Revolution Stadium Groundbreaking "12-24 months" Part XIII

Since you described other sports besides soccer, it says to me youth fields were poorly maintained in the 70s and 80s where you grew up. Though I can recall in high school in the late 90s playing away somewhere on a field that had lots of rocks in the goal itself and inside the 6. One of our guys scored on a shot that hit said rocks, took a weird hop, and wrongfooted their keeper. Felt bad for the keepers!

@rkupp talked about his observations of UK fields but didn't say anything about producing Peles and Messi's.

I think the main benefit of playing on an unforgiving surface is the ability to maintain possession and not go down as easily. If players stayed on their feet more consistenly and learned to keep possession, it would benefit the game at large.

 

I honestly don't understand your talking about unforgiving surfaces helping you maintain your balance. Are you saying that kids are just falling down and giving up possession when on softer surfaces because it hurts less or something? From a physical standpoint, it's easier to balance when you're on a harder surface than on a softer one.

And my mentioning Pele, etc, was obviously a bit of hyperbole, because the US hardly produced any decent players in that time, never mind all time greats. This talk of 'if we had kids play on less ideal surfaces we'd make better players' is silliness to the extreme. The problem with player development now has nothing to do with the academy kids playing on surfaces that are too nice. This couldn't have any less to do with the problems with US player development, and it has about as much relevance as saying the kids would be better if they didn't have such nice uniforms to wear, because kids growing up in other countries don't wear such nice outfits when they play.

I can't believe I have to spell this out, but the fact that some great players grew up playing in less than ideal surfaces speaks to the desire those kids had to play the game, the surface was not some "cause" of greatness. A burning desire to be great is an essential ingredient in all top athletes, so that the players as kids wanted to play and improve so badly even though the conditions weren't so good is what helped make them good players, not the conditions themselves. We're not going to be able to create better players by trying to synthetically create one small part of the conditions some great players grew up with. We always here about great Brazilian players growing up with nothing in favelas with nothing other than soccer, so I guess we should have our academy kids, and their families, start living in poverty when they join the team as well.

There is one thing I'm sure would happen if we had kids play on hard surfaces more often, there would be a higher incidence of injury, and ironically, considering what we're shooting for, it could make the kids have less desire to play the sport or play for the team.

 

You missed my point completely but I agree with you about desire. Dempsey played on less than ideal surfaces but he got good because he not only was born with talent but also practiced all the time and challenged himself against older competition. It's not a causal relationship between poor surfaces and great players, I was making a larger point.

 

Sorry, I guess missed where you talked about that stuff and what your larger point is, but I've twice seen you say that playing on hard surfaces would help players maintain possession and balance, and as I said, I don't understand where that idea comes from.

 

I don't know if this is his point or not but I have read many articles that claim that futsal has a big affect on how Brazilians develop.

I don't know how much of that is true but it is interesting to consider.

When I toured Italy, the country was littered with flat dirt fields in which no grass was around.

But I also think playing on a flat dirt surface or a futsal surface is better than playing on a crappy grass field in terms of learning touch and ball control.

 

It makes you wonder about priorities 2-10 if the top priority sees so little progress

 

I would agree that playing small sided games where players get more touches, with a smaller ball that makes it a little more difficult to control (though futsal balls are made to be less bouncy) is an excellent way to help players develop skills. As is having a culture that creates kids who love the game so much, they want to play on their own in whatever space they can find, be they dirt lots, roads, or crappy grass fields, and just play and have fun with the ball, and fun with the game.

What is not a good way to develop skills is to try to do some sort of pseudo-scientific look at other countries, and pick out some style or condition, and decide we need to copy this one thing, and then coach it into our players, constantly coaching them, and then coaching them some more, until we can't coach them any further about how they have to do this one thing the "right" way. I'm not saying this was your point in any way, or as a rebuttal of your comment, just a general point about how we love to over-coach in the US in general, and in soccer also over emphasize discrete aspects of other successful nations without necessarily taking the whole picture into account.

 

In my mind, this is the key differentiator -- coaching, tactics, field type, are all waaaay secondary to passion for the game. The typical American kid has so many sports choices (I think I played 8 or 10 different organized sports growing up, 4 different ones at the High School level) that their sports passion is often diluted. Also, since most American kids grow up without pickup sports being part of their life today, their primary soccer experience is organized youth soccer which is such a cornucopia of coaching quality and styles. To keep the passion for the game, the ability to unleash your inner creative player has to find an outlet. For a few (Clint Dempsey, for example) they find a way.

 

I thought it was worthy of discussion, but sarcasm seems to be his default response.

I think playing on rough surface doesn't allow players to rely on things like slide tackles and throwing one's body about rambunctiously. Those are brute force tactics that can be effective, but don't lead towards developing lasting skills like positioning, balance, timing, etc. When I played in college, we "americans" were always going to ground to tackle, and the brits, after sidestepping the tackle, would tell us "don't sell yourself". They were right.

Playing on hard, rough surfaces forces you to learn to stay on your feet, rather than go home scraped, bruised and bleeding every night.

