The Heretic Coach

“Those who do not want to imitate anything produce nothing” – Salvador Dali

A while back, I was watching a new soccer dvd I purchased.  It was created by a guy who used to work the job I currently do and something interesting in there got me thinking about some things.  In the introduction of the dvd, the author talks about how there are distinct patterns of play in soccer that occur quite frequently in the game.  Those patterns can be isolated and practiced.  And it is that repetition of these basic stereotypes of cooperation, as the author calls them, that eventually leads to automatization or committing those patterns to the subconscious.  From there it is simply a matter of selecting the correct pattern.  And from the solidification of the patterns comes the opportunity to improvise on those patterns.

Repetition IS imitation and it is a necessary part of the process of excellence.  People think Mozart was a child genius.  Well, if copying other professional composers of the time was genius, than yes, he was a child genius.  Mozart did not produce his first great original work until he was in his 20′s.  Everything leading up to that was imitation.

And without imitation I don’t believe there is any chance of improvisation.  You first have to make automatic those that are the rules and structures of the activity that it is you do.  I remember a jazz band musician friend of mine back in high school being excited about getting to learn to improvise.  The first improvisation class came and went and when I saw him afterwards I asked him how it had gone.  He was rather indifferent in his reaction and said it was okay.  Just okay?  He’d been looking forward to this forever.  As it turns out, even learning how to improvise has rules that you need to follow.  He thought he was going to go in there and just start playing a new lick.  It turned out to be as instructional as the first time he picked up his instrument.

In the business world, the talk is about imitation and innovation.  A common theme seems to be that innovation is highly overrated.  Imitation is actually where it’s at.  Those that innovate do decently but it becomes those that imitate on the innovation – working the bugs out until it’s perfect – that get the glory.  They stick with what they know is a great idea and they repeat it and repeat it and repeat it until it becomes the best.

I think the concepts of imitation and improvisation are very interesting ones and they raise a few questions for development of athletes in youth sport that I’d like to explore over the next few posts.

Is improvisation the heart of excellence or is it really imitation that is excellence?  The Golden Age of Learning as the 9-12 age range is often called in youth sports is all about the imitation of skills but does that mean you cannot play the game if you do not have the skills?  What is the relationship between game understanding, skills, imitation and improvisation?

Next post May 28th

“I arrived to try and change the world.  Now all I hope for is that the world will not change me.” – Pep Guardiola, coach FC Barcelona

I remember it exactly.  Tuesday, September 11th, 2001 was a beautiful warm and sunny day where I was.  The sky was astoundingly blue that early morning.  It was one of those mornings where it felt fantastic to be alive.  As it turned out, it seemed to be a beautiful day along the entire eastern sea board – including New York City.  Everyone then remembers what was to follow.

You just don’t forget these things.  History in the making.  It’s the type of history that they talk about in school text books decades after the event.  I was just barely a teenager when the space shuttle Challenger exploded over the Atlantic Ocean which grounded NASA’s space exploration efforts for almost three years.  9-11 was different.  It is not that the fate of the Challenger space craft is of a lesser significance.  It is just that 9-11 was the first time that I actually felt that I had experienced something that I new would be part of history long after I was gone.   Like the moon landing or JFK’s assassination had been talked about by the adults that were in my life when I was growing up.

Call it over dramatic if you like then when I compare last Friday’s announcement that Josep Guardiola, the coach of FC Barcelona, was to step down at the end of this season to one of those I’m living history moments.  I’ll certainly remember where I was when I heard the news.

Guardiola had threatened previously not to return.  He always chose short-term contracts that he could contemplate at the end of every season.  His future was again in speculation this season as he’d not yet renewed a contract so we were all left to wonder if this was going to be the final year.  And like 9-11, Guardiola’s departure has left me feeling sad.  Sad because you know that things have now changed forever and you wonder if they will ever be the same again.

Over the last four years, those of us in the game of soccer have gotten to witness history in the making.  And I loved every minute of it.  I only became familiar with the Blaugrana in 2008.  I’ve watched every game they’ve played in that time since.  I frequently sit down and re-watch their games that I’ve recorded.  And I’m convinced that any coach in the game should be training his/her players to play that way.  Anyone in my path fortunately (or unfortunately) hears Barcelona this and Barcelona that.

As a young coach, I can remember the talk of playing the game with skill and possessing the ball.  But it is never what I saw.  Well, I saw it but the teams that did it never went on to win the big stuff.  The teams that did win did what they had to win.  The notion of beautiful soccer was just an ideal.

That all changed four years ago.  The world was shown that it was possible to honour the game and win at the highest level.  Spain’s 2008 Euro championship and 2010 World Cup championship sealed the deal on that.  It wasn’t just something you told the kids you were coaching because you wanted to give them the nice picture of the way it should be before they eventually changed and did things the way the real world demanded them to do.  The process and product were right there in front of our faces.

