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- BEHIND THE PLAY #3
I work in youth soccer. Been doing it, in a paid capacity, since 2000 part-time and since 2004 full time. I have always felt fortunate that I have been able to work both in my community where I live and in the game that I love.
It leads me to spend a lot of time thinking about how we can improve and add value to the time that young players spend with us. I felt that when I was a Technical Director for fifteen years and I still feel it having been an Executive Director for over five. Knowing precisely what we are selling is fundamental to ensuring we do this. Are we selling opportunities? Experiences? Physical health? Mental health? These are all important and worthy items but don’t capture what I think lays at the base of what we are charged with.
Our job as a club is provide a platform. A safe, fair platform accessible by all that allows young kids through to young adults the opportunity to have compressed socialization opportunities afforded to them via team sports. By engaging in that, the outcomes for those players generally takes care of itself whether it’s playing at the university level or just feeling comfortable joining in pick up games with friends when they’ve finished their youth soccer career.
Would I like our club to produce professional footballers who go on to play for our national team? Yes, that would be a desirable outcome. But to design a club that is geared to less than .1% of its players as its mission is not one I want to work for.
Fluid team sports are an incredible vehicle. By fluid I mean dynamic sports where movement and decision making is in the domain of those playing and not those coaching. I classify soccer, hockey and basketball (to a lesser degree) as fluid team sports. Sports like baseball, gridiron football and volleyball are what I call episodic sports. Short actions are performed and when they end, players reset to the same setup and repeat. Coaches have considerably more input in these sports due to the numerous breaks in play and players, while not automatons, are far from autonomous. As such, sports like soccer push the responsibility for success, and the lack of it, onto the players and do so in a public setting given the actions are viewed and judged by others. However, they’re also interactive as the actions on the field are both co-operative, with teammates, and combative, with opponents. It’s tense, dense and hard to find other spaces in the lives of most kids where this opportunity is available to them.
It’s a chance for kids to experience the fullest range of emotions and values in a, hopefully, safe environment and have those experiences shape them while they codify and prioritize their own traits based on their perceptions of the experiences. Treated respectfully and with understanding? They’ll likely treat those around them the same. Enjoy shared success on the field? Seek it out in other venues of life. It’s incredibly formative and in my mind every child should play a fluid team sport during their adolescence for at least three years. It should be built into school curricula. The idea of putting semi-random groups of kids together and instilling the need to co-operate over a long period of time to achieve shared success, often in bad weather and when they don’t actually feel like doing it, while an opposing group of kids tries to stymie you is a venture so steeped in life skills it should be self-evident to all adults that every child would benefit from it.
So back to the idea that I am in the business of providing a platform for this public lesson in teamwork and its messy component parts like helping others, communicating effectively, developing determination, learning from mistakes, forgiving others’ mistakes, winning with grace and losing without disgrace. Through this resilience, maybe the most valuable trait kids need, is built and honed. So is leadership and the humility and savvy to recognize when its time to lead and when its time to listen and follow.
My professional goal is to provide a platform that attracts players to our club and then makes them want to stay. And in staying exposes them to all of the above including the tough stuff like losing, not making a team they wanted to be on, making mistakes that causes your team to lose, developing new relationships with other kids, especially kids a bit different than them. In other words, the willingness to put themselves out there in ‘the world’ and see what happens.
Are we interested in building players who can play at the highest level? Yes, every player who makes it to those teams has had to learn from adversity. Guaranteed. In other words, every players still benefits from the process and time spent on a soccer team.
This is about the point where I sense some eyeball rolls and head shakes. So just so it’s clear I’m not coming at this with a mouth full of granola, singing Kumbaya around a campfire while hand-knitting participation ribbons…
I played two games for the men’s national team. I played five years of varsity soccer at UBC where I was All-Canadian each of those years and won three national championships and lost one national final. I played four years of semi-pro soccer in the Canadian Soccer League in Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver. So I more than understand competition and the need and value of a competitive spirit. I have lived it at it a very primal level but I honestly believe I would never had achieved any of that if I hadn’t first had two negative experiences in the game that each poured molten hot resilience into my veins. These were: being cut from the BC U16 Provincial team and then enduring a very challenging year on the Canadian National U19 Youth team that qualified for the Youth World Cup in the USSR. I will undoubtedly devote at least one newsletter to that experience! Some of the people I know that have had much longer and more prolific careers playing the game than I have share the belief that I’m espousing here: keep kids playing. Let them benefit from it as they go through adolescence and for the most part they will find both their level and the unfortunately named ‘soft skills’ I’ve mentioned.
