The hierarchy of free play

What creates a great free play environment?

A friend with a ton of soccer experience cornered me at a conference, "I hate to break it to you but what you are doing can be done by anyone...I could go to the local park and have free play."

And I told him he certainly could and we would love that because we want to see it spread.  But he wasn't doing it right now, why?  He was simply threatening to do it, like I threaten to clean the garage...I know it's a good thing and needs to be done, but I have so many other important things to do.

But it did get me thinking.  Really, what are the elements that have made JOTP work?  Why was it so uniformly ignored?  

One of the reasons that I think free play is acknowledged but ignored lies in it's very very basic elements.  It takes forever in free play for one kid to learn one thing.  Why do it when in 20 minutes I can give 16 kids the basics of shooting?  Or dribbling?  How can we plan if we don't know where we are going? Teams have competitions, kids need to work together, get to know each other...etc.

My point here is that we are skipping steps of development.  Where there is no model in sports per se that show proper steps, there is in the world of psychology.  By studying these examples and also looking at examples of free play success stories perhaps we can unlock some learning cues that make certain places work so well and allow other coaches (like my friend) replicate it.

Maslow's Hiearchy of Needs

From Wikipedia:

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology, proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation."[2] Maslow subsequently extended the idea to include his observations of humans' innate curiosity. His theories parallel many other theories of human developmental psychology, all of which focus on describing the stages of growth in humans. Maslow use the terms Physiological, Safety, Belongingness and Love, Esteem, and Self-Actualization needs to describe the pattern that human motivations generally move through.

Maslow studied what he called exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people, writing that "the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy."[3] Maslow studied the healthiest 1% of the college student population.[4]

The model is usually shown in the form of a Pyramid:

 

So Maslow's theory postulates that one foundation is fulfilled before moving up to the next. Get your needs met, take a step up.

How do you replicate a great free play environment?  This is how we qualify a great free play environment:

•               a) Soccer

•               b) Everyday

•               c) Everyone is welcome

The games in the favelas of Rio, the sun baked futsal courts of Sao Paulo, the school yards of Brooklyn (basketball) the frozen ponds of the Phalen area of St. Paul...what is it about those special environments that attracts and then produces players? Using Maslow we can identify five key elements of a great free play environment:

  Basics.  Kids need to know where their next meal is coming from. So if the place is not walking distance from home simple plans to reboot kids will go a long way.

The environment needs to be safe, not just for the parents peace of mind, but also for the kids who need to risk take within security. A physical shelter is key as well.

 Cooperation comes first.  Kids don't just want friendship, they need it.  Free play environments create a breeding ground to test and build friendships for life. 

This is where most clubs begin (and end), insinuating that all the other needs have been taken care of.  Because of this clubs have a lot of back filling to do.  Ask a club coach how much time he spends on managing kids issues, focus, motivation, attitude.  If done right, however, competition is key to the next step in motivation.  Here it is where skills training, skill games/contests and high tempo scrimmages against each where striving to achieve becomes a skill practiced and built over time.  This is all the kids need as far as competition, competing on travel club teams is indifferent to real learning and is not a real priority until the next step is achieved consistently.

 Have you ever been at that place where the world slows down?  This is where your highest abilities meet the highest challenges.  (Find the semi final of Euro 2000, France  v Spain and watch Zidane). It is not about success, but it is about the moment of success or failure.  It is autonomous, it is not thinking, it is being.   When you are here you know it and so do others. And you want to get back.  This is beyond competition, this is creativity, imagination, joy.  And getting their takes practice.  

Put all these 5 elements together IN ORDER, and no matter what the spot you have a powerful cocktail of creating self actualizers.  This is what we "reach" for.  And once there we want to go back.  But we don't jump, or skip steps, we step up and reach.  And like anything we practice,  we get good at it.  

Ted Kroeten

Joy of the People

The nonsense of over passing

Looking to get some exercise one day my brother and I called up our good friends, the Kasanezky's, Sergio and Victor, we invited them to come over to, well,  play.

