coaches, then, is how to create drills that push performers beyond their existing limitations and thus unleash the forces of personal transformation. One way that has been tried and tested in football is futsal (short for ‘futebol de salao’).

Futsal is a bit like football, except it is compressed, compacted and distilled into a concentrated form. The ball is smaller and heavier, the theatre of space is shrunken relative to the wide open expanses of a conventional pitch. It is as if all the complex dynamics, competitive intensity and ferocious interaction of football have been packed into a nutshell.

What this means is that in futsal you touch the ball around six times more per minute than in normal football, and the smaller ball demands more precise handling. It rewards improvisation, creativity and technique; you can’t get out of a tight spot by just booting the ball downfield. As Dr Emilio Miranda, Professor of Soccer at the University of Sao Paolo, says: “No time plus no space equals better skills. Futsal is our national laboratory of improvisation.”

Almost all of the most revered Brazilian players were schooled in futsal. “Futsal was important in helping to develop my ball control, quick thinking and passing,” says Pele. “I played only futsal as a youngster,” says Zico, who scored 52 goals in 72 international matches for Brazil. “It’s the best start for kids.”

Ronaldo, the highest goal scorer in the history of the World Cup and one of only two men to have won FIFA World Player of the Year three times, says: “Futsal is how I really got started. This is my love, the thing that I enjoyed the most.” And Ronaldinho, one of the most creative players of his generation and twice World Player of the Year, agrees, saying: “When you come to play normal soccer, it’s easy if you’ve come from futsal.”

Of course, the idea that skill hinges on specialised practice rather than talent makes a mockery of the way most coaches think about success. The very idea that most boys can attain excellence is totally at odds with the assumption held by the establishment. It is a bit like the situation in the US where Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics, overturned conventional wisdom in baseball by shifting the scouting of players onto their stats for on-base and slugging percentage rather than the usual indicators of speed and contact.

If you are still unconvinced by the power of practice, consider again my journey in table tennis. To many enthusiasts my skills seemed nothing less than a miracle. But was it?

When I hit the top of the England rankings, most of the other top players in the nation were not merely from the same town as me, but the very same street: Silverdale Road in Reading. Had some ping-pong virus spread through the area without touching the surrounding roads and villages? Of course not: the success was about the coming together of factors of a similar kind to those that have, from time to time, elevated other tiny places into the sporting ascendancy (Spartak, an impoverished Moscow tennis club, created more top 20 women players between 2005-2007 than the whole of the US).

In particular we all had access to a top coach (who happened to be a teacher at the local primary school) and to the only 24-hour-a-day club in the county. We started out as ordinary table tennis players but through a peculiar set of circumstances we were transformed into extraordinary players. The evidence is overwhelming: excellence in sport is not explained by talent, but by hard work, will and opportunity.

---

Person, player, team.

Kids come first, players come next. Player development is a fragile, careful, process of love and hope.

Early in his career, before he was established and just one of many trying to make it, I remember Thomas Rongen, the then US Men's U20 coach, saying "Dempsey would be good if I could just get him to stop trying to nutmeg Coby Jones." Even then, even as he tried out for the US Men's National Team, he just played while others competed.






From SI.Com,

Posted: Wednesday June 9, 2010

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.

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

All Play and no work

All Play and No work: The Free Play--Deliberate Practice Continuum

As we look at youth development, building hours take thought and balance. Work and play are both part of a continuum of practice that players need to build smartly. Both are important. Here in the US we value the principles of deliberate practice, discipline, hard work, teamwork, and we tend to lay it on thick. We ignore the loose, seemingly mindless, unstructured, qualities of player driven FREE PLAY.

We know it’s important. We can’t find time for it. We are developing only half the player.

Young players, especially those in their “Golden Years,” of 9-13, should put in as many hours as possible in FREE PLAY situations, self driven, unstructured, safe and invigorating, free play is acknowledged as the greatest developer and it’s importance to the development of a player is without question.

Our players, players raised in the organized, competitive based US youth system, understand hard work, but don’t get the play part. They understand the “work,” but may not be able to express themselves in a situation that calls for “play.”

Perhaps this idea is best illustrated by giving an example of the opposite.

Because the opposite can be true. Players may play a lot and not understand hard work and discipline of attaining goals.

As DOC for a big club I once sent a very talented U13 player to participate in a U16 practice. This was a player who was raised in a refugee camp in Kenya, he had build thousands of hours of play. His ball skills were world class for a U13 (he was soon to join the US MNT at the U15 level). I was hoping this skillful player and the team would bond. The Team began by playing small sided in very tight space. The player scored 7 goals in 30 minutes, some of which were quite spectacular. At the end of Practice the coach asked the players to run eight 200 yard repeats. The player made it through one. The other players had no trouble giving effort to the sprints.

The coach called me that night saying that the player would not make his team. He did not complete his sprints. He lamented a Bad attitude, a low capcity for work.

Because he could not make himself run those sprints he would not be on the team.But what about scoring goals under the pressure of three defenders in front of the goal? Doesn’t matter.

My question to the coach was would you tell a player he could not be on the team because he could not finish in front of the net under the pressure of three defenders? No. Would you demand that that player finish those chances “or else?” 

That player has no more capacity to complete the task in front of the goal as the other player has to complete the 200m runs.

While the one set of kids understood “PLAY” while the others understood “WORK.” One kid had been brought up playing with no rules, or objectives, the other had been brought up under strict supervision and organization--this player understands work.

That’s because we put too much emphasis on work. We can control the work. We can't control the Play. In fact, if we try to control it it does not work. It is built up over time spent with only Fun as the objective.

These hours of mindless fun are an invisible learning tool used by every great player ever to inspire us.  

Pele: One the Street to 16 then deliberately practiced at Santos. 3 World Cups.

Zagalo: Free play till 16. Then DP. 5 world Cups. Rivelino, played at the Park, Zidane, at his courtyard, Maradonna, neighborhood waste field…the list goes on and on.  

It takes a balance of deliberate practice and unstructured creative play to develop, and that means everyone, not just the next Messi, but all kids.

Our players, players raised in the organized, competitive based US youth system, understand hard work, but don’t get the play part. They understand the “work,” but may not be able to express themselves in a situation that calls for “play.”

Never too late.  Set up a cool field in your neighborhood.  Find and old tennis court. Build the environment.  Don't worry about the hard work, that comes later and there is plenty of time for that.