Can someone please explain to me why US Soccer wants our team to look like we’re wearing pajamas on the pitch? This new kit is just horrible and makes you long for the 3rd kit to come out more often. But those are pajamas too. Insert obligatory Bananas in Pajamas quote here.

As if we weren’t a laughingstock already… Lets start a pool to see how long it takes for an opponent exchanging jerseys to tell a US Player “here you can have mine but keep yours - I’m good” Why is it Nike seems to think soccer kits have to be bland and striped. The brighter and more colorful the better.

Is it really that hard to come up with some type of bright red and blue jersey? Sure, navy isn’t the most striking color, but if you use Royal for a 3rd kit, maybe you can use it as a stripe for one of the others. And when we finally find someone who will design a kit we’re proud of - can we stick with the color?

Of course I’m not sure how much we have to worry about the US Soccer kits being hard to recognize on sight like Brazil or the like. As soon as someone sees us they have to be thinking ‘Wow - what an ugly kit - must be the US’

Here’s an idea - browse through kits from the likes of Nike, adidas, Score, High Five, Teamwork Athletic, or any other and post your favorite style that the US could wear. Post links in the comments - this could be fun. Bonus points if you chose 1st through 3rd kits.

H/T Josh and Fish who don’t like it either.

As SoccerDad does some roster assignments… If your child has dropped out of soccer three seasons in a row, maybe, JUST maybe, it’s time to pick a different sport.

The head of South Africa’s Tourism Services Association warned that due to continuing power problems in South Africa, the country may face serious problems hosting the 2010 FIFA World Cup:

South Africa’s energy crisis raises serious questions about its ability to successfully host the 2010 World Cup, the head of the Southern Africa Tourism Services Association (SATSA) said Wednesday, following days of crippling power outages. South Africa is suffering acute energy shortages, resulting in countrywide power cuts lasting several hours at a time as state electricity provider Eskom tries to cover demand.

“Stadia may have all the most wonderful generators in the world to broadcast the games, but will people come to South Africa to see them if they know that they will be going back to hotels and guest houses with no power?” SATSA CEO Michael Tatalias asked.

No power meant “no hot meals, no clean laundry, no lights,” Tatalias said.

Even if football fans were prepared to brave the threat of blackouts, which state electricity supplier Eskom has warned could continue for another five years, they face difficulties getting to games on time if street lights are out, SATSA warned.

“We have to ask ourselves honestly if we can still do this,” Tatalias urged.

Apparently the power situation in South Africa is severe with regular ‘load shedding’ which is costing businesses millions and also threatens to delay World Cup construction. Traffic congestion has gotten so bad due to traffic lights going out when the power does, the state owned power company is installing solar powered traffic lights at 2,000 of the county’s busiest intersections. Other large scale alternative energy programs are also being investigated. Key projects are already being impacted, as are tourists and other sporting events.

This is an interesting situation. You’d expect the head of South Africa’s Tourism trade group to put the best spin on the load shedding that he could. Instead he is waving red flags. All this time people worried about the communications infrastructure and ability to complete the Stadia. Instead, the power grid may not be able to keep construction schedules on time, and even if they aren’t impacted, the effects on World Cup attendees could be substantial.

This definitely bears watching. FIFA continues to rave about South Africa’s progress, noting they are farther along than Germany was at this point. But multiple experts note that the power problems are not fixable in the short term, so there could be load shedding and blackouts in 2010 due to the slow rate of new capacity coming online.

HatTip The Oil Drum

­This is somewhat old news, but welcome all the same. John Thomas over at the USYS Blog recently highlighted a new policy in Kentucky related to the licensing of coaches:

Mandating anything in soccer is tough enough. As one of the national staff coaches for US Youth Soccer, it’s hard educating coaches that have been coaching for over 20 years. The issues most of the time are- why do they need education when they have been winning all the time, but winning and player development can be two different things. My hat goes off to Kentucky Youth Soccer for putting education of the player’s first and mandating education. Here is what Kentucky Youth Soccer has done.

