Episode 5-Soccer? What's that?

The host of the podcast, Coach Rick, shares a personal story about his initial skepticism towards soccer but eventually embracing it as a coach. He discusses his coaching experiences with his daughters' soccer teams and how he focused on teaching the correct skills and positions. He also shares his unconventional coaching methods, such as making the game fun and challenging traditional formations. Despite criticism, his approach proved successful in developing the players and achieving victories. Hey, welcome back to my podcast, Gotcha Coach, the podcast about coaching for coaches presented by a coach. I'm your host, Coach Rick, and I'm glad to be back with you with Episode 5 called Soccer, What's That? First off, I want to wish those of you who are veterans a very happy Veterans Day and thank you for your service to our country. Second, I've been informed that my podcast has been downloaded in 13 cities across the United States and even in Japan. To those of you who have done this, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. It really means a lot to me. This next episode is one that is very dear to my heart and one that helped me to make some very important coaching choices as I move forward in my career. For those of you who are 30 and over, you'll know this Golden Girls reference that I'm about to give you. If you're younger than this, well, look it up on YouTube. Picture it, South Lake Tahoe, California, early 1990s, a 30-something dad is approached by his eldest daughter and makes a statement that changes the dad forever. Dramatic, right? Anyway, my wife and I had purchased our first house in Myers, an area of South Lake Tahoe, our modest abode, which was all of 1,008 square feet and backed up to Myers Elementary School and its large grassy area, a grassy area that turned out to be used as a soccer field for the local AYSO Region 282 soccer program from August through October. Soccer? What in the world is soccer? Now, soccer was not a sport that was on my radar for any reason. It didn't become an Olympic sport for women until 1996. And I had no knowledge of the sport except for this Brazilian star called Pele and his iconic backwards kick while facing away from the goal. I mean, come on, who doesn't recall that? In any event, my oldest daughter, Shelby, would stand in our backyard and watch the soccer games going on three or four nights a week and all day on Saturday, starting at 8 a.m., and came to me one day and said, Daddy, I want to do that. Well, I looked at her and replied, similar to the response that Clarice's dad gave her in the animated Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV movie from 1964, where he said, No doe of mine will be seen with a red-nosed reindeer. Instead, I said, No child of mine is going to ever play that communist sport. What? A communist sport? I have absolutely no idea where that came from or what I was saying, but I was, for some reason, certain that soccer was not American, even though kids were enjoying it on the field behind my house almost every day. But my wife and I were homeschooling our four children at that time, and social interaction with the kids their own age was a very important piece of our education process. So being the good daddy who had a hard time saying no to my kids, I gave in and we signed them up to play soccer that same summer and every year afterwards for the next 10 years. I also came into the soccer experience figuring that the best way to understand the game was to become a coach. Yep, I bought into the communist sport hook line and sinker. And to be honest, it was one of the best and most rewarding coaching experiences that I ever had. I didn't jump into coaching our oldest daughter in her first year because I felt that she needed someone with more experience to teach her the game. Instead, I coached daughter number two, Courtney, who was seven years old. I figured I couldn't screw things up too badly with dealing with seven-year-olds. Right? So we've talked in the previous episodes about my propensity for coaching outside the box and looking for alternatives to teaching youth athletes that were different from the ways that others were doing it. Anybody who has watched a soccer game with kids under the age of, say, 10 or 11 will notice one very definitive problem with the way that the game is played. Everybody on the field surrounds the ball. In other words, bunch ball. And nobody passes the ball to one of their own players. They just kick it and all run to it again and again and again. This was not how I perceived the game should be played. Now, remember, the Internet was still not a household thing and neither were DVDs. But I had watched an occasional ice hockey game and numerous basketball and football games on TV. And to me, soccer seemed to be modeled after these sports in some ways, particularly the fact that each player has a position. Each player touches the ball or puck and the object is to pass the ball or puck to another player and or shoot the ball or puck and attempt to score a point. Now, of course, you don't shoot a football, but you get my point. So I took the Sharks, the name of our team that Courtney was on, and attempted to do what I had done during my earlier coaching days in other sports, teach and teach correctly. I mean, come on. Why would someone get into coaching if their main purpose was not to teach kids the correct way to play a sport? What's that you say? Winning? Well, oh, my goodness. One thing that you will find going forward in the series is that by this time, I have changed my outlook to be more of a teach the basics, teach them correctly, and the winning will come later. But how do you teach the correct skills needed to play soccer to a six and seven year old? Great question. I wish I had the definitive answer. I mean, no, really. AYSO was created to provide kids the chance to learn and play with a capital P. The game was soccer. And one of their biggest rules was, and this is to this day, that everyone plays and all players need to play at least two of the four quarters in a game. And while this philosophy took quite the beating in the media and in some TV sitcoms, Last Man Standing comes to mind as the reason why that generation of kids grew up to think that all they had to do was show up and win or lose, they'd get recognition and that participation trophies or ribbons were handed out like candy and made that generation weak and unprepared to handle real life experiences. Well, while that might be the situation with some kids of that generation, I can testify that my four kids grew up in this era and flourished as they graduated from AYSO and have had success in their adult life. And part of that, in my humble opinion, is due to the lessons that were taught during their time in AYSO. Okay, I'll get off my AYSO soapbox now and return to how I approached the coaching of six and seven-year-olds in a game that I had no previous experience in. I figured that I needed to think like a six or seven-year-old. I mean, really, if you're coaching this group and try to coach them like they are 12 and 13 or older, then you are in the wrong arena and will only frustrate the group that you have charge of. Be smart, coaches. Understand the group that you are coaching. This is one of the top things to remember. No matter what sport you are coaching, please don't try to impose your style that you use with older kids on a young group of impressionable youngsters who are just getting started. You will fail. Or worse, you will adversely affect that six or seven-year-old. And as a coach, you really