Re: Arrrgggghhh! Parents! Sorry someone replied to the old thread and I started reading it from the beginning without looking at the dates. Two scores directly from kickoffs in one game struck me as very unusual hence the reply. I thought you meant directly as in the player who kicked off scored (I have seen this happen only once). Of course a little thinking would have suggested you probably only kicked off once in the game, but I was too slow to realize that earlier.
You learn more from losses than you do from winning. If a coach can't teach from a loss, then the coach needs to reevaluate his own skills. The more that you lose, the closer you become to being a winner. No one is born knowing everything, we need to make mistakes to get better. If we don't teach these concepts to our children then we are telling them that unless you are born knowing, you will not achieve anything.
Well said. This should be put on a card, laminated, and distributed to every single person in the world.
Thanks for the replies. A lot of good advice (adding players, or removing players, one touch, shoot with weaker foot etc.) here. Thanks!
In the first half of one game last year we were already up 4-0 and I decided to be flip the formation...my goalie ended up scoring the first 4 goals of her soccer career before we hit halftime. Last fall it was the same story all season, spending all my time trying to figure out how to keep the scores down without making the other team feel horrible. No such issues this season.
Yes, younger teams find touch restrictions very hard to deal with. That's why they're effective. When you are winning 10 - 0, or could be winning 10 - 0, playing subs or playing players out of position often is not an effective means of holding down the score, because your subs and new-found forwards want in on the goal-fest. Not dribbling much in the 2nd half of a blow-out won't hold back anyone's development. Touch restrictions are usually not that obvious, particularly two-touch or three-touch. Once in a while a player will have used up their touch allocation without getting rid of the ball, and then its slightly obvious because they stop playing. But what it will look like to most observers is that suddenly and mysteriously the superior team lost the ability to move the ball effectively. I've even had coaches come up to me and say how proud they were of their team because they did so much better after the score got to 5 - 0.
I didn't say that remark about touch restrictions in general, but about a suggestion to use a "one-touch" restriction for young kids during a match. The only thing such a restriction would accomplish in that context would be to frustrate and confuse your own team. You are free to disagree but don't imply that I said something last year that I did not.