On September 1, 2007 Kentucky Youth Soccer Association Board of Directors implemented a minimum coaching policy for those working with select soccer players. Currently there are no minimum coaching standards for recreational coaches but Kentucky Youth Soccer Association Board of Directors recognizes and fully supports coaching education for all levels and would like to emphasize that there is no substitute for an educated coach. Coaches will have until September 1, 2009 to meet these requirements.

This is a big decision for a state level association to make. But it’s the right one. Here in NC a number of leagues require licenses for coaches of higher level teams. I actually wish Kentucky had considered some type of stronger encouragement, perhaps just shy of a mandate, for recreational coaches - they often need the education the most.

So what does Kentucky require?

» Read the rest of this post…

As the spring season approaches, I figured this would be a timely article. As both a soccer parent and coach, it has always been interesting watching the interactions (or lack thereof) of parents and coaches. Usually the interaction is good, but at times it can be strained, to the detriment of the team. We all have our pet peeves, so I figured I’d come up with a couple of lists that highlight what we all can do to make the beautiful game more enjoyable for our kids AND the adults.

» Read the rest of this post…

Over at Main St. USA, they note with glee:

Confirmed: Dave O’Brien and Eric Wynalda are out as MLS’ #1 broadcast team and will be replaced by JP Dellacamera and John Harkes.

Please, please, please, let them be out as the USSoccer announcers, too. If I ever have to hear Dave O’Brien reveal his sketchy knowledge of soccer again, it will be too soon.

One can only hope Dave O’Brien will return to ‘focus on baseball’. But I hate to see Eric Wynalda go. He’s opinionated, sure. But his broadcasts were always entertaining. Hopefully he’ll still be covering US Soccer matches, alongside Bruce Arena where the tension can be cut with a knife. Always fun.

If JP and Harkes are the #1 team, who is going to step up to be the second team? Who would you like to see?­

A few years ago, Nike put together a series of commercials about a ‘Secret 3v3 Tournament’ played by 24 professional soccer players from around the world. Chris over at The Offside feels it was one of the greatest sports marketing campaigns simply due to the ‘coolness factor’, and I’d have to agree. But I also think it’s a great video to share­ with younger players because it is crammed with slick moves and tricks. Not t­hat you should be trying to get your 5 year old to do a rainbow - but because seeing this reinfo­rces to the­ kids that so­ccer is cool.

They also created a ‘rematch’ ad:

I may have to startup a page on our league’s website with links to all the various ‘cool soccer videos’ the kids can watch online. Any suggestions?

A longtime OTP reader shared this with me recently:

Today at my U14 game, my daughter made a diving save and deflected the ball past the post. The referee signaled for a goal kick and she shouted to him “Ref, it was out off my hand, it should be a corner.” He listened and gave the ball to the other team. As her dad and coach, I was proud of her display of sportsmanship.

I’d be proud too! Sometimes we lose sight of the most important lessons we should be teaching. One of my favorite stories about sportsmanship was during a U10 Rec match. A player got tangled up trying to steal the ball and went down hard. Before the referee even thought to blow the whistle, all the kids took a knee. Granted, we explained to the coaches after that to remind the kids to play until the whistle blows, lest we see U10 kids start diving . But it was clearly a spontaneous act of compassion by the kids. It was great to see.

What cool examples of sportsmanship have you seen in youth soccer? Were they rewarded or highlighted? How?

­

If your child decides to mouth off to a referee and ends up being suspended for a few matches, don’t go whining to the papers about how unfairly your child is being treated. It just lets the world know that your kid is a brat. Players who insult or curse at referees deserve to get sent off and sometimes suspended. While the length of the suspension may seem a bit long for calling the ref ‘a cheat’, you can bet this sent a message to the rest of the league. I bet kids in that league were on their best behavior after this came out.

Hmmmm. On second thought, if your kid gets suspended, absolutely go to the papers so the rest of the league knows about it. The players will be on their best behavior for sure!

I love how the association assessed a fine too. Time to break open that piggy bank!

