Ultimate fighting was once the sole domain of burly men who beat each other bloody in anything-goes brawls on pay-per-view TV. But the sport often derided as “human cockfighting” is branching out.
The bare-knuckle fights are now attracting competitors as young as 6 whose parents treat the sport as casually as wrestling, Little League or soccer.
The kids wear some protective equipment and helmets, but you just know the rationalization that’s coming…
It looks violent until you realize this teaches discipline. One of the first rules they learn is that this is not for aggressive behavior outside (the ring),” said Larry Swinehart, a Joplin police officer and father of two boys and the lone girl in the garage group.
Riiiight. Now my child does Tae-Kwon-Doe and not only trains on how to spar (hand to hand fighting), but also knows how to wield a sword, nunchaku, and a bo staff very well. Next up is training with weapons called tonfas (like a police baton), and kamas (scary looking!). But the training is very strict, with respect drilled into them constantly. They are constantly reminded that what they learn is kept off the streets and weapons training is limited to the more senior students who have exhibited the proper discipline in class, etc.
But equating cage fighting training with other sports that are dangerous, if proper discipline and restraint aren’t taught, is crazy. Do you really think these kids are all going to be in proper training environments? Besides that, you are training kids for little more than all out fist fights. TKD centers around personal discipline, form, precision, and focus. Ultimate fighting is all out fist fighting. I love this snippet:
Lindsey said the children wear protective headgear, shin guards, groin protection and martial-arts gloves. They fight quick, two-minute bouts. Rules also prohibit any elbow blows and blows to the head when an opponent is on the ground.
Emphasis mine. You’ve got to be kidding. Just wait until one of these kids hauls off and beats a classmate to a bloody pulp with the skills they learned in a neighbor’s garage training for their next cage match. Yes, the same thing could happen with a TKD black belt, but TKD has much more history as a discipline - fighting is only a part of what you learn. And discipline is drilled into them from the start.
These parents are delusional if they think this ends well.
When did the USMNT get an all black kit? Hey - anything is better than the Old Navy Pajamas - but all black? Well, if we can go to Poland and wear all black, we certainly can go somewhere else and wear RED like so many people want! I can understand not wearing red in Poland or England. But it sure would be nice to see a red away kit for the USMNT!
Thrown in by: Soccer Dad on March 26th 2008, 12:33 pm | Email
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Filed under: Players, The Pros
Most people think all soccer parents are crazy, living vicariously through their kids. As a league administrator, I’ve seen a few that do this, but overwhelmingly, soccer parents want their kids to have fun and get better at a sport they usually love to play. The idea of signing their child with a professional team’s youth program is completely foreign to American soccer parents as we have VERY few teams with pro academies. Your average soccer parent of a talented player will hope someday they play on a competitive youth team, them perhaps make the ODP program, advance to the Premiere level, play in high school, and maybe, just maybe, get some sort of scholarship to college (the holy grail in many a parent’s eye - until they realize it’s partial. Very partial). The truly elite may be tapped to play on a new USSF Academy team (U16/U18 Boys only), or perhaps be invited to train at Bradenton with hopes of making a national youth team appearance. The idea of professional play is always much farther down the road - after college.
But soccer parents in the USA often have no concept of a professional team academy, where players can be signed to a team as young as U9 and train with the team’s staff. The problem is, if a player isn’t going to be good enough as they age to make the reserve or first team, they are cut loose. This can be extremely traumatic for a player and their family, as Graham Fisher recently outlined at SoccerLens. I’m glad his son recovered and is enjoying the game so much, but you have to wonder if his son was helped by bouncing around once his initial dream was shattered.
With that in mind, we now get the news that Everton has signed a seven year old to their academy. Long time readers know that I often talk about how young players are often sold short and the game is often dumbed down for them (*cough* no offside *cough*) when they are more than capable of handling it. But even I twitch at the idea that a professional team has signed a seven year old and the parents went along with it. In the long shot chance this kid grows tall and develops into a star keeper, all is well. If he trains with the professional academy for a couple years and is cut loose, he’ll have an amazing childhood experience to remember. But if he stays in the Academy from 7 through, say, 17, chasing the dream, and then is cut loose - can you imagine the damage?