How would I describe that spectacle?  Glad you asked.  I can think of a few words:

Sumptuous.  Idyllic.  Pastoral.   Decadent.  Visionary.  Heavenly.  Transcendental.

Every game I sat down to watch I can remember saying to myself, “Make sure you appreciate and enjoy this because it’s not going to last forever.”  It had to end.  All things do.  My fear now is that we’ll never get it back again to the level that it was.  It was the perfect soccer storm I think.  The right combination of factors coming together in the right place and at the right time.  I can’t begin to say how proud I am to be able to boast that I got to witness it as it happened and not as the subject of a history lesson.

FC Barcelona under Guardiola changed the game forever.  If you’ve ever played on a team that could do something similar to this then you know how joyous (but rare) it is to experience.  If you’ve ever tried to coach kids to play this way then you know how difficult it is.  There will definitely be more teams and programs pushing forward and trying to do what was done because it now has been proven successful.  It is no longer just an idea that sounds nice in theory.  But anti-soccer will always be there too.  It undid Barcelona in the Champion’s League against Chelsea.  It did the same to them two years ago as well against Inter Milan.  And in these instances, the critics of Barcelona say their biggest weakness is that if Plan A doesn’t work, they don’t have a Plan B.  I just have two things to say to that:

1. Isn’t that more an indication of the game of soccer itself?  You can do everything right and still lose.  As one of this Blog’s commenters noted, soccer can sometimes be more about luck than performance.

2. Who friggin’ cares!  Plan A was awesome to watch win or lose.

There are those that say there is no right way to play the game.  I disagree.  If you truly want to honour the game, then you play it the way Barcelona has tried to play it over the last four years.  Now our kids can be taught that this is not just some interesting rhetoric that adults spew.  Yes, you can play beautiful AND win.

In his press conference to announce he was moving on, Guardiola said that four years managing a team is an eternity.  I can only imagine that four years of managing Barcelona could feel like an eternity.  It obviously took its toll on Guardiola.  Just look at how much he aged in that time.  Alex Ferguson has been with Manchester United since 1986 so I wonder how he feels?  He probably disagrees with Guardiola on that claim.  I take a slightly different take.  I say Guardiola’s four years will be felt in soccer for eternity.

Thank God for that.

Next post May 14th.

Quit the wrong stuff.  Stick with the right stuff.  Have the guts to do one or the other.

- Seth Godin

Quitting is easy to do.  Not only is it easy, it is necessary for success.  The last post I wrote pre-baby arrival was about the fear of failure.  Failure is not the same as quitting.  Failing happens when you’ve quit so many times that they’re are no other options.  And there is both a good and a bad form of quitting.  Serial quitting  or reactive quitting is the type that leads to failure.  People quit when it gets painfully hard and they give up. However, strategic quitting – knowing when to cut your losses and get out – is the secret to success.  Yes, sometimes giving up on something is the very best decision we can make.

Why?  According to author Seth Godin in his book The Dip, being well rounded is not the pathway to excellence.  In the short-term it is a good strategy so as to help you figure out what you should and shouldn’t quit.  After all, as Godin notes, how often do we buy something from an organization or person that also happens to be good at a bunch of other things  that we aren’t interested in buying?  We don’t.  We pick the person or business that offers the best version of the item we want.

We do this because buying from the best is driven by scarcity.  Scarcity creates demand.  In theory, because you are the one who offers that quality product, you are deemed the best relative to all the others.  That’s the way the system works.  It relies on the fact that most other people or organizations will quit (and fail) long before they do what you do and reach that tiny platform we call success.  Many start but only a few succeed, making them the best at what they do.  These are the conditions necessary for scarcity and they are available to all of us if we just understand when and why we should quit.

As is the title of his book, Godin calls one of the key curves we need to understand about strategic quitting, the Dip.  He says the Dip is that long, uncomfortable lag between the start of an activity and the achievement of mastery in that activity.  It is the point where for a while, the increase in effort does not necessarily produce an equally attractive increase in results.  And scarcity goes hand in hand with the Dip.  If there was no dip in an activity, there’d be no value in it because everyone would be able to do it and that would not make it scarce.

The second big curve that Godin says we need to watch for in order to quit strategically is the Cul-de-Sac.  This, for example, is the dead end job.  It is the fruitless toil at something that we just can’t seem to admit isn’t getting us anywhere but that for whatever reason we are just too scared or too comfortable to quit.   After all, in a Cul-de-Sac, we’ve been doing the same thing in the same way for so long it does not seem possible to do it any other way.  If you are in a Cul-de-Sac the first thing you need to do is acknowledge it.  The second thing you need to do is quit immediately whatever the activity is that has you going round and round.

People that, as Godin puts it, lean into the dip believe that they have the long-term prowess to become the best at that activity.  And because they don’t quit and move on to the next thing, they avoid mediocrity and advance towards excellence.  So to become a star at something you have to quit most everything else that you are doing.

