Evolution of US Soccer Coaching Focus

Discussion in 'Coach' started by Monkey Boy, Nov 2, 2013.

  1. Monkey Boy

    Monkey Boy Member

    Jul 21, 2006
    Madison, WI
    Club:
    FC Bayern München
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Game time is not for coaching concepts, it's for putting what putting what you train into practice. Adding more games will reduce the time you have to teach everything, including tactical understanding.

    One of the biggest problems good coaches have is not enough practice time to teach and get in the necessary repetitions for learning all the various skills, etc. Reducing practice time will only make development worse and I have no clue where you can come up with such a conclusion from my OP.
     
    Twenty26Six repped this.
  2. Monkey Boy

    Monkey Boy Member

    Jul 21, 2006
    Madison, WI
    Club:
    FC Bayern München
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    You are correct that rca2 strongly believes in the model of academy style training with semi-organized games with ad-hoc teams on play day.

    One big advantage with this approach is the the training. In this model you have all of the kids training with experienced coaches with a set curriculum - thus dramatically improving the quality of coaching for all of the kids, which is where they get their best development. Another advantage is that you can easily move/assign those young kids who are advancing faster into games with players at a similar soccer/development age - rather than based on the player's calendar age or school grade.

    These advantages are huge when you focus in on the best development for every player. The quality of the current model, whether it be starting travel/competitive teams at young ages or parent-coached young teams, is highly dependent on the quality of the assigned or volunteer coach. The quality of the academy/play day model is dependent on the quality of the club and associated coaches/trainers.
     
  3. dcole

    dcole Member+

    May 27, 2005
    #28 dcole, Nov 6, 2013
    Last edited: Nov 6, 2013
    That sounds OK for U5-U8 though, as you suggest, any system is highly dependent upon the quality of the coaching. An academy-style system with bad coaching isn't going to be any better than a team-based system with bad coaching. So, to me, the key is the quality of the coaching rather than the format. One advantage of the academy style is that it is possible to have one or two good coaches who know what they are doing run the whole thing and ensure that all the minion coaches are doing things the right way. Whereas far-flung teams are more difficult to manage.

    @rca2 goes way further though and suggests this kind of system also should apply to U9-U13 players. How do you feel about that?
     
  4. Twenty26Six

    Twenty26Six Feeling Sheepish...

    Jan 2, 2004
    Club:
    Liverpool FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I think it's an important to define what "competitive" means here.
     
  5. dcole

    dcole Member+

    May 27, 2005
    I think we've rooted out the meaning, but @rca2 can correct us if we are wrong. We think he means academy-style with no formal teams until U14. I assume he's fine with regular league play, tounaments, referees, etc. once the kids hit age 13.
     
  6. Monkey Boy

    Monkey Boy Member

    Jul 21, 2006
    Madison, WI
    Club:
    FC Bayern München
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I have no experience with it unfortunately. I do think it would be superior to the current situation we're in with parent-volunteers. I happen to also be a parent volunteer coach, but the quality varies dramatically from team to team. There are few teams where the parent has experience beyond being a youth rec player up to maybe age 12 or so. The experienced ones tend to be those who played into HS.

    In our in-house club league, there are a lot of kids who leave the sport by the U9-U10 level due to poor coaching. On most teams, the kids don't advance much from one year to the next which creates a bigger gap over time compared to teams with more experienced coaches. I have no doubt that up to at least the U10 level, the academy system would be a better development model.

    IMHO, I think that when a kid gets to be about 10-11 it's a good time to provide the competitive option. At this age, the better kids are really pushing to play competitive games and it's best to keep them motivated. When it comes to any education or development, motivation typically is the defining factor for how far an individual can go.
     
  7. Twenty26Six

    Twenty26Six Feeling Sheepish...

    Jan 2, 2004
    Club:
    Liverpool FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    What exactly is "academy-style" supposed to mean as well? Because academy seems to be a catch-all term for a lot of things nowadays.
     
  8. Monkey Boy

    Monkey Boy Member

    Jul 21, 2006
    Madison, WI
    Club:
    FC Bayern München
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I defined academy coaching already. For the purposes of this discussion, it's a mass training with no defined teams organized by experienced coaches. The players are split up into groups and train in those small groups on the activities for the day, with maybe coming together in several small scrimmages at the end of practice. The play-day model with this approach has kids rotating to different teams and playing with/against players of similar ability.
     
