I’ve been meaning to write some about the differences in attitudes and personalities between boys and girls teams. I’ve been a coed coach for most of my coaching life, so it was muted there. But in watching girls only matches in our Challenge program, you often saw cattiness and the ‘dominant personality’ that Old Soccer Guy talked about and I followed up on a bit. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started coaching my U11 team, but I quickly found out it was definitely differenet and not what I expected. Despite many attempts this past season, we never managed to push, cajole, or otherwise encourage a dominant personality to take over. We knew there was a risk of things getting nasty, but felt identifying a leader would help our team if they managed not to turn negative. But nobody really stepped up. Of course these are 10 and 11 year old girls, so not a complete shock. Instead, we continued to rotate our captains throughout the season and I believe it helped a number of them grow as players and leaders. I figure in the Spring we’ll continue with this.
We also tried some backdoor maneuvering. We approached two of our more skilled players and asked them to work at being ‘background leaders’ where they may not be the person up front, but worked to encourage their other teammates who were struggling and to try and nip any infighting in the bud. This did work well when the two remembered what they were supposed to be doing. I think we’ll continue to nurture this angle as well.
But overall, our team never suffered from cattiness or infighting. Our biggest problem was more a lack of intensity at practice…
Loading...
December 4th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
I have never coached U11s, but I had a 10-year-old daughter for a year once. It’s a tough age for leadership. With most girls that age, they want to be liked first, and they have a tendency to travel in twos. Three is an impossible number. Jealousy is rampant and a pair will exclude a third person all the time. So it can be hard to get someone to step up and lead a group. Perhaps if you pulled one of them aside and said, “You know, these girls look to see what you are doing and they follow. To best help the team, we need you to set a great example …”
Just a thought
December 4th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
That’s exactly what we did where I talked about backdoor maneuvering. We tried to get those two to see that the girls looked up to them and if they set the example, even if they weren’t the ‘captains for the week’ it would help the team. And for the most part they did.
December 18th, 2007 at 10:21 am
I have a daughter playing U13 now for a pretty competitive team. At the U11 age the coach (very experienced with older girl teams) named two of the better players captains and it proved to be a complete failure. All of the kids are more or less dominate personality types or they would not be on the team. None of the kids at that age were willing to listen to advice/direction from a teammate. At the end of the year the coaches dropped it, and I think they would have done it sooner except that they did not want to make the girls who they named captains feel bad.
Personally I don’t mind the captain for a week approach to do things like lead stretches and a set warm up routine as well as handle the pre-game coin flip, but if you are looking for an 11 or 12 year old to be a team leader in my limited experience you are asking for trouble at that age.
I will say that now at U13 the coaches are trying to get my daughter and another teammate to step up and be a “captain-like” leader. Their encouragement has worked to make my kid more vocal on the field and in practice, but she is still reluctant to take on more than that for fear of having the other kids get upset with her.
To me, the biggest leadership role that a kid in that age range can fill is to lead by example in working hard in practice.
December 22nd, 2007 at 8:38 am
That’s pretty much why we’re doing the captain for a week – to give them all that experience. We’re hoping if a couple do rise above and decide they want to lead, they’ll be more background leaders during practice and during matches. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.