It's too tempting and too easy to slide into someone's path to block their progress and on a good grass surface you can come in full speed, go down and slide a long way. That may be effective, but it's not really the best way to tackle or defend.

The other thing is that hard, uneven, inconsistent surfaces force players to develop very high-level concentration and quick reactions to deal with the uneven bounces. US born players, in general, are at a deficit to players from almost every other country in this category - in close in play, where quick reflexes are necessary, we are just a lot slower reacting. This has nothing to do with desire or passion. You can see it in pickup games where everyone is just playing for fun.

Well, I disagree. But the problem is more about before the academies. What happens before age 8-10 is more important in developing those inate ball skills and quick reactions.

Well, I don't say that its the cause, but I do think its an essential ingredient. Yes, not every great player grew up playing on dirt, but its pretty hard to ignore, IMO, the incredible ball skills of those who did. And that's a factor that we are among the weakest at.

In just about every skill, if you practice it over and over under difficult conditions and then move to better conditions, you are likely to be better than if you had trained the same way the whole time. Training all the time of good surfaces is never going to make that field an easier surface to play on then what you learned on.

I'm sure that's a factor also, but another one is also the takeover by "organized sports" of youth play. The ultra-competitive, Darwinian environment of kids' play, away from the influence of adults, makes the skills learned more creative, individualistic and less-predicable, rather than more conservative, uniform and unimaginative when adults "organize" and "teach".

I'm not suggesting that we create a Brazil in America. All I'm suggesting is that it is a good thing to train and practice on a field that is more challenging than the one you will compete on in games. So mediocre training facilities isn't necessarily a handicap to an academy if they do other things well.

Maybe you grew up in a different time/place than I did. We played every sport on crappy overgrown fields or cracked broken pavement and adjusted the rules/style to wherever we played. We didn't keep running into the tree that was 3rd base and we adjusted our layup approach so we didn't end impaled on the basketball post. It never made it less fun or made us afraid to get hurt.

That's the same idea - it's a surface that, not only demands that you develop superior control and concentration, but also that you can stay in the play by staying on your feet.

Actually kids today are getting very specialized, often picking a sport to concentrate on well before high school. The kids who play different sports every season these days, are generally those who aren't on the main track in any one particular sport (except for some, like football, track or lacrosse and some others, where h.s. IS the main track). Basketball, hockey, soccer, baseball are all sports where the best future prospects are all in club programs (and the talented kid who can't afford them or are otherwise overlooked, get left behind).

I actually think the crime of organized soccer isn't the cornucopia that you mention (although that can be a problem in some situations), but the overwhelming uniformity and tunnel-think that trains kids to all think and play the same way. The perfect example was when the "step-over" came to america. Before long, every kid was doing the same move and every defender was facing the same move. Who would ever be fooled by that?

I remember watching (Brazillian) Ronaldo, before he got physically ruined, and he would take players on 10x and never use the same move twice (and barely ever use a move someone else used!). Defenders were scared to death.

 

Getting wayyyyyy off topic.

 

Don Garber had a meeting in Sacramento today and was asked about Boston. Nothing new but at least on topic

"It would be really easy to put a soccer stadium in the parking lot of Patriots Place for the Revolution, but the Krafts know that it has to be in the urban core. And they know that they're not going to get much public support, they know that they're going to have to build in an expensive market, a $250 million stadium. It's got to work, and it's hard.

"I believe that you guys will still be reporting on soccer when there will be a groundbreaking for the Revolution, absolutely. But when that's going to come, I don't know."

 

Sorry, this just seems like another exercise in deciding on a conclusion and then trying to find factors that support it, or interpret factors to make it sounds like they support the conclusion, aka, confirmation bias.

I thought we were talking about developing more skillful players, right? I also thought the basic premise of the lesser fields was putting them in conditions that make things harder? This sounds like your saying this rougher surface will make things easier for the kids on the ball, because the defending will be easier to avoid? So the way to get academy kids to learn to play against more rough and tumble tactics is to make it so they don't have to deal with such tactics as much? Seems totally logical.

And if we're talking about developing defending skills, wouldn't playing on a less than ideal surface make it harder to control a ball, and therefore easier to defend?

OK, I do completely agree with that statement, and was even going to say that if we're talking about developing skills, by mid teens, when kids are joining the academy, is a bit late, as by that age, you're more refining skills you have, but that's not what I thought we were discussing. Are we talking about what would be good for the academy players, or changing to a slightly different argument, so that the desired conclusion fits better?

Except that, as I asked before, how come US players of my generation, growing up playing on far less than ideal fields, didn't seem to generate players with these skills you talk about, if playing on poor surfaces is, if not an essential part, plays some big role in it?

Oh wait, I guess it is an essential ingredient, except for the players where it wasn't an ingredient. What's the definition of essential again?