  9. NoVA Mikey

    NoVA Mikey New Member

    Oct 25, 2013
    I do agree that 2 hours a week is not enough time to teach what I need to for my U9s to learn mastery of the ball, and taking away from that with more matches (where nearly half of the team on the sidelines) offers limited benefits for basic skill development. Our Rec league is not yet "competative" in that we don't keep an official score, or post results. I do like to coordinate with another coach in our rec league to schdule a practice scrimmage where we can offer real-time soccer situations, and stop play, break down what is going on, and correct decisions. We usually don't schedule these scrimmages until late in the season, and then I still use half of the practice for skill deveopment. Next season I think I will combine my team with another and run a street-soccer style practice with many 15 minute 4v4 pick up games. And have the coaches and assistants evaluate player skill levels so that we are matching player levels with coaching level.
     
  10. dcole

    dcole Member+

    May 27, 2005
    #35 dcole, Nov 6, 2013
    Last edited: Nov 6, 2013
    I'll offer a test case, which is my own mid-sized US city (population 250,000). We have two options. The first is your traditional rec/advanced/travel team model run by our local rec/advanced/travel clubs, which recently merged with each other to create a single entity. This is the model you likely are familiar with. It offers rec level soccer from U5-U18 (volunteer coached), advanced soccer from U9-U18 (volunteer coached) and travel soccer from U10-U18 (with paid coaches).

    The other option is a completely unaffiliated, academy-style model run by our local D1 college, which is a perenial top 25 program. They start at U3 and go through U10. They have two training nights per week where the kids are put through stations run by players on the D1 team and overseen by the D1 coach, who is Scottish and holds the highest coaching licences available. They also have a "play day" on Saturdays where the kids are randomly grouped into "teams" for scrimmages. This program has been in place for about 10 years. It costs about 2.5 times what the other system costs.

    Here's how the academy style program tends to go: They get probably 100 kids at U3, 100 kids at U4, 100 kids at U5 and then the number drops steadily until they get to U10, when they have maybe 6 kids left. I'd say of the 100 kids who start each year in U3, probably 75 quit playing before U8, another 5-10 quit playing during the U8 or U9 years, 15 bleed over to the rec/advanced/travel program before U10 and 5-6 make it all the way through the program. Of those 5-6 who make it all the way through probably half just quit soccer then and the other half go try out for travel teams, only to find that they are light years behind both technically and tactically. In the 10 years they have been doing this, they have produced exactly one player who plays high level soccer (a U15 boy who now plays on one of the top travel teams in a neighboring city). That's it...one. And, frankly, he's just a gifted athlete who is pretty much good at everything.

    So, why doesn't the academy model produce higher level players? I think there are a number of reasons:

    1) The training is surprisingly bad and lacks intensity. The stations sound OK in theory (they have some dribbling stations, some shooting stations, some passing stations, etc.), but they are run in a sloppy manner by 18-22 year old kids who do nothing to encourage the kids to try hard and provide little instruction. All of the training happens in a vacuum with no practical application. The kids have little-to-no idea why they are doing what they are doing or how it fits into the game of soccer.

    2) The "play days" are a total joke. The kids get no instruction at all because of this whole theory of not coaching during games, so of course they just kick the ball as hard as they can whenever they get it. There is almost no dribbling and lots of kids standing in front of pugg goals "being the goalie" and lots of 18-22 year old dudes sending text messages and tweets and updating their facebook pages.

    3) The program attracts parents who aren't into competition and take a pretty hands-off approach to their kids' athletic endeavors. I know these people, and they are fine people. What attracts them to the academy is that practice is in a centralized location where all their kids can practice at the same time and the same place. They pay no attention whatsoever to the practices or games, to the point where they really couldn't tell you what goes on there even after years in the program with multiple kids. They love that there are no "real games" because they hate the idea of traveling to a neighboring city to play a soccer game and they like that they can skip as many practices and games as they want with no one counting on them or caring at all. Then, they seem kind of surprised after doing it for a while when their kids say they want to quit, or they take them to tryouts for a travel team and find that their kids pretty much suck at soccer despite having played for like 4-5 years, but they don't really care because now their weekends are less complicated.

    So, no, I don't like the "academy-style system".
     
  11. mckersive

    mckersive Member+

    Mar 26, 2013
    New York City
    Club:
    Chelsea FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    This sounds like a money grab by the local college coach and poor training resulting in failure. It would be interesting to see if a competitor could do a better job wi†h the same talent pool.
     
    dcole repped this.
  12. dcole

    dcole Member+

    May 27, 2005
    Interestingly, our rec program recently rolled out what I think is a pretty good approach. For each of U5-U8, they offer one "academy" team that is coached by the rec club's staff and overseen directly by the DOC. This academy team competes against the volunteer coached teams in the house league. The first season they did this was last spring, and they got about 10 kids per age group. They then doubled that number this fall, plus they reached out to the better volunteer coaches at the rising U8 level and offered them the opportuity to convert their teams into academy teams that practice with their volunteer coach one night per week and with the academy an additional night.