What do you think? How young is too young for a child to be put into a professional training academy? Is a system like ours, where kids gradually advance to the next level more suited to pre-teeens and tweens than going straight to an academy?
You have to admit it makes some sense and it wouldn’t surprise me if it was partially true. Perhaps it wasn’t the plan from the start - but the whole ability to buy write-in votes when you buy a season ticket seems a unique angle. It’s either marketing genius after the fact, or a real conspiracy.
I think it’s funny that MLS is so concerned about a team name given how silly some of the current ones are.
WePlay.com, a social networking site for youth sports - something like Facebook for young athletes - is expected to start in mid-April. The site caters to youth athletes, parents and coaches - a vast audience. About 52 million children a year participate in organized sports leagues, according to the National Council of Youth Sports.
Young athletes will be able to set up a profile, post pictures, communicate with friends and share videos of games. Parents will be able to get practice schedules, coordinate car pools and find out which equipment to purchase. Coaches will be able to communicate with their players and parents, as well as learn about strategy and other skills.
“Two hundred forty million people in America are one degree of separation from youth sports,” said Steve Hansen, the chief executive of WePlay. “Youth sports is held together by e-mails, phone calls and clip boards. We want to change that.”
I think youth sports are a bit farther along than phone calls and clip boards, but if they aren’t, is WePlay.com the answer?
Many of you probably know that The Fugees have received a few sizable donations, namely $500,000 from Universal Studios and $100,000 from Nike, so you might think they don’t need financial assistance. However, it is likely much of those donations will be used to build soccer fields for The Fuguees, which was one of the reasons the story struck a chord - their local city denied them access to the city parks. But they still need to purchase uniforms, equipment, pay for travel, etc. In the SoccerLens interview, Coach Mufleh noted a current fundraising effort they have underway that I wanted to highlight:
How can the international football community donate time or money to assist the Fugees Family?
They can go to our website www.fugeesfamily.org and donate. We are looking to find 2000 donors that can give $100/year. I would love to have 2000 football fans around the world that make it possible for these beautiful kids to succeed. We as a non-profit rely on foundations and individual donors. We receive no government funding. We are committed to running this program for a long time and it’s incredible how something as simple as football can be so powerful in these kids’ lives. To volunteer you can contact me at coach@fugeesfamily.org
So if you find yourself looking for a youth soccer program you can help out beyond your local league, by all means consider The Fugees or any other program working to give at risk kids a chance to play the beautiful game.
There are a lot of websites out there dedicated to youth soccer. Most are trying to sell you the next best thing in coaching, training, drill books, etc. Everyone needs to make a living, and I can assure you if I could make one writing about youth soccer, I would. But some sites are clearly done by someone dedicated to the sport, who want to give something back - and if they can make a little extra money on the side, great. The point is, it can be daunting trying to weed through the thousands of youth soccer sites out there to find the really useful ones, regardless of why the authors put them together.
One site I’ve come to really enjoy using is SoccerXpert, which was suggested to me by one of my assistant coaches.
Thrown in by: Soccer Dad on March 23rd 2008, 11:44 am | Email
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Filed under: Referees
It wouldn’t be the weekend without another uproar over a (supposedly) missed offside call. So the head of the organization that oversees officiating for the English Premiere League, Keith Hackett, penned an article in support of offside and why the recent refinements requiring active play have made a positive impact on the beautiful game. His view is that the recent clarifications have made offside easier to understand, not harder, so he uses an animal metaphor:
To be clear, the definition, in the laws, is this: in deciding whether to flag, assistants must watch out for three things, any one of which would make an offside player active.
First, is the offside player interfering with play? As advised by the IFAB since 2005, that means playing or touching the ball. Attempting to play the ball does not count - he must actually play or touch it.
Second, is the player interfering with an opponent’s ability to play the ball, by clearly obstructing the opponent’s line of vision or movements, or by making a gesture or movement which, in the opinion of the referee, deceives or distracts an opponent?
