More venues? More games? What happened to developement. Here's a good article from a pretty well respected coach in US Soccer that was put out just a few months ago. From reading this article is your club developing your child into a good soccer player, or are they just looking at dollar signs. Read this and determine if this sounds like your club.
Originally Posted by Unregistered
World Cup Champion coach Tony DiCicco rips U.S. soccer development
October 21st, 2010 6:25 pm ET
By L.E. Eisenmenger, U.S. Soccer Examiner
In part..............
LE: So, what's holding back soccer development in the United States?
DiCicco: Youth soccer is big business. For them it’s about winning the next match and if you win, more of the better players come to my club and I make more money. The coaches should be mandating, absolutely mandating, that their players come and watch the professional game. Not just because it’s supporting professional soccer, but because their players will learn from watching this level. They will learn more from doing an hour and a half training session if they come and watch a game.
I coached the U-20 men back in 93, I was the assistant coach and we were preparing for a World Championship in Australia. We were in England. We were a good team, the U-20 Men’s National team, all the best 18, 19, and 20 year-olds in America. We went to see Manchester United play Queens Park Rangers in London and it was a great game. Tremendous intensity, speed of play, tackling, runs off the ball. The next day in training, the players were better players just from watching that game. That’s what we’re missing in this country.
On the girls’ side our players are not smart players, they lack sophistication, they’re not technical enough. If I get a stud athlete and I get her to out-run everybody and I put the ball over the top 15 times, she might score two or three goals and we win the game. But eventually that stud athlete comes up against a stud defender and it doesn’t work anymore and she doesn’t know how else to play because she’s never been coached properly. We have a lot of that. I don’t blame the players, I don’t blame the parents, I blame programs and I blame the coaches.
I know the U.S. game, I coached the U-20s in 2008. There’s no other player in America who can hold the ball like Kelly Smith. How can this be? But if you don’t come and see how Marta or Kelly Smith or Bompastor or Abby Wambach plays, how are you going to get better? Is our average player getting better? Yes, our average player is getting better, but where’s the next Mia Hamm? Where’s the next Kristine Lilly, the next Michelle Akers? They’re not there.
The reason they’re not there is because our system is not developing players. In the women’s game, we have the most players playing in the world at youth levels, but last year nine of the top ten strikers in WPS were international players. This year it’s better, Wambach and Arod are up there, but everyone else at the top are international players. Why is that?
LE : How do you turn the pyramid around?
DiCicco: Our players are not getting the foundations of the game. Our players are not technical. Right now in the U-17 World Cup, the semifinalists are South Korea, North Korea, Japan, and Spain. Three Indonesian teams - they’re all about technique. Their coaches emphasize it. Our coaches at U-10 emphasize winning. You can win games and sacrifice player development and that’s what’s happening in our system. Why is that happening? Like I said, youth soccer is big business. If I don’t win, it doesn’t matter if I’m developing players, my business is going to hell. If I win, I attract other good players and by doing that I win more games.There are some very good programs out there, some coaches that are doing a really good job. But for the most part we have almost a generation of young kids that have not been developed properly.
My U-20 team, I had to cut Casey Nogueira. Casey is so talented, but she had never been cut from anything. She had a free pass from one age group National Team to the next age group National Team to the next. When I cut her, it was the best thing that ever happened to her. That year she played lights out, led the team, scored around 24 goals because she was finally told it wasn’t good enough.
Our players are not coached enough. What scares me is our U-20s this past July at the U-20 World Cup. They lost in the quarterfinals and came in somewhere between 5th-8th. That’s the lowest finish of any U.S. team ever in a World Cup. Our U-17s didn’t get out of CONCACAF. We’re losing ground now and it’s really serious.
I don’t know of any federation that’s spending more money on their women’s program than the United States. Maybe Germany, maybe a couple others, but the U.S. is certainly in the top three as far as funding for their youth-and-full Women's National Team programs.
Overseas, kids grow up in a soccer culture. The German player sees the game eons above the American player the same age. When I was coaching U-20 women, I turned to my assistant coach and said, “Why is it that we’re playing the same age group, but we’re like, playing up? Because these players see the game so much better than we do. The U.S. has won because they’ve had adequate technique, had some pretty sophisticated players, but we’ve been dominant athletically and with mentality. And now I hear that mentality is not so good. If we lose mentality, we will not be winning too many World Cups in the future. We’ve got to work to get our game back. Pia Sundhage has an excellent team and she’s going to make a run at the World Cup Championship, but our U-17s didn’t even get into a World Cup, our U-20’s were locked out of the quarterfinals.
The 1970 Brazilian National Team won the World Cup in Mexico, but the next time Brazil won a World Cup was 1994 – 24 years later. It happens in our League. The last time we won a World Cup was my team in 1999. It’s going to be 11-12 years from now before we have a chance to win another one. We won some Olympics and that’s really important to American teams, but to the rest of the world the World Cup is the World Cup. That’s the real test, that’s where you have 16-24 teams competing. In the Olympics you’ve got 10-12 teams now.