    This actually has worked OK so far. The DOC is a good guy and a great technical coach, but had no experience coaching below U10 travel when he took the job, so no idea what a U5 rec player looked like. He and I hooked up early on and I taught him what I had learned through the school of hard knocks coaching U5-U8 kids, and he taught me a bunch about technical training. Using a combination of my methods and his own, he's done a really nice job with these new "academy" teams. He has "discovered" what @Monkey Boy and I (and I'm sure a lot of the rest of you) already know, which is that the U5 and U6 ages are critical. If close control dribbling is taught at this age, you vastly improve your chances of producing a quality player.

    I actually think this hybrid "academy" system will work because it offers the best of both worlds: solid coaching AND the opportuity to be on a "real" team and play in "real" matches. (If you consider it a "real" match for U5/U6 to play 3v3 on a 25x15 yard field with pugg goals and U7/U8 to play 4v4 on a 25x35 yard field with no keepers.) No scores are kept and there are no standings at u5-U8, by the way, as it should be.
     
  13. rca2

    rca2 Member+

    Nov 25, 2005
    A competitive match is a match whose result counts in a competition. In international play the competitive matches are clearly distinguished from the noncompetitive matches ("friendlies").

    U14 includes 12 and 13 year olds. The "train to compete" phase begins at age 15.

    Yes I favor the academy system for Zone 1 players. Organized teams and leagues are unnecessary to teach individual skills and small group tactics, which is the Zone 1 objective. Teaching fundamentals to Zone 1 players is our (USA) biggest problem in player development. But it is also a problem for a lot of other countries too. Older kids can learn tactics, but older kids cannot learn fundamental skills as easily as the Zone 1 age group. It is the golden opportunity for learning movement skills.
     
  14. dcole

    dcole Member+

    May 27, 2005
    It is. No doubt. But it is a legit academy style system. You're not going to do much better than real-live D1 players as academy-style coaches. If you brought in actual adults and paid them to run this training, your costs would be astronomical. The only way it works is to have one (or, max, two) highly paid people running the program and a bunch of minions following their orders and running stations. The D1 coach is legit. He's even from Europe! Trouble is, the minions are just that. You can tell them: "OK, Bobby, tonight you're going to run the Coerver station. Have them do 50 toe touches, 50 foundation dribbles, 25 Xs, 25 Ys, 25 Zs, etc." But then the D1 player stands there and tells the kids what to do in a dispassionate tone and the kids goof off and don't really listen and have no idea why they are doing what they are doing or how it relates to anything. And the D1 player doesn't care at all. Nor do the parents.
     
    mckersive repped this.
  15. rca2

    rca2 Member+

    Nov 25, 2005
    Remember we are talking "soccer age" not chronological age when we talk age levels.

    Wayne Gretzky and his friends were taught hockey fundamentals by his Dad in his back yard. He played his first organized hockey at age 6, playing "up" four years. With 10 year olds. And he dominated.

    Training doesn't have to be "either or" fundamentals vs. matches. But for practical purposes, it ends up that way. Matches reduce time for practicing fundamentals. More progress in the long run comes from early concentration on fundamentals.
     
  16. dcole

    dcole Member+

    May 27, 2005
    Interesting though that your example contradicts your theory of how it should be done, i.e., no competitive games till age 13.
     
  17. rca2

    rca2 Member+

    Nov 25, 2005
    Those are Coerver ball mastery movements, but that is not the Coerver method of coaching, which starts with ball mastery movements and uses combinations of movements and small group exercises for context. I think this may explain the player's confusion as to the relevance of the ball mastery exercises.
     
  18. Monkey Boy

    Monkey Boy Member

    Jul 21, 2006
    Madison, WI
    Club:
    FC Bayern München
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Good real life example of poor coaching in that format. There are also numerous examples of poor coaching in the parent coached, team organized format leading to many good players quitting or going no where by age 10 - we all see it on almost a weekly basis during the season.

    In our in house league at the 1st grade level we have 8 teams with an average of 12 players each = 96 players. We are one of 5 clubs on just the westside of Madison, WI with similar numbers, so about 500 kids in 1st grade. By 3rd grade, U9, the in-house leagues for these 5 clubs have to combine to make one 'in-house' league due to the drop-off in numbers for each club. Typically there are about 10 teams averaging 10 players each, for about 100 total between 5 clubs. By U11, there will be about 100 kids from the entire city (I was only giving westside numbers for the younger ages) that try-out for the premier club. Those that don't make it go to competitive teams from their local clubs.