shouldn't have that result as something that occurs. So I began to introduce the concept of playing your position. And I played a little game with the girls at every practice. In order to get them used to the idea of playing their position and staying spread out on the pitch, I told them that each of your teammates forgot to take a shower. They forgot to take that shower for a week. And they smelled. And there was no way that you wanted to get next to them. So stay away from them. Well, the girls thought that was the funniest thing they had ever heard. But it got the point across. And slowly but surely, they began to stay spread out and not just following the ball all over the pitch and playing bunch ball. Every time they forgot and began to bunch up, all I had to do was yell out, shower! And they would spread out. You see, keeping it simple and making it fun was the key to making this age group understand a concept that is really much more difficult to grasp. But it went a long way in developing this group of girls and made them better players. And it kept two of the six AYSO core values, positive coaching and player development. Over the next 10 years, I was able to coach each of my four kids in AYSO, from the Sharks to the Red and Black Heart Attack to the Macarenas and more. I became fully involved in AYSO Region 282 as a coach, a certified referee, and yes, a regional head coach where I found myself responsible for training incoming coaches into the sport. All in a sport that I swore my kids would never play. And yes, my girls in the Macarenas did do the Macarena after each of our wins that they had. And I even did it with them after we won the championship game that year. Thankfully, there are no movies of that occasion. In keeping with my previous coaching habits of thinking outside the box and teaching more than one way to do things, I mixed things up on the soccer pitch as well. The conventional formation played in AYSO with 11 players was being taught as a 3-4-3 alignment, where there were three defenders, four midfielders, and three forwards. And while this was a safe way to play the game, there were times when some ingenuity had to take place. Also, there were some coaches, and I was one of them, there were some coaches who taught their players that defenders couldn't score and could only play in the defensive side of the field. Well, I threw that philosophy out the window and actually challenged my defenders to score a goal. I pulled my defenders right up to the midfield line and horror of horrors pulled my keeper out of the 18-yard box instead of having them planted in the goal box like a tree. This drew a lot of criticism from some purists, but it allowed my teams to be more innovative and explosive. If you know the rules of soccer, offensive players cannot receive a pass in the offensive side of the field unless there is a defensive player between them and the goalkeeper. By having my defenders up at midfield, it forced many teams into that offside position and turn the ball back over to us. Now, of course, this kind of play is determined by the quality of players that you have, which leads me to my lesson for newbie coaches. Much like a public speaker needs to read the room and know your audience, you, as a coach, need to totally know the caliber of players that you have. Sometimes players can't or won't comprehend this kind of thinking, especially if they have had previous coaches who pound the stay-on-your-side-of-the-field mentality into them since they were first playing. Another thing that I did was a bit different, was to play a 3-3-3 alignment with a striker position that roved everywhere on the field. This was the favorite alignment of many of the teams that I coached because I made the striker position seem more awesome by giving it the name MONSTER. The kids took that name as a badge of honor whenever we played that alignment, and it worked quite well. In addition, that monster position could be used in another alignment that I introduced on some of my teams. Whenever we'd play a team with one dominant player, I would assign the monster to shadow that player wherever they went. At practice, we'd assign one of our players to be that player from the other team, and our monster followed them everywhere they went, even when they excused themselves to go to the restroom. It certainly got the point across, and it worked in frustrating the opposite team's player more times than not. Again, know your team. The monster position might be your most talented player, and you may not wish to tire them out that much during a competition. As I said, another one of AYSO's core values is everyone plays, which means that all players must play half the game. I took this one step further in my coaching and made every effort to play each player for three out of the four quarters of the game. Why? Well, I like to think of sports and school in the same way. Practices are equivalent to the time that you spend in your classroom being taught, and the game is your quiz or test, the chance to show that you have, or maybe haven't, learned. And if you aren't giving the time to show that, how does the coach know what you need to still work on? Those of you who know me, either from my time in South Lake Tahoe or Gardnerville, Nevada, or more recently here in the Lincoln, Rosedale, California area, can understand this next statement. I am an animated coach. I get very excited whether I'm on the sideline at a soccer or basketball game or watching my 4x1 or 4x4 relay teams on the track. I am loud. I've been known to dance or do something that resembles a dance. And this, if done correctly, can be a huge inspiration to the kids that you are coaching. If they are getting into it as much as you are, they buy into it and follow your enthusiasm. I wholeheartedly suggest that you new coaches find what type of animation works for you and embrace it. I was blessed to have quite a bit of success with the teams that I coached in AYSO. And each of my kids' teams that I coached had equal success. But one of the proudest moments of my AYSO experience was being able to coach both my oldest daughters, Shelby and Courtney, as they played together on a co-ed team when they were older. Both of my girls mixed it up with the boys and both earned the respect of the boys, both on their own team and the teams that they played against. But AYSO soccer on a whole was not perfect, especially for me. You see, in addition to AYSO soccer that ran from August to early November, there was this thing called club soccer that ran through the winter and spring. This was designed for the more competitive soccer player and it caused many headaches for me as a little league coach and during all of my high school track coaching experiences as many of the best athletes for those two sports were also the ones who were playing club as it was referred to. This made it very difficult for me to figure out where on what day and caused many fine athletes to choose soccer over the other two sports. But we'll talk about that more on a later episode. So there you have it in a nutshell. How a dad, me, gave in to his daughter's plea to play soccer and wound up not only fully entrenched in the sport for a decade, but having it formulate a coaching philosophy that I highly recommend doing this if you have young kids that show any interest in playing soccer. You won't regret it. Until next time, take care, be safe, laugh a lot, and tell someone that you love them. And don't forget, you can reach me with your questions or comments by emailing me at coachrickb53 at coachrick.com I'll talk to you soon.