If you want a good chuckle, check out this collection of rants against soccer and youth soccer from the National Review. It never ceases to amaze me that these people get paid to write this stuff. Some of my favorites quotes include:

There is no surer sign of the decline of America’s culture than the craze over this awful European sport. Drive past a park or a schoolyard on a clear spring afternoon and you’re likely to witness a depressingly unpatriotic sight: the baseball diamond lies empty and crab grass grows in the infield, while herds of American children dressed in preposterous polyester uniforms run around kicking a white and black ball in no particular direction and to no apparent end.

Can someone explain to me how it’s unpatriotic that ‘herds of American children’ are having fun running around no matter what they’re wearing? It gets better.

I am convinced that the ordeal of soccer teaches our kids all the wrong lessons in life. Soccer is the Marxist concept of the labor theory of value applied to sports — which may explain why socialist nations dominate in the World Cup. The purpose of a capitalist economy is to produce the maximum output for the least amount of exertion. Soccer requires huge volumes of effort but produces no output.

Wait - what? Baseball scores rarely exceed 10. If we got 7 points for a goal in soccer, you’d think they were American football scores. And this makes us Marxist? Of course it wouldn’t be a good National Review rant without some sexism:

What makes peewee soccer particularly insidious is that boys and girls play together. At this level, the sport has become a giant social experiment imposed upon us by the same geniuses who have put women in combat. No one seems to care much that co-ed soccer is doing irreparable harm to the psyche of America’s little boys.

At this pre-puberty state of life girls tower over boys and typically have better coordination. Last year the Pele of my son’s league was a kindergartner named Kate Lynn. During one game, Kate Lynn repeatedly stampeded over Justin. After the third knockdown, I quietly pulled him aside and advised: “Remember that rule about never hitting a girl? Let’s suspend that for the next forty minutes.” But he never did, because she was likely to hit back.

Um - just wow. And that was only from the first article. Keep reading if you can. The mind boggles.

H/T yhatemetoo

Normally I would write about something like this in a Tales From The Pitch thread, but this was such a cool experience, I figured it was worth a blog post.

After deciding to do away with the Recreation State Cup for U9-U12, the NCYSA replaced it with regional festivals. The idea was to have events spread across the state so that teams didn’t have to travel far. The overall goal was to increase participation, thinking Rec teams were less likely to travel. So when we were asked to host one of the regional festivals, we jumped at the chance, and last Fall around 40 teams played a full day of soccer here in Mebane. It was a lot of fun, and we hoped to do it again.

This Spring, we agreed to host the festival again, and had 19 teams from our league that eagerly awaited the chance to play some teams from other leagues. But for a number of reasons, all four festival sites struggled to attract teams, so with less than two weeks to go before the festival, we saw that there were only a handful of other teams planning to attend the festival (in addition to our own teams). This wasn’t good. So to try and salvage some type of event, we decided to try something different.

» Read the rest of this post…

For those of you with children playing soccer in high school or college, new shinguard standards go into effect this Fall. The standard from the NOCSAE stipulates that all shinguards must be tested annually and have a readily visible certification seal that indicates they passed lab testing and indicate the height of the tallest player that size shinguard is appropriate for.

All too often players are wearing very small shinguards, exposing them to serious injury. The initial standard required the seal be visible on the front of the guard for referee inspection, however recent modifications allow for tags to be sewn into the top of the shinguard.

One issue being raised by parents is that many online vendors still don’t indicate if the guards for sale have this seal, and what the height range is for each. Also, there is some variance between manufacturers where a “L” shin-guard from one may be in the same height range as an “XL” from another. So if you are in the market for new shinguards, or you have an older player on a high school or collegiate team, you’ll need to make sure their shinguards are NOCSAE certified and are the appropriate size for their height.

I haven’t heard of any state youth associations mandating these standards yet, but it seems like a very good idea. Those of you who administer youth leagues should strongly consider informing your parents this summer about the proper size shinguard to purchase for their child, as many have no idea. Now that the NOCSAE labels will have the proper height information on them, it will be easier for parents to judge which size to buy.I’d say most youth associations should mandate certified shinguards as well, but to phase it in over two years or so. Use those two years to let everyone know about the proper size to get, and in two years, everyone should already be getting the right guards for their kids.

Note this standard was originally supposed to go into effect last Fall, but they delayed it a year to give the manufacturers more time to get their product lines updated and tested.

A few people are concerned about players who tape their guards to hold them in place, which seems to have been addressed according to the SGMA:

Provisions have been made in the standard for guards that are held in position by tape, a sock or other type of accessory item. For details of these provisions please review the most recent version of the standard available at the NOCSAE website.

But I cannot find any reference to tape in the standard. They may be referring to the change allowing the seal to be on tags sewn into the top back of a guard (which can be flipped out for referees to see), but it’s not clear.

So keep this in mind if you go to buy shin guards this season, even if your child is younger - it’s a good standard to adhere to!

H/T LegalEagle

I’m not going to try and say our recent rains have ended our drought. We’ve only had about 14″ of rain in five months this year, vs ~30″ all last year. But we sure seem to have had a lot of rain when it rains. Looking back at our Spring season, we rescheduled at least half of our regularly scheduled matches, mostly due to rain. Many teams managed to get one or two practices completed in February before matches started in March. I can’t prove it (because I’m too laz^H^H^Hbusy to look up rainfall for every day this year), but it sure seems like we got a lot of rain either late in the week (Thursday/Friday) or on the weekend, which made mincemeat of our schedule. My U11 Girls had one match rescheduled four times before we finally got it completed.

So I guess this is a fitting end to our Spring season.

» Read the rest of this post…

I’ve been a youth soccer coach for about six years now. I’d say that probably makes me a novice. Definitely not a n00b anymore, but a novice. I’m still constantly learning and trying to improve how I coach my players at all levels. I feel comfortable helping out other coaches, but realize I still have a lot to learn. Yet as a coach and a parent, sometimes you see things you just know are wrong. This is one of those times.

I often find in talking about youth soccer that many coaches try to apply the same guidelines and principles to players at all competitive ages (U10-U18). “This is select!” is a common refrain when parents and players are uncomfortable with certain methodologies. In saying that, they are grouping all the kids into one group. Yet it is clear, to me at least, that even at the highest competitive levels, coaching styles and methodologies have to vary when dealing with U10 players vs U18 players. This post is primarily aimed at U10-U12 age players and even for some U13/U14 players.

With that in mind, I want to talk about the use of playing time as a form of punishment or motivation.

» Read the rest of this post…

It never ceases to amaze me how absolutely crazy May can be. Between end of season events, tournaments, state championships and festivals, planning for tryouts, starting registration for the Fall, developing/changing programs for the coming year, Annual General Meetings, travel team selections, and more, May is one chaotic month. Which is why OTP was so neglected. I hardly had time to read email, let alone write, and that’s unfortunate as May is full of post topics!

So my apologies for things getting so quiet here. We still have a lot going on (tryouts next week, AGM preparations, and more), but I’m slowly getting back to a normal schedule and hope to have lots of in the coming weeks. My draft queue is jammed, so they may come in bursts!

What excitement have you all seen this May?