Sporting memories: Being a coach and finding that sweet spot between motivation and having fun

I was held in quite high regard for my football of the soccer variety abilities when I was a teenager and in my early 20's. I got a division-1 scholarship for this and it seemed like everyone wanted me to be a coach when I wasn't playing. After graduating college I was quite enamored that my old high school really wanted to hire me as the head coach of their teams, both girls and boys. While I am sure that would have been quite a fine job it also didn't pay very well so I turned it down. However, for many years during college play and for years afterwards I found myself as a coach of various soccer/football teams for kids.

The competitive athlete in me really wanted to push these kids to greatness and I pulled from my own experiences with good coaches about how that can be done, but I also needed to realize that a lot of these kids were simply here because their parents wanted them to be good at soccer/football - the kids themselves often didn't want to be there at all.

It can be tricky to convince a child to want to achieve excellence at a sport and a lot of them get a bit emotional and will even cry when things don't turn out the way that they want it to and this is often the case in a competitive sport.

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A couple of things stand in your way when you are coaching youth sports even back in those days when I was doing it. Since a lot of these leagues are very low cost or even free it is evident that a lot of the parents were using these systems not because they wanted their children to excel at the sport but they were dropping them off for the "free babysitting." These kids are easy to identify because the parents don't even stick around for the games. That was a real shame for me to see because I remember how involved my own parents were in my own sporting upbringing but who knows? Maybe I was just blessed with really outstanding parents.

The major issue that I found with coaching was finding the balance of fun mixed in with skill building. Skill building isn't always going to be fun and the drills can be grueling to a child that doesn't understand why we are doing this. To them, they just want to get out there and play but for anyone that knows anything about soccer/football they realize that in order to excel at actual games, one must first master the actual skills of dribbling, crossing, passing, and having field "vision" before any of that is going to mean anything. Even when I was playing as a youth one of the main problems that we would face was that the teams often had kids on the teams that everyone knew that passing to them was akin to giving the ball away. This is something that we would have with every team and while it isn't nice to say, these kids with low ability levels make the other kids not understand the team nature of the game and how no matter how good one person is, they are not going to be able to win this game on their own.

I pull from experience on this one because when I was playing in recreational leagues when I was around 12 years old, my skill levels were already well known by the recreational league and they would intentionally put me on a team with other kids that were NOT good in an attempt to try to achieve balance in the league. The idea here is that you don't want to have one dominant team that makes all the other teams feel bad. For me this was counter-productive because eventually, I would have to pass to other players and most of the time this resulted in them losing the ball. Thankfully, my parents recognized that putting me on rec leagues in the future was a waste of my abilities and instead put me on very competitive travel teams where every single one of the players were talented.

Coaching is different though and for someone that was as skilled as I was and also as young as I was this was something that caused me a great deal of frustration. I pushed the kids towards excellence but much of the time there were tears of frustration or downright disdain for the sport taking place on the field. You can't MAKE a kid like something and unfortunately a lot of the parents were seriously attempting to do this.

I recall one year when I was coaching indoor soccer/football and one of the girls on the team tried something I had actually instructed them to do - pass the ball backwards when there is no forward pass - and she ended up scoring on her own team. This is a worst case scenario because what I was instructing her in is actually an essential part of the game but when it has such a terrible outcome she starts to lose faith in her instructor who just happened to be me at the time. After that own goal she was never really the same again and for the rest of the season she never passed backwards again, which is a shame because that is going to limit her abilities in the future.

In USA, soccer/football is the most participated in youth sport. Unfortunately, a great many of the leagues, coaches, and even the referees, don't know what the hell they are doing and are there on a volunteer basis- which is very kind of them but it certainly isn't conducive to developing any real skills in players. I think this is a very big part of the reason why team USA manages to do so poorly on an international level despite having great wealth and a large population.

As a coach I desperately wanted to try to get greatness out of these kids but unfortunately the system is set up so that even if I tried my best, I was likely going to fail in this endeavor. I regret to say that especially in the very young kids I gave up about halfway through the season and just sent them out there to have fun and do whatever the hell they wanted to. This doesn't mean that I gave up on the kids though and on more than one occasion I would go and speak to the parents of certain kids who showed real promise and encourage the parents to get their child involved in more competitive leagues. That is the only way they are going to get better and have a way of truly shining.

I often think back to how I could have maybe had a career in coaching but it would have been at a very low level that likely would have resulted in me living a life of relative poverty.

The problem with coaching in the USA is that if you are too much of an overlord, which is kind of required if you are going to get excellence out of the kids, you are seen as being mean and will probably get fired. In the meantime the coaches that likely don't have any idea what they are doing and just let the kids run wild and have fun are rewarded because everyone has a great time. I get that sports are supposed to be fun for kids but honestly, if you make it too much fun, nobody is going to get any better. I suppose that is why around my mid 20's I stopped participating in it. It's just too frustrating.