Do you understand the difference be causation, correlation, and coincidence? You understand just because B happened after A doesn't mean A caused B, right? Was playing on dirt really what caused these players to become great, was it corollary, or just coincident? Does the fact that some great players played on dirt due to other shared factors that might have led to these players becoming great. Were other factors more important, such that the great player could have been great even if he just so happened to have a nice grass field to grow up on, or was it all down to that essential dirt patch? Could the fact that a lot of great players played on less than idea surfaces while growing up be the case purely because there are a lot more, waaaayyyyy more, not so ideal places to play than there are finely manicured places to play, such that simple math would dictate that more people would be playing on these not so great fields when young, and therefore by adulthood, more players would have that in their background?

That sounds nice, but I'd say that what's far and away more import is the desire, the drive, to practice or try something again and again and again, the surface is at best secondary.

Hmmm, well you're view of the evils of organized sports seems to be at odds with general sentiment. I thought that one of the big problems that comes in with parents organizing everything is that the parents become too competitive, way more than the kids want, and take the fun out of the game. Winning becomes more important than developing skills that one might develop if there wasn't such an emphasis on playing safe, minimizing risks, playing to win. I'd thought the whole ultra-competitive, Darwinian environment, meticulously keeping score so you know who won, was more of a parental construct, and that kids, if left on their own with no pressure put on them about what could happen if they fail, where all they're playing for is being able to say to each other who won, then they will be more willing to try fun little things, fun ways to beat each other with the ball that they can brag about or whatever. The true cut throat thing comes in with tryouts, select teams, super-duper select teams, and paying through the nose so that the 10 year old kids can get on the right track to earn a scholarship, such that results now take on some greater meaning that no kid wants to think about, never mind being told to worry about, and those situations generally (though not always) don't benefit kids in developing skills, never mind flair.

Except that in futsal, they specifically design a ball for that particular surface, one that is easier to use on that surface. It's also a nice, smooth, even surface, so it's easier to move the ball quickly, compared to manipulating a ball on grass. But let's not let those inconsequential points get in the way of saying it's the surface in that game that makes the players better.

Sorry, but surface is always going be secondary to other factors. If a kid has the desire to work on his game, to play all the time, the surface he grows up on won't affect how great he can be. And if you have a kid who doesn't have that desire, putting him in some synthesized environment won't make him great either. If you want players to create/improve/refine skills, then you want them getting as many touches as possible, in an environment that encourages them to try things, and no matter the surface, the more touches they can get, the more things they try, the better off they'll be.

 

I think this is the problem. When I was getting my "D" coaching license, I remember the instructor asking something about drills for controlling the ball (or something along that line, too many years ago!) I said that I liked soccer tennis. You get 2 touches, one to control and one to play it back over the net. I was told that that wasn't a good way to work on touches. There were better drills. A couple of years ago I was watching some show on soccer that went to Barcelona's training facility and there was Messi, Neymar, and others playing soccer tennis. I thought; that was not a good way to work on touch.

I've felt this way for a lot of years; the US is the most aggressive country on the planet. We attack in everything we do. We are not Dean Smith's four corner offense, we are Jerry Tarkanian's Running Rebels. When someone comes along and puts together a soccer team/philosophy that matches our natural instinct, then you will see us compete and potentially dominate on the world stage.

 

Klopp for USMNT

 

Repped for the Tark the Shark reference -- spot on. I suspect that we went through licensing at about the same time. About 1/2 the drills I loved (mostly small-sided games) were frowned upon by the instructors. I still went ahead and used them anyway -- what's better to keep passion for the game than something that's fun and competitive? I'm pretty sure that my kids learned the skills they needed AND that a higher percentage of them moved on to the next level than the norm.

 

At this point, I'd be willing to place bets on the Krafts taking a portion of that $250 million and trying to figure out a way to make soccer work at Gillette Stadium.

 

For argument's sake... if the Krafts announced tomorrow that they were abandoning their pursuit of a SSS and were instead adding a roof to Gillette, installing a grass field, improving public transportation to soccer games, and making other "soccer" enhancements... how upset would you be?

Because I can see something like that happening easier than I can see a downtown stadium at this point. Let's say they decide to do something with Gillette similar to what the Dolphins are doing with Sun Life Stadium...

 

When this thread gets to "Part L", are we going to call it "50", like the NFL did with the Superbowl?

 

Part L? You know what the "L" stands for, right?

 

Because the sport was so undeveloped, there were many other issues. And, I don't know when exactly you are referring to, but the US had been a primarily multi-sport culture for athletes until recent years.

Yes, but I'm not citing anything as proof, just giving my theory.

There are certainly different types of "cutthroat" situations, but I'd say the one where if you don't play well enough, you stop getting included in the game (or never see the ball if you do) is more motivating.

Okay, we disagree. And we've already been scolded for being off-topic. I'm willing to leave it at that.

 

From the article:

Walsh and Kraft continue to discuss a stadium, Koh said, but “nothing substantive has come out of it so far.”

“I think the mayor has expressed he wants to see the Revolution have a home in Boston and I think the Krafts also really want that to happen,” he said. “It’s just a matter of where it would potentially be sited and the financing of the stadium. Those are the things that haven’t really been talked about in depth yet.”

More recent open records requests by Boston.com did not indicate the stadium talks have advanced since last summer.

In other words...still nothing to see here...500...close away.