BEHIND THE PLAY #19

I have worked at a youth soccer club in Vancouver since 2003. Full time since 2004.

I have seen all kinds of parental over-complication of their child’s pathway in the game and the concomitant unrealistic expectations that ride shotgun on that voyage. I’ve also seen families invest themselves in learning whether a club is right for them, calmly ask questions and then sit back and allow events to unfold. They each have a strong interest in their child’s experience but some are more realistic and patient about them. Similarly, I’ve learned from mistakes I’ve made and seen at other clubs around not being clear with families on expectations and outcomes.

Expectations and outcomes. This should be Chapter 1 in any club manual for parents. Expectations should lead to actions, or inputs, and outcomes would be of course be outputs. When the inputs are incongruous with desired and/or realistic outputs, the sparks start to fly. This usually takes the form of blaming coaches, clubs or both and is often accompanied by the unnecessary output of changing clubs.

I cannot stress to you how much club-hopping has increased both here and in other countries since COVID. We see them leaving us and we a similar incoming wave of players looking to join us. Same with other local clubs I’ve spoken to. There are likely many drivers for this. Some are definitely parents and/or players having unrealistic expectations but that is likely matched by clubs not meeting reasonable player and parental expectations.

Unfortunately though it introduces chaos into the environment, depending on the timing of these inter-club moves and that creates anxiety around team viability.

In other words, this transience affects our ability to impart positive outcomes for players at the club level considerably. Are positive outcomes entirely on parents to deliver? As with expectations, absolutely not. Clubs have a massive responsibility here as well to give players reason to join the sport and in keeping them playing long enough to have those positive outcomes. Let’s look at that.

The Venn Diagram I made above looks at the question of how to provide positive outcomes for all players from a club perspective (grey), parent (green) and player (blue). Yes, it’s an oversimplification but it’s a starting point that makes each parties involvement clear.

Let’s start with clubs.

Clubs: The over-arching outcome for all clubs should simply be to create players who play their whole life. That is success.

To get there though, clubs have to accept a higher level of accountability and lift their heads out of the short-term panicked cycle of team formation and winning at young ages and commit to policies that make the idea of graduating far more players into adult soccer a priority.

Frankly, all clubs should have to provide annual reports on player retention and their outcomes. It should be a criteria for attaining the Canadian Soccer Association’s National Youth Club License along with proof that you are demonstrably developing players for your highest level teams (BCSPL) rather than having your staff coaches lurking at other clubs’ games and then surreptitiously recruiting their better players only to then cut players who have been at your club for many years to make room. From there clubs should be providing the same quality fields for training and playing to all players and making all in-season secondary training programs (Academy, Skill Centre) available to all levels of play. Additionally, if a club provides staff coaching for a set number of training sessions to volunteer coached teams, every team should receive the same access to that.

Our governing bodies should also provide standardized survey questions to send to all parents at the club on how we handle various aspects of player safety and make reporting results to them annually mandatory. I have no doubt that player retention rates would correlate closely with perceptions around player safety and players being treated fairly.

Parents: Of the hundreds of youth soccer products and services lobbed at parents in recent years there still isn’t a bona fide handbook or course for them to learn how this youth soccer experience all works from a neutral but informed voice. I may make it my retirement project when I’m done in my current incarnation working at the club level. Naturally it would need to be regionalized to ensure maximum audience relevancy but some of the big pieces parents need to be aware of are universal.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. Parents need to support their player by doing the regular parent stuff. Sign them up, get them to the practices and games, support them by letting them know how much you enjoy watching them play and advocate reasonably but firmly with an open mind when its necessary.

But beyond that we all parent differently and that’s driven by the fact we all have different core values we want to instill in our kids. What interests me is what I see as an increasing shift in parenting where they increasingly feel their job is to insulate their child from negative experiences and hardship rather than exposing them to it when they’re young and letting them learn from it. There’s value to be had from success but I’d argue there’s more to be learned from the resilience you develop from setbacks.

Eberechi Eze just made the England Euro squad. Here’s a clip of how many times he was cut, picked himself up and tried again.

Further on this, the video below is one of my favourites. Dr Becky Kennedy is a clinical psychologist specializing in relationships, particularly between parents and their kids. If you take nothing from this newsletter today please let it be the part I link to below where she says, “Our job is not to make our kid happy. That is so important and so counter-cultural.” Clicking the video will take you directly to the part salient to this discussion but essentially she points out that denying kids the opportunity to sit with difficult situations and consider how to deal with them facilitates them morphing into anxiety down the road.

In a previous newsletter I talked about formative experiences in the game that we go through, including lots when we’re young, and how that shapes us then and through adult life. I mentioned that two of my most formative experiences were negative and I had to wade through them , dust myself off and decide how to respond. In both cases I added considerable resilience to my inventory. Something I really needed as I hadn’t had to deal with much adversity to that point. It helped me advance in the game tremendously and it has helped me as a person on an ongoing basis to this day. That alone can be an incredible outcome for your child to have in the game.

Players: As I said, also in a previous newsletter, youth soccer offers you a platform. Clubs and parents have a role in making it fair and accessible to you but what you do with it is largely up to you. You can use it socially, physically, mentally. You can draw lessons from it that will make you a better player, student, driver, friend and family member. That’s up to you and how deeply you embrace the platform.

The workforce likes people who have worked on teams (sport or otherwise) and experienced what it takes to be successful in that context. Universities are changing their admission policies to include personal essays and interviews to go beyond just high school marks and gauge the actual person. My son’s U18 team wrapped up four years ago. Six of the eighteen players on that team are now in UBC’s Sauder Business School, a program with one of the highest application rejection rates in the country. Did they get in because they had successes from a youth soccer platform? Definitely not entirely but it probably helped get some over the line in terms of differentiating them from others who maybe didn’t have the platform that a good club can and should provide.

This game is a compressed degree in social skills for kids. It will help you in soccer and out of soccer. I have absolutely no doubts about that and feel strongly that playing on a team sport where the in-game decisions are made by the players far more than a coach (ie. soccer, hockey, field hockey, basketball) should be part of the school curriculum; even a requirement for graduation or at least count as a course credit whether their team experience is on a school team or a club team.

Learn from Eze, don’t shy away from challenges or be embarrassed by not making a team you wanted to be on or were on previously. Your development pathway is not linear. Expect bumps in the road and learn to deal with them.

I’ll end with another mention of expectations and outcomes. The overriding expectation that parents should have, any time they put their child in a team sport, is that through their support and reciprocal efforts by a competent club providing an adequate platform, their child can and should have a positive experience and want to continue playing. That continued play will lead to successes and setbacks and their development path will take them in a direction that is hard to predict. Keep the expectations firm but reasonable and the outcomes while maybe very different than the ones you initially hoped for when you first signed your child up to play, are, from my experience, dispensed regularly, fairly and formatively.

_{Busy week so no newsletter this Thursday; next one Monday, June 17.}

_{Today’s song really could, should and probably was a terrace chant. Here’s The Stone Roses This is the One. (Apple Music) (Spotify)(YouTube)}