So a platform doesn’t mean, and shouldn’t be, a stage we create where only positive experiences happen. If you win a lottery once in your life it’s a big deal. If you keep winning lotteries every week, the thrill starts to wear off as does your ability to deal with adversity. A great example of this is my 2002-born son’s team that I coached. Their arc through divisional soccer is a great example of what I’d like to see all players experience. They were dominant in U13 and U14. Teams caught up at U15 but they still managed to win the league title for the third year running. By U16 the challenges arose as other teams improved and we reached the point where too many players moved on to BCSPL (the highest level of play in Vancouver and one that our club was not eligible to provide back then). We finished mid-table that year and only a bit better at U17. U18 is a tough year as most of our players become more focused on school to try to give themselves a good chance of getting into the university they’d like to attend. Their last game as a team was just as COVID was starting in March of 2020. They won it and re-claimed the league title that they’d had from U13 to U15. Early success followed by adversity followed by the determination to stick around and finish on a high. That was how they interacted with their platform.
But what does a safe and effective platform look like? The first thing is that it meets the core participatory needs of the participants. It reduces or eliminates barriers. It’s ideally close to where they live, not cost-prohibitive and there’s a level of play and a team at that level that is appropriate for where they are at in terms of ability. And as that ability level increases or decreases in relation to others, there is another team they can move to and be a part of. Under-challenged players get bored and frustrated. Over-challenged players get humiliated and frustrated. If you want retention, and that is and has always been my primary metric of success, you need a platform that players feel supports them rather than environments that compel them to leave in frustration.
Parents and coaches are fundamental to the platform as well. They are agents of attraction and retention. Their support of young players is what keeps them playing far more than fancy kit, expensive boots, and ‘showcase tournaments.’ Parents register, transport, advocate and encourage. They facilitate getting their kids onto teams with their time, money and positive energy and that then fuels the retention. The coaches that players have, whether professional or volunteer, are massively influential in terms of retention. Club officials need to keep in mind that players of all ages can make it clear to their parents that they are not enjoying an experience and don’t want to continue doing it. Younger ones do it with crying and tears. Older ones who have gained agency over these decisions just tell their parents they aren’t going to continue playing. Unfortunately, a major reason for kids leaving the game is because they didn’t have the relationship with their coach that they needed.
We’re in the middle of a very substantial year long project with Supporting Lines, a company that uses surveys utilizing specifically worded questions to measure team culture. Across sports (and corporate environments where they do a lot of their work), success and retention on teams and in organizations both very clearly correlate with effective communication between players and their coach and staff and their managers. We’re in the process of putting together a toolkit in conjunction with Supporting Lines to help our coaches understand the impact simple things like five minute check-ins with players can have as well as the language and tone used. This will be an addition to our platform that makes it feel both safe and welcoming to players.
So you value retention and you build a welcoming, embracing platform that meets needs and players stay. That’s what we’re selling. What are the desired outcomes of this platform though? As a club that now offers every level of play available here, they are many and varied and depend on what the individual needs and what the experience of playing exposed them to.
Resilience - they are able to suffer life’s challenges with grace and fortitude
They develop social skills that reduce their anxiety
They learn to appreciate kids who are different than them
Develop the confidence to start new relationships and speak their mind in those relationships and elsewhere
The ability have more meaningful relationships with their peers through shared work, success and disappointments
They make their school team
They play right through to U18 and onto adult teams
They make a university team
They become more competent, complete people
It leads to the adoption of an active lifestyle
It provides them with the social confidence that allows them to feel comfortable in varied settings and with people who present differently than them
And if some of them make it to a professional league and/or the national team, that’s awesome but they will all but certainly have also picked up all of the above along the way and will carry those skills, traits and values long after their career is over.
The last thing to remember about platforms is that they are a support device; an outstretched hand willing to pull you up. They are not a promise or a solution on their own though. They require engagement which means players have to embrace the platform and make of it what they can and want to. The more they engage though, the more the platform will benefit them if we as adults involved in the game create, maintain and continually improve it. A room can be full of the best instruments possible but there’s not going to be great music until people learn how to play them and most great music is made by groups of people working in concert with each other.
I’ve quoted him before but I’ll do it again as its a good place to finish this off. Colin Elmes, founder and co-owner of TSS and friend of mine going back to when we played our last year of youth soccer together, likes to say, “We’re in the business of making better people. Soccer is just our vehicle for that.”
Couldn’t agree more. Sold.
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