H/T The Ref

A couple of years ago, due to abusive behavior by parents at youth (American) football games, a local recreation department erected chain link fences to keep the parents away from the players, coaches, and officials. Clearly the move was meant to get the parents attention to how bad things were getting, and I hope it was only temporary. At the time I hoped it was a remedy that wouldn’t be needed elsewhere. ­Turns out it was:

Keith Harris, chairman of the Wigan Youth League, came up with the idea of roping off one side of a p­itch to keep parents away from their offspring and the officials. “I was chatting to a colleague about parents and said, as a joke, that we should fence them all in,” Harris said. “He said it was a good idea. We had ten to 15 games a season being abandoned because of adults being abusive, so we had to do something.”?

It seems to have worked. In the first season of using plastic fencing, two matches were abandoned because of touchline behaviour; in the second, two more games failed to be completed, but because of players not supporters; and, this season, one game has been abandoned so far, but, again, not because of parents.

Michael McCourt, a Wigan Youth League referee, calls the fencing “brilliant, superb. We have a lot of young referees and it protects them,”? he said.

Wow. All soccer leagues deal with ‘parents behaving badly’, but I can’t imagine having it get so bad across the board that you’d abandon so many matches. Sure, American parents have run onto soccer pitches to assault referees, but I would think having so many incidents in a single league is abnormal. But apparently they were pretty severe given the distance the leagues put between the parents and the pitch:

Other leagues have followed suit and, this season, the Stourbridge Youth League decided that all clubs must erect plastic posts with ropes up to six metres away from the touchline. Coaches must stand on the opposite touchline and no one is allowed to stand behind the goals.

That’s a heck of a distance! You have to wonder if putting the parents so far away defeats the purpose since they’re likely to just scream louder! And imagine what the kids must be thinking, seeing their parents penned in at a distance from their games. But clearly the parents brought it upon themselves.

So the next time you’re getting caught up in your child’s game and letting the referee know how badly they are doing, imagine what it would be like to be fenced in 18 feet/6 meters from the field trying to cheer on your kids. Then imagine trying to explain to your kids why you have to watch their match from behind a fence.

HatTip to The Ref.

W­hen I signed up for BlogBurst, a sort of clearinghouse for large media outlets to pickup blog posts for republication, I doubted any of my posts would ever get selected for republication. So imagine my surprise when two of them were recently selected by Reuters. It’s pretty cool to see something you wrote published on a major media website.

Yes, I know. It doesn’t take much to excite me!

A while back I alluded to the challenges we had faced with our U11 girls in terms of getting them motivated in practice, but hadn’t had a chance to expand on that until now.

Our U11 team is a great group of girls, but it’s also on a steep learning curve. Very diverse personalities, varying levels of athleticism, and all but one is entirely new to this whole ‘competitive travel soccer’ thing. My assistant coaches and I knew we would be a bit behind, as all but one had played Recreational soccer as U10 players last year. We knew the season would be a learning season in a variety of ways beyond just soccer skills/footwork, so we gave the girls a fair amount of leeway in the early months. Water fights were common after August (and once in a while November!!!) practices. Pranks were played. Stuff like that. We were there to learn soccer, but we also wanted to form a true team, and a big part of that was the girls getting to know each other and bond.

But with that freedom came a somewhat unexpected side effect and that was motivation. The girls were all REALLY excited when they made the team in May. Yet practices seemed to be less intense than we had hoped as the season progressed. We tried various ways to motivate the girls to put 100% effort into the drills, but they lacked focus. Part of this was probably due to our desire to get them to bond, but that wasn’t the only thing behind it. Even in matches, they played hard for a while, but often you could sense that they just didn’t ‘want it’ bad enough. Free balls were surrendered all too often in the last few steps. As players drove towards the goal, instead of doing whatever they could to advance, you got the feeling they would push forward up until they met a certain level of resistance, then back down a little. The burning desire to succeed and do their best just didn’t seem to be there. We even tried implementing a variation of the incentive soccer patches that worked so well with my U10 team. The girls loved them, but I couldn’t say the chance to earn a patch was pushing them to improve or work hard in practice. We had to do something different.