And third, is the player ‘gaining an advantage’? This last point is specific, and is not what Match of the Day seem to think it is. It applies only to an offside player playing a ball that rebounds to him from an opponent, the post or the crossbar. If he does not play the ball from the rebound, then he is not penalised for being in that offside position. Nothing else counts as ‘gaining’.
And that’s it. If a player ticks any one of those three boxes, he is offside. The three-part definition is remembered as ‘PIG’ - if a player doesn’t Play, Interfere or Gain, he is fine.
It still amazes me how many parents and referees still believe a player in an offside position is always offside if they don’t touch the ball. Keith takes soccer match commentators to task over this as well. He also notes how the new refinements discourage negative play, including something people in youth soccer talk about all the time - the offside trap:
The law is a real positive for the game - the pundits should love it. The active definition helps games flow - there are fewer stoppages for offside now - and it makes negative play far less profitable. No sensible team today uses the arms-aloft offside trap made famous by George Graham’s Arsenal in the 80s and 90s. That trap was totally against the spirit of the offside law - it was never intended as a device for earning cheap free-kicks. The active system means that the offside trap is now a dangerous tactic to use and allows the benefit of the doubt to be always with the attacking team.
An excellent commentary that should be shared far and wide with parents, coaches, and yes, even a few youth referees.
This is a post that’s LONG overdue, but I honestly couldn’t bring myself to write it when I should have in July 2007. So bear with my procrastination as I take a small trip down memory lane about a U10 Rec team I had the honor of coaching and that I will always remember. This post isn’t about me or some lame attempt to congratulate myself as their coach - far from it. I learned more from them than they ever could have learned from me and I felt they deserved to have their hard work chronicled as they move on to bigger and better things.
I started out coaching like many … with the youngest players in U6. My son had been on a U6 team whose coaches were moving to U8 and they asked me to take over the team. From there I sort of followed my son up as he got older, though I quickly found myself coaching/assistant coaching two teams - my son’s U8 team and the U6 team he had previously been on. U6 and U8 were so much fun as the kids learned the basics of how to play and worked hard to develop their core skills. Like many new coaches, at the time I couldn’t imagine coaching an ‘older’ team. While we had exciting matches even at the U6 level between teams that knew each other well, there was something about the U10 age level that was intriguing to me as a coach. It was an age that the kids really started to ‘get it’. They started to understand how to put those basic ball skills together and to pass with some form of reliability. So as my son aged up to U10, I overcame my reluctance and was very excited about taking on a U10 team.
Thrown in by: Soccer Dad on March 19th 2008, 4:58 pm | Email
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Filed under: Parents
Dad Gone Mad has a great post up about watching his son play baseball recently, and it should be required reading for all sports parents:
I spent the rest of the gaming watching my son, and I felt myself getting emotional as I did so. It wasn’t because I was living vicariously through him as he hit line drives and deftly fielded hard-hit ground balls. It wasn’t because I thought his strong play was somehow a reflection on me or the efficacy of my coaching, my fathering, my own passion for the game.
It was because he was having fun.
It’s as pure as anything I’ve ever seen: a seven-year-old boy playing baseball, getting dirty, sliding when there’s no need to do so just because it’s fun to get dirty. He had a bright blue Gatorade mustache. He was wearing a heavily weathered helmet that dwarfed his head. And the smile almost never left his face.
We all live a bit vicariously through our kids, and that’s OK to a point. Well grounded parents do it because they want their kids to be happy and have fun, while others sometimes lose perspective and think their kid is the next prodigy of whatever sport they are playing. Dad Gone Mad sums that up perfectly:
When you watch a lot of youth sports, you begin to notice the attitudes and postures of the kids. Some hate it and look miserable. Some play because they want to make their parents happy. Some try their hardest and strike out every time, but they persevere because once they’ve hit the ball a single time and felt the euphoria it brings, they can’t wait to feel it again.
