Sporting memories: Trying to teach the youth a tactic that failed badly

One of the major issues that young players have in football/soccer programs in the United States is a lack of competent coaching. When I was in high school I caught our high school math teacher who was the soccer coach, reading a book that is the equivalent of "Coaching Soccer for Dummies." This guy was absolutely clueless about the sport, had never played it, and was just getting a bit of a boost to his paycheck by being a coach of a sport that the school didn't really care about.

He and I butted heads frequently and I feel bad about that. I said things like "do you even understand this game at all?" when games were going badly and a lot of it was because of his management and placing players in places they didn't belong and couldn't perform in.

When I got a full-ride scholarship to a Division-1 school he didn't try to take any of the glory for himself because he knew that I had drawn attention to myself in spite of him not because of him. After college and during it, I wanted to try to make a difference for kids in soccer, I wanted to try to give them an advantage that I didn't really have when I was their age. I wanted to show them some of the secrets of the game that an unskilled coach like my high school coach couldn't possibly show them.

One of those tactics is something that I hope is taught all over the place in football that never was when I was growing up and that is the importance of ball possession, even if it means passing backwards often.

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In youth soccer/football in the USA it seems to be the norm that everyone on both teams just runs towards the ball as fast as they can. Assigning positions seems rather unimportant because everyone just "bunches up" and kicks at the ball with no real objective in mind. This is something that is just fine and dandy when they are really young, but by age 10 or so they really should have some sort of more advanced tactics.

I had mentioned before that I was delighted when some teenagers that I was coaching took my advice about staying spread out, working the corners, and then crossing to position. This works very well especially because a team with an incompetent coach will always head towards the ball and this can be used against them by forcing the defense into a position and then removing the ball from that position.

I was coaching a girls team of U-12's and convinced them that we could get around, rather than through, the defense by simply going backwards and luring them in to our end of the field when in reality we were setting a trap for them and would pass it around.

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It would be something like this and while this probably just seems so basic and elementary to anyone living outside of North America, this tactic is barely ever used on purpose in any youth league. The only reason why I ever attempted it at a player was because my parents put me in a private league that had a paid European coach that really knew his stuff. He was the kind of coach that even if you performed well, if you weren't abiding by his tactics he would take you out of the game even if by doing so he would put his own team at a disadvantage.

He was a very good coach and I aimed to be the same.

We practiced this maneuver a lot of times and the girls seemed to be getting it in practice and scrimmages, but when we used it in an actual game, well the nerves or communication completely broke down.

To a child, playing the ball back to your own keeper seems like madness and this was when the first disaster struck. The keeper, who had a good 15 yards between them and the nearest attacker, fumbled with the ball a tiny bit and well, that is all that it takes. This resulted in a short and uncontrolled pass and it ended up at the feet of a striker. There was no chance for offsides at this point because as I had instructed, the other defenders has already pressed forward because the idea was that the ball would be played from the keeper to the left back and then cleared over their heads to about the center line where we would now have a very big advantage on a counter-attack.

That one misstep on the part of our keeper changed all of that though and the keeper ended up getting scored on rather easily.

At the break I told the girls it was ok, and to not lose heart but the keeper was on the brink of tears and really didn't want to try the play again. Instead of breaking her fragile heart I instead said that this time the play would go back to the rather confident center defender and we would play it out that way.

Well, it was at this point that I guess nerves struck again and the center back passed too hard to the left back and the ball went out for a throw. We managed to hold off the attack and get the ball out of our end but at this point I could see that the girls were losing their faith in me and my "silly tactic" that had already resulted in one goal being scored against us. A goal that was a giveaway.

They ended up being afraid to play like this for the rest of the game and while I didn't give up on it, I could hear them groaning and not wanting to do it when I would call it out in the future. Not just in this game but in a lot of the other ones as well.

Several parents got word from their daughters that I was telling them to play like this and some of the more arrogant parents, also being rather ignorant of the sport, started to get mouthy with me about being a bad coach.

They don't realize that if your daughters continue to play in an "always forward, always fast" sort of way that they will never be anything other than very average players.

I was trying to help them, but because of the culture in soccer/football in the States you get to a point where it's almost like the parents are actively working against you.

We ended up being mid-table by the end of the season and I don't think that my attempt at changing their mindset for the better stuck with any of them. I don't think that any of those girls went on to excel at the game and that is a real shame.

I think there are times as a parent when you need to get out of the way and just presume that this guy (me) that got to go to college for free due to his abilities in this sport maybe, just maybe, knows that the hell he is talking about.

I didn't coach for much longer. I wasn't even being paid to do it and the parents were working against me so I didn't see the point.

I dislike that the girls thought I was letting them down but the real objective on my part was to make them better at the game. This is something that I can still see on replay in my mind many years later.