SC Soccer Forums SCSoccer.com Forums Club Soccer & ODP Revolution in the Bleachers

g&b, you are talking about the most elite teams....major D1, professional and national. That pool is so thin. There are other opportunities out there (most D1, D2 and minor league soccer) where the better athlete can prevail.

futbol, you are citing the absolute greatest at the highest level....the extreme exceptions, not the norm.

I agree with both of you...at the highest level you certainly need to be highly-skilled and technically perfect. You also need to be pretty darn fast....speed of play is incredible.

But at the levels below that (all the way up to the Patriot League in college D1 soccer)....apparently size & athleticism helps your cause.

As I suspected—I think we are all agreeing—

The hard part is, of course, player development—what to encourage in young players—

As is usually the case I was looking for something else and ran into this .... a little dated maybe but interesting read.

********************************

C.W. Nevius, a sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote a five-part series on the subject for his newspaper in 2000.

Click on each story in sequence

Child's Play No More

Serious Business Goes Into Kid's League

High Hopes Usually Lead To Hard Fall

How One Flub Spelled The End Of One Boy's Joy

There Are Big Problems and Ready Solutions

I just can't help but wonder. It certainly wasn't the case 20 years ago that kids committed to one sport and one sport only, year around, at such an early age. Great football players, frequently played baseball or basketball in the off season and vice versa. We see great athletes who excelled in more than one sport. In tennis for instance, Tommy Haas and Eunis Al Anawi were both soccer players who ultimately had to decide on tennis, Leighton Hewitt was an aussie rules football player. This early specialization is pretyy recent. There is no question that there is a short term setback as a result of taking a season, or seasons, off to play other sports. I really dont' know if the setback is permanent though. In other words, can a player make it back over time? We really don't know, because most of the "elite" players (and who decides that a 12 year old is elite?) are specialized and playing year around now. I don't know that we'd necessarily be worse off if everyone took a deep breath and declared soccer to be a fall sport, leaving the spring open for other pursuits. Then again, that's got about as much chance of happening as "elite" players not being required to spend "elite" amounts of money to train and play at rarified levels.

LeGrazie—

This is not a recent phenomenon—late 60s and into the 70s I was a serious junior golfer. EVERY golf instructor and club pro around said to play golf year-round and only golf.

Is it more widespread, the early focus? Yes. And it probably seems new because soccer is a young sport in this are. But specialization is a key to being elite—what I think is also true is that for a few, specialization early is not the ONLY way to get where a player wants to be—but it is the most likely route.

>>[Hurst66] The author talks about standing up to the club coach or DOC and saying "Enough....we're not doing all of those tournaments!" Easier said than done. I haven't seen too many highly-competitive teams who have managed to say "no". Nobody wants to put their own kid in a bad spot. As she states in one of her chapters.....the coach has all the power (even though the parents shell out the dollars).<<

The problem isn't as simple as "the coach wants one thing and the parents want another." My kid has switched clubs once, and only once, in her life. The reason she decided to do it at a relatively young age was that the team she was on wanted very different things than she wanted -- and that showed up in everything from practice to tournaments.

I guess I could have whined a lot about the other parents not supporting what my daughter (and her coach) wanted; but at the time when she asked to go to a club 100 miles away I thought my job as a parent was to either (a) say "yes" and support her or (b) say "no" and tell her other alternatives. I just didn't think about (c) writing a book and whining about how the other parents wouldn't do what I wanted them to do.

It's hard for me to have a lot of sympathy to the author's position...most of me wants to simply tell her to quit whining about it and make a decision. If your kids are ambitious and want to test their limits, then make a decision as to whether you're going to support them and at what level and then shut up and do it. If your kid isn't ambitious, or you don't want to support your kid, then simply tell the kid "no." If you're the parent, then step up and act like one.