Thrown in by: Soccer Dad on March 19th 2008, 4:47 pm | Email
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Filed under: Asides, Players
Am I the only one who finds this whole Next Soccer Star concept a little bit oddÂ? It’s like aÂn online reality show or some attempt to make a social network for wannabe soccer pros. And we all know how the last soccer themed social network did (been to Âjoga.com lately?). I know everyone got a kick out of the kid from Australia who got a Man U Academy tryout from a video of his play. But does anyone really think this is a viable way to find or showcase talent? Maybe I’m just being old fashioned in an Internet world, but this just seems odd and prone to spurring more parents to lose perspective.
Thrown in by: Soccer Dad on March 16th 2008, 10:00 am | Email
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Filed under: US Soccer
Over at SoccerLens, Dan Leo has an excellent, albeit sobering, look at the state of US Soccer. It’s easy for suffering US Soccer fans to get euphoric over even the smallest successes, but it’s good to have a reality check once in a while.
I think Dan probably sells the MLS a bit short recently, primarily due to it’s expansion and continued moderate success. The popularity of soccer in the US is growing. The availability of soccer matches via satellite and cable have had a huge impact. American EPL fans are still American soccer fans who may someday decide they want to see matches live. Viewer ratings for some US Soccer events have been better than expected. But it is still an agonizingly slow progression.
I also think he overlooks the potential impact of American youth soccer, which continues to grow at an amazing rate in the US. While that doesn’t directly translate into adult soccer fans later on, it certainly can help. The problem is that most people wish more youth soccer players would translate directly into adult soccer fans later. I think we should consider another group of potential fans - their parents. 17 million youth soccer players means a heck of a lot of youth soccer parents learning and cheering on soccer every week. I know many youth soccer parents who have turned into soccer fans through friendships made on the youth sideline, etc. Which is one area I think youth soccer leagues can help a lot.
In a future article I’m going to look into ways youth leagues can help generate excitement for the adult game in America, not just among their players, but also their parents. With an estimated 17 million kids playing soccer, the potential impact is huge.
I don’t think that overt racism is a contributing factor to the lack of diversity on the soccer fields. I think most clubs would gladly expand their talent pools in order to compete. I’m also not so sure if pricing is as big a deterrent as you might think, at least at the higher competition levels. There are lots of families that stretch dollars in order for their kids to play AAU basketball so I don’t see why they wouldn’t also do it if they and their kids felt the same way about soccer as they do about hoops. And even if pricing is an issue you do have clubs that provide financial assistance, as Twin City does for its players. The point is I really think it’s more of a cultural issue than a money or overt racism issue.
The question for youth soccer leaders is this: do you want to continue to be seen as the “white bread, upper class” sport? If not, how do you change the image of the game? How do you make everyone feel welcome?
I recently had a player develop a heck of a case of shin guard rash and found a thread on the NC Soccer Forum that listed a number of possible remedies. Obviously if a rash persists you should see a doctor, but there were some very good suggestions from long time soccer parents and coaches about initial treatment, so I figured I’d share them:
Depends on the type of guards you use. The cloth-covered all-in-ones, with the legs straps and built-in ankle guards in the stirrups are the worst if you don’t wash them every once in a while and either bleach them or use lots of Lysol (and let them dry good too) The best are the slip-ins that can be cleaned off, be sure to wash the sleeves they go in though. Remember, bleach kills bugs and fungus so buy the white sleeves. [ed note: we have washed the cloth covered ones weekly - so far so good. Plus I think the benefit of the ankle guards outweigh any rash risk as long as you wash them on a regular basis]
Clean immediately with astringent, zit wash, or witch hazel - morning and night.
Beware of a neoprene allergy if they have foam linings.
Wear thin socks/stockings under the shinguards instead of them sitting against the skin. You can also get special rash guards.
It could be a fungal infection - try Lotrimin or other anti-fungal.
If the rash turns to open sores - make sure it is bandaged and only then use something like neosporin.
Buy multiple pairs of shin guards if kids play back to back days so they can be washed.
Switch brands.
Some common sense and the understanding that these rashes can be caused by any number of things, so some experimentation may be needed to prevent them in the future will go a long way. And of course, if it persists for more than a few days - get a professional opinion.
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