a shot was taken, and the keeper bobbled the ball, but was able to direct to toward the side of the goal. There were several other players nearby, including attackers within a couple of feet, so I high-tailed it from just off the top of the penalty area right inside, because I know there’s going to be a scramble; as I sprinted in, an attacker gets the ball as the keeper is diving for it, backs it up a step, and punches it into the goal. I heard a defender, maybe two, call for the ball out-of-play, so I decided to adapt Terry Vaughn’s advice about penalty kicks: make the call and get the hell out of the way.
Sounds like a good plan to me! But the keeper had other ideas.
Parents often get upset when a goal is scored and a player is in an offside position but isn’t involved in the play. In addition to the common misconceptions email we send each season, we have started to work on offside education as well. To try and answer some of their questions and to give them some common examples, we send the following offside primer to them every season.
Each season we have parents upset over the outcome of a match because of a perceived missed call. While we all know that calls get missed (and referee’s are saints! ) often the problem is due to parents not understanding the Laws of the Game. We started to send an email to parents before the matches began with a fairly detailed rundown of common misconceptions about the game. I find that we tweak it every year so I figured I’d share it here and see if other leagues include additional things or have better ways of explaining some of them.
Chivas has introduced a brilliant plan to sell tickets to its home-opener. Perhaps we should call it the "Free Soft-core Porn Corallary." Their players are crap, but their cheerleaders are muy caliente.
A lot of the hard-core American soccer fans have the sex appeal of a
Level 2 half-orc wizard who lost his 20-sided die. These guys are
really good at drinking beer, screaming obscenities and obsessing over
the minutiae of the pariah of professional sports. Sex machines we are
not. So a little tastefully revealed flesh that will appeal equally to
the 13-year-old youth soccer studs and their dads can’t hurt. "Who
cares if they can’t score when Meola’s at the all-you-can-eat buffet?
They’re giving out ChivaGirls calendars!"
If MLS can move to compete with the Victoria Secret catalogue or the SI
Swimsuit Issue among the 8th-grade set, then that’s a real coup. Talk
about viral marketing. Show a boy a couple of goals, you’ll have his
attention for 90 minutes. Guide a boy through puberty and you’ll have a
fan for life. Bravo, Chivas USA!
/me rolls on the floor laughing. Can’t argue with that logic!
The UNC men will be having their second intrasquad scrimmage at 10:30am
over at the Finley Fields while the Duke and NCSU men square off at 2pm
at Duke’s practice fields.
Thrown in by: Soccer Dad on February 25th 2006, 5:16 pm | Email
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Filed under: Ramblings
I was involved in an accident yesterday morning that highlighted just how far our cars have come in terms of minimizing injury and absorbing the energy of the impact. As I was stopped to make a left turn into my driveway, I was hit from behind by a driver who was distracted and never saw me stopped. We live in the middle of a very long and flat stretch of road with a 45 MPH speed limit so cars are generally moving at a good clip. The person who hit me never saw that I was stopped, waiting for an oncoming car to pass, and drove right into my trunk. I drive (or rather drove ) a late model Chevy Impala sedan which is classified as a ‘Large Sedan’. It is a heavy car (just under 3500 lbs) and as long as our Windstar mini-van. The car that hit me was a Honda Civic - not a huge car (just over 2500 lbs). You’d think that in a high-speed accident where a significantly lighter car hits a heavier car, someone is going to get hurt. But not this day - both of us walked away without a scratch and I was playing pickup soccer with our league coaches the next day. I was VERY lucky.
Either way, this will be an exciting match for local soccer fans in North Carolina’s Research Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill) and of course Cary. The amount of interest in soccer continues to grow in North Carolina, from very strong teams at UNC Chapel Hill and Duke to the standing room only exhibition between MLS DC United and USL-1 Rochester last year. All of this is great news for the SAS Soccer Park which seemed to flounder for a true calling after the WUSA folded.
So the fact that U.S. Soccer choose this destination for the national team’s match against Jamaica on April 11 is a move I applaud.
Over the years, I’ve watched MLS exhibitions, WUSA matches, USL Division I games and an NCAA Final Four in this little high school-like stadium. But it’ll surely be an entirely different atmosphere when the U.S. plays down there. With only a two months separating the Jamaica match from the World Cup, one has to expect there will be a sellout crowd that evening. Then again, such a feat shouldn’t be that hard. SAS can seat about 7,000 people and allow for a few thousand more with additional stands and standing-room areas along the chain-link fence that surrounds the field.
