Hi everyone, I've visited this forum many times over the past few years, have found a lot of useful information, this is my first time posting. I've been a coach for many years, currently coaching teams at a high level. I'm most experienced at the U14+ age groups. Recently, I've started working for a club, the position has me venturing into new territory, most of our kids are in the U8, U10 and U12 age groups. The coaches of our teams are also involved in hockey, this is a given where our club is in Canada.. While trying to get them to buy in to having the proper playing to training ratios, no scores U12 and below, CSA preferred training model,etc. some of the coaches come back to me saying they don't agree with a lot of it as it's different than how hockey does things and of course hockey players are much more successful than soccer players in Canada. I tell the coaches that while I can't speak to how hockey players develop, this is how our national body believes we can best develop our soccer players. Hockey here is much more result oriented at the U8-U12 ages compared to soccer. I'd like to have some kinds of study or article to give to our coaches that speaks on how soccer players develop differently in comparison to hockey or other sports. Could anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks!
I was born in Port Huron, MI, so I understand. I didn't play hockey until I was about 12, but I had friends who started skating almost before they started walking. Most of my hockey playing friends started playing at 2. Everything I trust points to the similarity between youth sports at the earliest ages of athletic development. Wayne Gretsky's story greatly influences my thinking. His father trained him on fundamentals (with some neighbor kids) on a small backyard pond until he was six. His father had the knowledge and spent the time. (His father had wanted to play professionally, but was considered too small.) Then Wayne played his first organized hockey with much older kids. He only scored 1 goal the first year but by the time he was eight he was totally dominating the play. He was so dominant in youth hockey that some people booed when he took the ice and teammate's parents complained, wanting him benched and told not to shoot (so that their kids could get more time on the puck). Canadian hockey is the classic illustration of the coaches tendency to pick the oldest kids available, i.e., birth month discrimination. (Fortunately for the sport, Gretsky was born in January, not December.) Bottom line is what is bad for youth soccer is also bad for youth hockey. I would suggest this. Look for birth month discrimination at your club. I would guess by U10 the club has tryouts and segregates into A and B teams as well as house leagues, if they have enough numbers where you are at. Look at the A team's birth month distribution. Most of the stuff I initially read about Long Term Athlete Development was by Canadian organizations writing about youth hockey. Look particularly at slides 10-12. http://www.hockeycanada.ca/en-ca/Hockey-Programs/Coaching/LTPD Maybe this slide show or one like it will help you make the point.
Thanks for that! I guess the difference I see in development stages is that hockey has tournaments at the learn to train stage while canada soccer promotes not keeping scores, having festivals instead of tournaments. I'm struggling to explain why they do it in hockey but not in soccer.