On The Pitch

Depending on the area, School Soccer and Travel Soccer can be quite different. It can often cause some culture shock when players from Rec and Travel background some together to play in school. Here’s a funny exchange that kind of highlights that…

In some areas, the difference between club and school soccer can be quite a shock for many players and coaches. After watching a number of skilled players struggle to adjust to easier/safer styles of play, I wrote this for many of my current and former players.

We talk a lot about player development (often how broken it is), but we never seem to step beyond that to the obvious foundation to improve it: coaching development. There’s this almost universal assumption that elite coaches are always elite players who move into coaching and are ‘good’ because they know the game and have been coached for years. But they aren’t usually coaching U5-U8 soccer, when kids are learning the critical basic techniques and developing a love for the game. Why don’t we talk about the development of those coaches more beyond ‘Hey take this Youth I Coaching Class’?

David Beckham recently received a red card and was sent off. No shock there, right? Except this time it was at a youth soccer match!

Due to the rising amount of spam and fake user accounts, we’ve activated captchas for new user accounts and anonymous comments.

There are a lot of parallels between teaching and coaching kids, including the issues faced when dealing with parents. One well known educator recently published a plea with parents to better understand the troubles teachers face and how to help. Much of it applies to youth sports as well.

We coaches often get 2-3 sessions a week to develop our players, but that’s not enough for them to really excel. They need to work some on their own, but few do in this distracted world of video games and social networking. So how can coaches encourage their players to work with their soccer ball at home?

Soccer calendars vary by state, primarily due to the local climate. Yet many soccer parents chuckle at the concept of ‘Spring’ soccer, because the weather can get pretty wild (and cold) some years. Still, the idea of ‘Spring’ soccer generally meant the bulk of the season was played in… the Spring. Here in North Carolina that meant travel matches would start in late February and end in late April. Not any more!

Just a heads up that tomorrow, January 18th, On The Pitch will go dark in protest of the pending SOPA and PIPA legislation. If you haven’t heard about this legislation, you need to educate yourself, as the major media companies are trying to get Congress to pass legislation that will allow for government censorship of [...]

Anyone who watches professional soccer knows about ‘magic spray’ that mysterious spray trainers use to ‘cure’ injured players on the pitch. But when I encountered ‘Magic Spray’ in an official USSF memorandum, I was stumped and had to do a little research.

A successful coach at Sereno Soccer Club named Les Armstrong was suspended from coaching after he forged a parent’s signature to drop a player from his roster before the State Cup championships. The coach was sanctioned by the Arizona Youth Soccer Association and suspended from coaching for five months. Now with new USYSA Club Pass rules, the player could have just been dropped without any parent signature. If this a good thing?

I’ve spent a lot of time using social media to expand the reach of various organizations, non-profits, and even our own soccer league. So it made me laugh when I realized I had Facebook pages for just about everything except On The Pitch. What a silly oversight.