gsterp
Well-known member
Coaching in this country still sucks for the most part, too.
Too many coaches and too many parents worry about Ws and Ls when kids are just learning the game instead of teaching them technique, positioning, tactics, patience, etc etc.
It's just this bullshit "put the fastest kid at striker and kick it long so he can beat everyone to the ball and score, yay!" mentality. It is enraging. My nephew's club (he is 10) has the players rotate around every position and try to pass the ball around. They win about half the time, but on talent alone they should win more. Why don't they? Because they are focused on improving as players and not just doing 1 on 1 bullshit that only teaches them the wrong things as players like the other clubs do. It also hurts their chances to win when they put a natural defender up top or vice versa, but at least the kid is learning to play outside his comfort zone. Then parents bitch to the coaches because the team isn't winning enough! They are 10 fucking years old, who cares!??!
They don't even keep score for youth games in Brazil until the kids are at least teenagers, because the focus isn't winning and losing then. It's developing. We need more of that here in the US.
This x 10000000000. The fact that there are State Cups and other tournaments for even 9 and 10 year olds is ridiculous. Let the kids play and learn how to evade pressure, and step in to show how to improve that when they need that pointer.
Unfortunately our culture isn't going to allow that to happen anytime soon. Maybe once this current generation of younger players retires we might be able to have a deeper coaching pool, but it's probably going to even lag behind the actual quality of players for a while.