Just a heads up that tomorrow, January 18th, On The Pitch will go dark in protest of the pending SOPA and PIPA legislation. If you haven’t heard about this legislation, you need to educate yourself, as the major media companies are trying to get Congress to pass legislation that will allow for government censorship of the Internet under the guise of copyright infringement. Think how many soccer sites link to exciting goals or plays from the EPL, etc. That linking alone would be grounds for a lawsuit or possibly criminal charges.
So on January 18th, along with many other major websites, visits to our website will redirect to information on how you can try to fight this legislation.
[Read the rest of this entry…]
We’ve all seen the ‘magic spray’ soccer trainers use to heal injured soccer players – everyone wonders what it is and given how it often causes a miraculous recovery, it must be magic.
Our recreational league has been coed since it’s inception. We formed coed divisions simply because of numbers. When our league formed in 2002, we had ~350 players or so from U6 up through U12 – just enough to form small two year divisions of coed teams (U6/U8/U10/U12). A few years later players were split by gender only if they made our new travel teams (U10 and above). After that, every year or two we’d have a healthy debate about coed with most (including myself) wanting to keep it. Common beliefs were that it helped improve the intensity and aggressiveness of the girls, helped them ‘toughen up’ playing with the boys, and would help them be stronger players when they got older. These were widely held beliefs, but we had little evidence to back them up, even anecdotal. One year we did a survey of our parents and the results reaffirmed what we thought at the time. Around 70% of the respondents preferred coed, with over 75% of parents with daughters preferring coed. We knew there was support for it, but those results were still surprising. Of course, any statistician will tell you people don’t like change and will say they like the ‘status quo’ even if they have some reservations. Fast forward to the past few years. Our travel program was growing and our players who started out with us when they were 4 years old were now in middle school, many playing on travel teams. While we had a number of boys travel teams, we struggled to get enough girls to come out in any given age group. My group of ’96 girls seemed to be an exception, so I had the first girls team from our league that played more than a year. We certainly struggled at first, then saw some success. But we couldn’t shake the feeling that we were ‘behind’ other teams/leagues. Other teams, from big and small leagues, had girls pursuing the ball with abandon who were confident with the ball. We didn’t. The differences were noticeable.
I’m getting very close to my 10 year anniversary of coaching youth soccer, and I guess I’m reaching that stage where I look back and think ‘Oh my God what have I done!’ when it comes to those early years. Blessed with children born 8 years apart, I hope I’ve learned from my mistakes coaching my eldest so I can do a better job coaching my youngest as well as all the other kids I coach. But one thing that has always had me puzzled is the inability to tolerate losing at a young age. EVERY coach wants to win. But the problem is when the desire to win sacrifices a player’s development, or worse, causes them to quit. Sure winning feels good, but it’s OK to lose! Really!
I’ve been meaning to start posting again for a while now that my life has gone from barely managed chaos to just insanely busy. So while perusing the excellent 