Considering the frenzied crowd that showed up for the DC United exhibition, I can only imagine what it will be like when the U.S. team comes to town and World Cup excitement is building. I’m sure it will be a sellout crowd. Can’t wait until tickets go on sale! Triangle Soccer Fanatics is working to setup a supporters section too.
I could have sworn I posted about this earlier. In light of the recent release of the USSF Best Practices for Coaching Soccer, I wanted to pass along another extremely useful educational tool for parents of youth soccer players.
How to deal with Practice, Games, and even the Ride Home
If you are a league administrator and you haven’t seen this yet, I encourage you to review it and send it on to your parents. If you are a soccer parent or even a parent with kids in any sport - this is a great resource.
It is an excellent document and they even have an online quiz parents can take at the end to earn a Certificate of Completion. We sent this out to our parents this season and got very positive feedback.
Thrown in by: Soccer Dad on February 21st 2006, 12:18 am | Email
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Filed under: Ramblings
It’s always interesting to see what terms or phrases people searched for when they stumbled across your site. OK, maybe its only interesting to a geek like me… ANYway, I was checking out the stats for the site and saw someone had searched for ‘why do they call the soccer field the pitch‘ The sad part was - I didn’t have a clue. Funny considering the name of this site. So I set out to find an answer.
While laughing at the RefBlog’s argument over a call that never happened, I noticed he had also posted up the current IFAB Law Change proposals. I won’t list them all here, so check them out at the source. But a couple would have impacts at the Rec level, requiring further Rec rule exemptions or leagues adapting.
Law 1 - Changing the corner arc to 2 meters. Needless to say, a 6 foot arc is pretty big for a youth field, even for U10/U12. I can’t imagine this passing even for the pros, though there definitely are some stadiums where the kicker has no room at all to run. I think TheRef is right in thinking this is meant partly to get discussions going about stadium layouts. Of course a bigger arc would give you more clearance from flag pole, but most kids learn to deal with the pole being nearby. Of course sometimes we have trouble getting our arcs drawn to the required 3 feet! Then things can get a little tight! If it passes, I’d expect youth laws to stick with the 1 meter arc.
Law 12 - Including throw-ins as a cautionable offense for failing to give proper distance. Can’t see why this would be a bad thing. Not that most rec leagues give yellow cards if the players crowd a restart, but it will clarify to new coaches that a throw-in can’t be blocked like a basketball throw-in!
Law 12 - Yellow Card for touching a dead ball that’s not yours. I can see how this would result in all sorts of upheaval if it passed and was enforced. We haven’t seen opponents trying to delay restarts by messing with a dead ball, but it wouldn’t surprise me. The example TheRef gives about players being carded for handing a ball to their opponent for a throw-in highlights how this could cause problems. But if it passes, it would be as simple as telling your kids "if the line judge doesn’t call your color, don’t touch the ball" It might take a few matches for kids to adjust, but they would adjust.
Can’t say there is anything earth shattering - but the touch an opponent’s dead ball change would be interesting for the first few matches!
Thrown in by: Soccer Dad on February 20th 2006, 10:28 pm | Email
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Filed under: Ramblings
I wouldn’t wish being a ref on anyone Of course they’re still trying to drag me in kicking and screaming for my Grade 9. Don’t know if they’ll succeed this year or not. But the RefBlog is always a fun read as you get to see just how crazy it can get (and sometimes how uneventful it can be in a match with good players and coaches.) I had a good laugh as he described a scene from a recent match.
The call was the old rec chestnut about slide tackles. In the league we let people slide, but not slide tackle, with an extension that sliding into someone, even if you don’t make contact with your opponent, is a foul. I phrase that last sentence carefully, because you can’t foul your own teammate, so when a player, who was a couple feet ahead of his opponents on a chase for the ball, slid to kick it away, I immediately thought "no foul", despite his sliding into his own goalkeeper. The funny bit, was, after the ball went out of play (pretty quickly, although from another teammate, not from the slide itself), the slider started arguing about how this was not a foul, and I shouldn’t call a foul, and something or other.
"Hey, hey, hey," arms up, trying to calm him down, "did I call a foul?"
He stops and looks at me quizzically, it’s clear he expected me to make that call (other refs in that league surely would have), but it hit him that I never blew the whistle. "No?" I grin, because hit also hits him that he didn’t need to argue - I agreed with him. Sheepishly, "Don’t mind me, I’m just talking to myself."
D’oh! Yellow Card for stupidity! Never argue with the ref, especially if he calls it YOUR way!
Thrown in by: Soccer Dad on February 20th 2006, 10:18 pm | Email
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Considering that I own almost 30 domain names for various projects, friends, family, etc. you would think I would have gotten a domain for this blog from the start. But On The Pitch was an experiment for me, so I just tied it off my existing family domain and figured I’d see where it went.