The four of us had struck up a friendship that always seemed to wrapped up in games and competition, we all played soccer together on the Internationals, but the two Brazilian brothers were infatuated with learning the American sports and wanted to compete all the time in touch football, softball, whiffleball, tennis, hockey, whatever. They found successes and failures as they explored these sports, always creating hilarious stories and images (don't get me started about the ice hockey experience).

So one day in early spring the four of us set out to the park for some 2 v 2 soccer.  We threw down our jackets and played USA vs the Brazilians.  I can't remember much about the score or the game, but I have a feeling how it went by what happened next.

As we  were walking home  we stopped at a basketball court.  It was around the time of the final four and Brazil had recently beaten Team USA at the world championships.  The two Brazilian brothers actually wanted to take on the Americans in 2 v 2 half court basketball.

So the soccer ball became a basketball and we checked the ball into them, immediately it was like an circus of activity. They passed and moved and passed and moved and passed and moved some more all punctuated by high level communication of "here," "pass," "got it." My brother and I almost fell over laughing and thinking "what these fools were doing?"  After a ridiculous 45 seconds of passing and running, always on the perimeter, they would launch this crazy-bad  3 point shot that would most likely miss the rim altogether.

Then when we got the ball one of us would  get down low, they would double team, we would make a simple pump for the basket where both players went in the air to block it.  We would simply duck under the blocks attempt to lay the ball in. For Glenn and I, who grew up playing more than a fair amount of basketball, we were interested in  beating players off the dribble, and the final moves in close to the basket.

The game went on like this, they passing, us posting up or driving by them.  The game was not close.

But to this day they think they outplayed us.

I wondered: was this crazy-hustle passing game with no purpose that the Brazilian  brothers displayed in the basketball game similar to  what we looked like when we took on the Brazilians in soccer? Do we equate, like they did in basketball, hustle passing and needless work with success? Domination?

The reverse was most likely true in the soccer game where  Glenn and I perhaps over passed (I do remember a look of amusement ), while the Brazilian brothers  applied skill over athleticism, even individual skill over collectivism.

The reverse was true in the basketball game. They over-passed, over-ran, even over-hustled.  Sometimes we just sat there watching them, half laughing...look at them go...when will they penetrate of come inside?   For us in basketball it was enjoyable to fool them, to make them jump, to show all our tricks and it did not take us a second of thought. It was truly 'play,' and we would toy with them. 

I thought this is something to think about as we evaluate play in the youth teams we see.  Passing is simply one weapon.  The other is dribbling (both possession dribbling and dribble penetration).  Both need to be developed, but the dribble is more basic, more individual and takes more time to experiment and create a "voice."  Once this is developed then the collective communication of passing  become the next step.  Can't have one without the other. Xavi started out as a center forward.  While Messi and Iniesta are probably the two best in the world at passing and dribbling in balance (Messi more dribble, Iniesta more pass).

1) Most youth passing games are coach or parent focused and orchestrated. (See the U11 boys team from California everyone is talking about). While this looks good now--where will they be 10 years from now?  Watch closely at their decision making close to goal, there is very little 1 v 1, the question is  will they be Menudo or Ricky Martin (who was also a part of menudo...)?

2) Players must be allowed to explore their individual skills: dribbling, shooting, possession dribbling and finishing. If it is not allowed within the team environment for collective reasons it must be allowed to expand in other environments.  This is vital as each player needs two weapons the ability to pass and the ability to dribble.

3) Transition, so vogue right now in coaching circles, is extremely important to winning and losing, but not so important in skill development.  It tends to reward the fast over the skillful, the strong over the creative. Take a lesson from basketball where half court basketball, a game without transition, has become the gold standard of skill development.  Soccer needs to attend to games like this that allow kids to experiment skill over athleticism.

4) Anyone looking for an easy basketball game contact me and I will line up a game against the Brazilians, and you can see this phenomena for yourself...but be careful if you take them on in soccer.