About On The Pitch

Thrown in by: Soccer Dad on February 21st 2006, 1:04 pm | Email | Print

So why exactly AM I doing this?

I became a soccer coach in 2002 when the coaches of my son’s first soccer team moved up with their kids to the next age level. They asked me to take over the U6 team that Fall. Having absolutely no soccer background, besides being a fan, I was hesitant. But I’m good with kids so I decided to give it a go. Somewhere along the way I also offered to help organize the U6 division. We had maybe 120 kids that year and I recall sitting with my laptop and an Excel spreadsheet trying to assign the teams evenly, calculate average ages for teams, and a LOT of cutting and pasting.

I swore never again unless I had some tools to use, so I set out writing software to help manage the league. Each season I’ve added more functionality and it makes running our growing league (over 850 players now) much easier. This season we were able to create custom PDF documents for each coach with the various forms pre-filled out with player info from the database. Pretty cool. If time allows, I hope to package the software and make it available to other leagues (watch for http://leaguewizard.net to go live this year!)

Well, being so involved in the operational side of the league somehow led to me being elected President of the league. At that point I learned first hand how much goes on in a youth soccer league, what the parents REALLY care about, and more. I had done a LOT of research online as we worked to improve our league (just how do the older leagues do it, etc) and noticed there were very few web logs dedicated to soccer and especially youth soccer. Most discussion seems to occur on mailing lists and forums.

So I decided to start up a blog to chronicle what we ran into as a new league, what we learned, and hopefully build a resource for other young leagues and maybe some older ones. Topics covered here will primarily deal with youth soccer, but don’t be surprised to see occasional posts on professional soccer, especially now that Cary, NC is getting a USL pro team. During the World Cup, well, the fan in me takes over so watch for more youth related posts once it’s over.

You’ll find the frequency of posts varies with the time of year. Lots of posts before and after seasons in the Spring and Fall, very few in the Winter, and a smattering in the Summer. That may change now that our league is state affiliated and working to build a Challenge program, but we’ll see what time allows.

As for me - I’ll be the first to admit I’m not some youth soccer expert. I’m learning new things every day and likely will for many years to come. But I’ve fallen in love with the game and want to do whatever I can to further youth soccer in our small, but growing, city. So I’m always looking for ideas, resources, and more from other leagues and associations to pass on. Like many, I have opinions, and will surely spout them off here. No guarantee they’ll all be good opinions I’m learning remember? And you can always post comments highlighting why I’m mistaken! But I hope some of what I discover and write about will help others who are just beginning their youth soccer journey.

So thanks for stopping by! Post a comment or two while you are here and if you’d like to see me write about something, pass it on!

- Coach Mike

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