    There is always going to be some drop-off, but the numbers here are huge. It's pretty consistent where most of the drop-off comes from though - the teams with the weakest coaches. In these situations, by 2nd grade the kids are not improving compared to their peers and they are getting clobbered every week. The volunteer coaches are confused and frustrated plus the kids are unmotivated. So many kids who had great potential just a year before quit.

    This is working better than your academy style example, but it's definitely far from ideal.
     
  19. dcole

    dcole Member+

    May 27, 2005
    I think your numbers are pretty typical for how the rec/advanced/travel model typically works and, yes, the key is the coaching. I think some see the Academy model as some kind of silver bullet, but it's every bit as dependent upon good coaching, which should not be taken as a given in ANY format.

    Another huge problem with the Academy model, that I did not explicitly point out above, is that the Academies tend to be run by guys with experience coaching older kids/men at a higher level (such as the college coach in my example). Many of these types don't understand how to coach U5-U8 players. They don't focus early enough on close-control driblling and they baby the players until they get to be about 9 years old, and then they try to teach them how to play the game at a high level without having laid the foundation of close-control dribbling skills. My only license is an F license, but I guarantee you that I am a better U5 coach than 90+% of the A licensed coaches in this country. Those guys tend to be looking to coach serious, older soccer players and that doesn't make them at all qualified to coach U5 players.

    The other thing with the Academy is that you are putting all your eggs in one basket. If the head of the program is bad, you get ZERO good kids coming out the other side. At least in the rec/advanced/travel model you are diversifying your risk of bad coaching.
     
  20. rca2

    rca2 Member+

    Nov 25, 2005
    I agree with your point that some professional coaches, and I think it is connected with the shortcut to A given to professional players, don't understand the "age-appproriate" concept. But on the other hand I don't consider coaching U5 soccer players as coaching soccer. I also don't believe that you are teaching soccer-specific skills to 4 year olds. I think many coaches would agree with me on that. But then I really don't know that "many coaches would agree with me" any more than you know that you are "a better U5 coach than 90+% of the A licensed coaches in this country."

    Tab Ramos and Claudio Renya are examples of retired professionals who could have jumped directly to coaching adults, but both started out coaching youth. I think it is perfectly acceptable to disagree with something they say, but I think it would be wrong to question their ability to coach youth without having actually seen them coach.
     
  21. dcole

    dcole Member+

    May 27, 2005
    You don't believe that I am teaching soccer-specific skills to 4 year olds? Well, you're simply wrong. I've coached my own four-year-old son for three seasons now. He can dribble with exceptional close control. He cuts the ball back and forth, weaving in and out of defenders. He can do a stepover move at full speed. (It's not perfect mind you, more of a "jumpover," but it's pretty darn good and highly effective.) Last time I checked, dribbling a soccer ball counted as a "soccer specific skill." And how come Wayne Gretzky can learn to play hockey so well by age 6 that he's able to "dominate" 10 year olds, but it's impossible to teach soccer-specific skills to four year olds?

    My point about my being a better U5 soccer coach than 90% of A licensed coaches is that A licensed coaches by-and-large do not coach and have never coached U5 players. And their advanced training really has very little bearing on what gets done at the U5 level. The point is the same as saying that a kindergarten school teacher is better at teaching 6 year olds than 90% of Harvard professors are at teaching 6 year olds. Harvard professors have never taught 6 year olds before, so of course they don't know how to do it. Could they learn? Sure. But their doctorate degree in History isn't going to help them very much. Just as an A licensed coach can learn to coach U5 players, but having a super-high soccer coaching license isn't going to help you much or make you particularly good at it, because the stuff you can teach them, while certainly qualifying as "soccer specific," is not complex enough to bring to bear the benefits of their A license. Just as a bazooka isn't nearly as good at killing flies as a flyswatter is.

    I've been doing it for over 5 years and I know how to do it extremely well. You can't just waltz in with an A license (and the attendant knowledge about how to run a 4-2-3-1) and think you're going to be good at coaching 4 year olds. It takes time and there is a learning curve. I can tell you for sure that the D1 college coach in my town STILL hasn't figured it out after 10 years of doing it. But then, I suspect he subscribes to they same school of thought as you that you shouldn't even bother trying to teach four year olds how to dribble a soccer ball. It's impossible! Until you actually do it and find that it's not only possible, it's pretty easy. (Assuming, again, that you know how. Which you do not.)
     
