Sporting memories: Coaching a youth team to excellence

When I was in college I went for free on a football of the soccer variety scholarship. By USA standards anyway, I was considered very good at the sport. While we were not permitted to have "real" jobs we were allowed to coach youth soccer for some pocket money on the side if we wanted to. I chose to do so because why not?

I had no experience in coaching but I did know a lot about the game and remember how in my youth teams, the coaches normally knew less about the game than the players did. The coaches were just there because one of their kids were on the team and they wanted to get involved. There was very little in the way of skill development and many of these coaches were so overweight that they couldn't even do any of the drills they were having us do on the field.

I wanted to do better than this for the youth team that I coached.

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_{Not my team, we barely had digital cameras back then}

While I coached several teams, my favorite one to coach was the under-15 team. These kids were old enough that some of them showed real promise for future excellence, they just needed a bit of guidance. One of the worst aspects of youth football of the soccer variety in the USA is that the kids tend to simply chase the ball and have no semblance of strategy or of finding space on the field. It normally goes like this: One or two kids are excellent and they simply dribble the ball around all of the lessor skilled players on the other team. Despite their good ball-handling skills, they never develop any team skills and they never use the wide open spaces on the field. Normally every goal is scored by the one or two skilled players on the team working their way down the middle of the field, and the wings are never even used.

I drilled my U-15 team in taking the ball down the flank, and then crossing from there. In a few games I actually forbade them from using the middle of the field at all from half-field until the penalty box. For the first couple of games they were groaning about how it was "too hard" to score goals using this method but then I told them stories about how it is to play on the college team and how I had a scholarship and was considered one of the best players in the state.... so shut up and listen to me.

When you play against actually skilled teams, this rush the ball down the center of the field strategy isn't going to work. Sure it might work in this city team that just anyone can join, but once you are playing on or against a team where everyone on the team is good at their position, you are going to be screwed.

Well by game 3 things were starting to come together and they embraced using the flanks to work the ball down the field. Then late in that same game, they pulled off a beautiful cross from near the corner, right to the legs of the center-forward who one-touched it into the back of the net for what might have been considered the best goal of the season for the entire league. I was so happy about this that I rushed the field jumping up and down and congratulating them and ended up getting yellow-carded by the official.

From this point forward my team started to realize that I wasn't just being hard of them for the sake of being mean, but I was actually trying to make them better. They continued to use this strategy until the end of the season but unfortunately I was no longer their coach at this point because of differences that I had with the man who was in charge of the community soccer club. I'll tell that story another time but trust me, it was ugly.

While being a relatively successful player was very rewarding to me, I really think that being able to guide others to greatness feels just as good. A few years later I ran into one of the better players on that team I was coaching at a pizza place and he ran up to me and gave me a hug. He told me that he had also received a college scholarship for playing football of the soccer variety and he thanked me for teaching him the things that I did. I don't think I have ever been so proud in all of my sporting life.