» Read the rest of this post…

Many readers likely recall the tragic story of Hayden Barnes Ellias, who was killed last year by a falling soccer goal during a team scrimmage. While soccer goal accidents are not very common, a number of children have died from them falling over in the past 30 years or so. The parents of Zachary Tran, who died in 2003, started up an advocacy group called Anchored for Safety whose purpose is to increase awareness of soccer goal dangers and to encourage organizations to properly anchor their soccer goals. Be sure to browse around their site for a lot of tips, ideas, and help for getting goals anchored and secure.

While browsing their site, I came across a scientific paper from Christopher Ferrone related to the design of a safer soccer goal (PDF). Being an engineer, this was very interesting since soccer goals are pretty basic, so I was curious what innovations were contained in the paper.

The majority of U-10 soccer goals are constructed of steel, typically weighing from 150 to 500 pounds. Serious injuries and deaths are a result of blunt force trauma to the head, neck, chest and limbs of the victims. In most cases this occurred when the goal tipped or was accidentally tipped onto the victim2. The intent of the instant design is to prevent or mitigate serious injury or death by developing a more stable soccer goal while considering both reasonably foreseeable uses and misuses.

So is this new design feasible?

» Read the rest of this post…

Over at Youth Sports, Joyce has a post up about the importance of keeping things simple in youth soccer:

During the holidays, my daughter’s soccer team played a series of “friendlies” in a three-hour span at the new Adirondack Sports Complex in Queensbury, a dome which boasts a large fie­ld perfect for indoor soccer. During one of the games, I sat next to a soccer dad who knows the game and kept repeating quietly to no one in particular:

“Simple passes, keep the game simple.”

Next, I got an e-mail from a soccer coach whose team we will be profiling this week in our youth sports section. A quote from soccer phenom Johan Cruyff (who has this amazing move named after him) was featured at the end of his e-mail:

“Football is simple, but the most difficult thing is to play simple football.” - Johan Cruyff­

There’s no question some youth coaches try to teach complex tactics too early when they should be concentrating on mostly technique and footwork. However, the first example Joyce uses is worrisome since it highlights a common problem in youth soccer: too much passing. If you take a group of young kids and work on passing, passing, and only passing - you’re going to win a lot of games. Younger players have trouble defending against teams that can reliably pass to each other. It takes a lot of time for them to figure out how to recognize passing lanes and work out angles to intercept passes. ­But as they get older, the defensive ability of opponents improves, and they’ll find they need more to beat that last defender.

The fact that Joyce quotes Johan Cruyff drives the point home. Keeping it simple doesn’t mean avoiding soccer moves. Coaches should teach soccer moves as early as possible as part of a balanced program that includes significant work on passing and receiving, keeping their head up, and learning a solid set of simple soccer moves. Does that mean teaching U8’s every Coerver move there is? Of course not. But I’ve seen many U8 Rec players with good coaches do a basic step over or scissor and a couple who can do a Cruyff turn in addition to passing well. Those players are the ones that have a solid balanced base to build on as the grow up.

One of the coolest moments for me as a coach this past year was when one of my U11 defenders took the ball upfield and met an opponent near mid field. Defenders tend to be cautious, knowing if they lose the ball, it can have dire consequences. So they tend to avoid holding onto the ball for very long. But my defender dribbled up to that opponent, did a scissors that faked the opponent, and continued up field for better position before crossing the ball towards the goal. Fantastic.

It’s all about balance. Young players need to learn the basics so they have a solid core to build on as they grow older. But that core has to be more than just passing and shooting. Just keep it simple

­ ­­

Martha over at The Offside highlights a Nike commercial showing Kobe Bryant lacing up some cleats and drilling a soccer ball into a net:

Even funnier though is this video of Freddy Adu talking smack to Kobe via video:

So the next time one of your young soccer players talks about basketball, let them know that a basketball player like Kobe almost decided to try and play professional soccer:

When Bryant was six, his father left the NBA, moved his family to Italy, and started playing professional basketball there. Bryant became accustomed to the lifestyle there and learned to speak fluent Italian. At an early age, he learned to play soccer and at first his favorite team was AC Milan. He has said that if he had stayed in Italy, he would have tried to become a professional soccer player, and that his favorite team is FC Barcelona. Bryant is a big fan of FC Barcelona manager Frank Rijkaard and Barça star Ronaldinho.