  22. dcole

    dcole Member+

    May 27, 2005
    I'll address this point separately. For starters...Really? Did I say I was a better youth soccer coach than two of USSF's head youth soccer coaches? I'm pretty sure I didn't. I'm pretty sure I said I was a better "U5" soccer coach than "90+%" of A licensed coaches, the vast preponderance of whom happen to coach at the U15 and above level and have never coached a four year old in their lives. But if you want to read that as "every single one, including the outgoing USSF Youth Soccer Technical Director," go right ahead.
     
  23. Monkey Boy

    Monkey Boy Member

    Jul 21, 2006
    Madison, WI
    Club:
    FC Bayern München
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    The ideal of the academy approach, at least as I understand it, should correct several problems. The problems with the volunteer coaching and multiple teams are:
    1) lots of coaching turn-over -- parent volunteers only for their kids. Even the best ones don't continue to coach the younger ages when their kids are done.
    2) large diversity in coaching quality and experience -- even parents with soccer experience typically do not have coaching experience, but if they do it's rarely experience coaching younger age groups
    3) In games, even non-competitive ones, the focus is on winning first -- this is the believed measurement for the coach -- this leads to lots of problems in coaching: joy-stick coaching, playing players in only certain positions (hiding 'weak' players), encouraging overly physical play, coaching aimless kick/run play, not allowing players to take risks, etc
    4) Grouping kids by physical age or grade level rather than soccer age, thus reducing the competitive challenge for stronger players and taking opportunities away from weaker players
    5) Many times creating situations of haves/have nots, even if unintentional - this can happen simply due to good coaching, but teams are normally formed by request and there is definitely recruiting to make some stronger than others from the start

    If done right, the academy approach and game day ad hoc teams should eliminate or drastically reduce these problems. You are correct though that if done incorrectly then it just won't work, but that could be said of any approach.

    From reading your posts, it's highly likely that your DOC along with you and some other coaches could do a much better job of running this type of set-up than the current program in your city. If you did, then wouldn't you have a much greater likelihood of improving the development for 100's of kids instead of only doing it for 10's?
     
  24. dcole

    dcole Member+

    May 27, 2005
    Not sure how scalable it is. The way I operate now is me with 10-14 kids, and that works just fine. But if you give me 100 kids, then I need help. Now, who's going to help me? You could go numerous directions with this. My DOC coaches a U14 girls team and he's using these girls as his minions for coaching the U5-U8 academy teams. (It works because the girls get some kind of community service credit at school for doing it.) The 13-year old girls are, of course, every bit as terrible at it as you would expect if you've ever had a 13 year old girl as a babysitter.

    With the DOC using 7-8 of these girls, he's reaching about 70 kids at a time. Even with this structure, the DOC is spread incredibly thin and the quality of coaching decreases dramatically as you add more players. And it's not like you can fix it by adding more and more 13 year old girl "coaches". You need more experienced coaches, and that gets expensive. Keep in mind, our DOC makes six figures. If you add more guys like him, you're pricing yourself out of the market. So the temptation is to add more minions, not more directors.

    At the moment, our academy-within-the-rec-program concept is brand new, and it's being subsidized by the volunteer coached teams. By this, I mean that the academy players pay the same amount as my players pay, but my kids are getting a volunteer and the academy players are getting a paid coach and his staff. But as more and more kids join the academy, there is less money to subsidize it with. Then what? Doesn't everybody hate the idea of "pay to play" soccer? Are we really looking to turn our entire recreational soccer program nationwide into a $300 per season deal?
     
  25. Monkey Boy

    Monkey Boy Member

    Jul 21, 2006
    Madison, WI
    Club:
    FC Bayern München
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    My assumption for this model has always been that you still need to recruit parent volunteers to help with running the practices and to act as coaches on play day. The parent volunteers would not have the same level of responsibility nor time commitment required by the individual team model. The DOC or committee develops the training activities to be run and provides instructions to the volunteers. They also provide the parent volunteer coaches instructions for running each game on game day, which would mostly be organization of the subbing rotation.

    My sister and brother-in-law ran an academy system like this for a small community some years ago. They used this model for training, but had set teams for game days. It was very cheap to run and provided very consistent coaching as all of the coaches were following the script. The downside is that it took a ton of effort on their part to organize and run, but that can be done by only a few people. Because they ran this program voluntarily themselves and were subsidized by US Youth Soccer, the cost was minimal for each kid involved.

    They ended up moving and the program went over to someone who changed the model to the common separate team/coach set-up. The quality of coaching dropped dramatically while the cost went up. The participation numbers also dropped to the point where it's basically now combined with a couple of other nearby communities so they have enough teams at each age level.
     

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