Well, we’re approaching 100 posts and 1 year of posting, so I figured it was time to get a domain to match the site title. So feel free to use http://onthepitch.org from now on. The old URL will still work as well, but you’ll be redirected to the new one.
Thrown in by: Soccer Dad on February 18th 2006, 10:19 pm | Email
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Filed under: The Pros
Who says football and basketball have to have all the highlight films? MLS is holding an online vote for MLS Goal of the Decade. They have twenty clips up of MLS goals from 1996 through 2005. I’m sure the bicycle kicks will gather a lot of votes, but I agree with Marc Connolly out at US Soccer Players that John Wolyniec’s goal in 2003 was the best by far.
no matter how many times I watch so many of these familiar highlights from over the years, my opinion doesn’t change about which goal was the most impressive. It’s John Wolyniec’s from 2003. Hands down. His left-footed volley off of, what had to be, a 45-year [sic] ball from Amado Guevera was a once-in-a-lifetime goal.
No doubt. Being able to hit such a long arcing ball in mid air with your left foot and score - absolutely amazing.
Now as a coach, if I had to pick one to show my kids, it would be Jaime Moreno’s goal in 1998 from D.C. United vs. Colorado. So many sweet passes setting up a close up goal. The defense was literally running in circles.
So go vote - the second of four rounds of voting ends February 20th. They’ll cut it down to 10 goals on February 20th, 5 on February 27th, and announce a winner on March 6th.
Now the clip I want to find is one I caught on ESPN and wasn’t able to catch which match or league it was (probably Premiership). Direct kick and the camera lineup was perfect behind the kicker. The kick bent hard around the wall (and I mean around, not over top - it flew right by the head of the player on the end of the wall) and caught the right corner. The guy on the end of the wall spun around as the ball went by in disbelief that it bent so sharply.
UPDATE: Duh! I thought I had clicked on every goal they had available, but apparently not. The goal I was talking about at the end there was Dwayne De Rosario, October 15, 2005, S.J. Earthquakes vs. Los Angeles. Silly Me!
U.S. Soccer’s Coaching Education Department has released a new publication designed to give youth and junior level soccer coaches in the United States a set of fundamental tools to help open up the game of soccer to young players in ways that celebrate the sport’s spontaneous qualities. The 70-page "Best Practices for Coaching Soccer in the United States" coaching book serves as the sport’s definitive new player development guidelines.
If you coach soccer at any age level, I encourage you to read this through. It is broken down by age group from U6 on through U18. League Administrators should also read this through as they make many recommendations regarding how to handle certain things like tournaments and aging up. It is refreshing to see the realization that there is no ‘one way’ and that various groups have various needs. All you need is a solid set of fundamental guidelines.
The scope of coaching education in the United States is as large as the country itself. As our society is woven with the threads of many cultures, so is our soccer the product of the styles and experiences of the many diverse communities across the country.While this presents us with a set of challenges that are unique to the United States, this diversity also helps to continually breathe life into our soccer community. It is against this backdrop that U.S. Soccer approaches its responsibility for helping to prepare coaches to bring the game of soccer to our young players.
There is not just "one way" to teach soccer to players, nor is there just one style of coaching. There is a broad spectrum of styles and methods for how each of us experiences the game. Some of this comes from our backgrounds, while some of this also is the product of our own personalities. At the youth and junior levels, however, there is a set of fundamental principles that must be considered by anyone involved with soccer. In general, young soccer players require a certain amount of uninterrupted play. This allows them to experience soccer first hand. They should be allowed the opportunity to experiment, and with that, succeed and fail.
I’m not going to say I agree with absolutely everything they lay out, but overall this is an excellent set of guidelines. I’ll go into some more detail in later posts about some specific issues.
) often the problem is due to parents not understanding the 
Can’t argue with that logic!
) a late model Chevy Impala sedan which is classified as a ‘Large Sedan’. It is a heavy car (just under 3500 lbs) and as long as our Windstar mini-van. The car that hit me was a Honda Civic - not a huge car (just over 2500 lbs). You’d think that in a high-speed accident where a significantly lighter car hits a heavier car, someone is going to get hurt. But not this day - both of us walked away without a scratch and I was playing pickup soccer with our league coaches the next day. I was VERY lucky.
Of course they’re still trying to drag me in kicking and screaming for my Grade 9. Don’t know if they’ll succeed this year or not. But the 
D’oh! Yellow Card for stupidity! Never argue with the ref, especially if he calls it YOUR way!