When faced with the decision to start down the path of a new activity, Godin writes about three separate states of mind that an individual can have:

Brave – the brave thing to do is to hang on in the dip, get through to the other side and benefit from all the great things that scarcity brings.  I don’t believe enough kids choose to be brave.  While scarcity is needed in order to make excellence, I still think there is more room at the top then there currently are people taking their rightful place at the top.  We have not maxed out on our quota of brave people.

Mature – the mature thing is to acknowledge that you probably won’t make it through the dip in most things so don’t bother starting.  This is where I see most kids today faltering.  They obviously lack the maturity to see that they can’t specialize and become the best at every sport and their parents are not doing enough to help them gain that maturity.  They seem to believe that they can be both elite and multi-sport.

Stupid - The stupid person wastes a lot of time and money because they quit the activity when it gets hard.   They give up right in the middle of the Dip.  In my time in soccer, I’ve seen more than my fair share of youth players (and their parents) do the stupid thing.

As Godin concludes about these three things, some people do show bravery in facing the dip.  Most show maturity in declining the activity altogether.  Both are acceptable choices.  It is the third one, the choice to start and then quit that you must avoid if you want to be a master of something.

Like any brick wall, the dip is typically not a finite barrier, it is an opportunity.  Unfortunately, most people see it as an end point and so they quit.  Instead they need to see the brick wall as a true test of how badly they want to succeed.  The brick wall is scarcity’s way of creating value.  Most look at the barrier and say that’s it, time to quit.  A few will find a way to get around it, over it, under it or even through it.  They obsess.  They sacrifice.  They know on the other side of that brick wall (or walls) lies their place on the podium or in the winner’s circle.

These special people are driven by the notion of long-term gain and not of short-term pain.  And Godin writes that individuals who are able to convince themselves of the long-term gain as a means of dealing with the short-term pain do often go on to be more successful at riding the Dip.

So Godin’s advice is to plan your quitting strategy before you get started.  After all, planned quitting allows you to make smart choices along the way.  As Godin notes:

“If quitting in the face of the Dip is a bad idea, then quitting when you are facing a Cul-de-Sac is a great idea.  The hard part is having the perspective to see this when you’re in pain, or frustrated or stuck.  That’s why setting your limits before you start is so powerful.”

And I think that the purpose of being a multi-sport athlete early on for a child is a great way to do that.  After all, how else do you find out what it is you possibly might be the best at?  You have to sample.  But (and it is a big but) subsequently we don’t spend the time necessary to educate youth athletes on the habits of excellence.  We don’t provide them with the skills necessary to understand the difference between the Dip and a Cul-de-Sac.  The end result?  Fewer kids go on to achieve excellence in sport.  Don’t forget, in Long-Term Athlete Development we don’t call the stage for kids approximately ages 10 to 12 LEARNING TO TRAIN for nothing.  That is the perfect time to unveil to them the path to excellence.

And some final advice from author Godin to all you coaches out there working with athletes and their parents in that L2T stage of development (or even those of you looking to become excellent at something yourself):

The lesson is simple: If you’ve got as much as you’ve got, use it.  Use it to become the best in the world, to change the game, to set the agenda for everyone else.  You can only do that by marshaling all of your resources to get through the biggest possible Dip.  In order to get through that dip, you’ll need to quit everything else.  If it’s not going to put a dent in the world, quit.  Right now.  Quit and use that void to find the energy to assault the Dip that matters. “

Go on.  Inspire some kids (or yourself) to become excellent at something.  I dare you.

Next post April 30th.

Last week, life took a big twist with the arrival of my first child.  That being said, I’ll have to save my next post for April 16th.

“Leaders can let you fail and yet not let you be a failure” – General Stanley McChrystal, former commander of US and international forces in Afghanistan

My child’s dreams have been crushed.

I’ve actually heard that a few times in the last couple of weeks.  It’s tryout time for our competitive soccer teams where I work.  And apparently the inability of some of these kids to make the team they wanted seems to be all my fault as well (it’s amazing I get any sleep at night at all).

I’ve read a series of books on the topic of spirituality by Eckhart Tolle.  He talks a lot about living in the present and how you go about doing that.  A key message is how you stay grounded in enjoying the present moment when things are happening around you that you don’t like.  The advice is pretty simple.  When something you don’t like happens you have three choices:

1. Change it

2. Remove yourself from the situation (if possible)

3. Accept it

Of the players that have tried out and not made the team that they wanted to, we’ve had some quit, some threaten to quit and just a few say nothing and get on with it.  Fair enough.  Of course the reaction that I, or probably you as a coach for that matter, are looking for is the last one – stop whining and complaining and get on with it!

What the heck has happened to people?

In two decades, we’ve gone from accepting that our kids weren’t good enough to make a team to fighting every decision that doesn’t go our way.

It’s not my kid.  He’s certainly better than Billy or Tony but yet they made the team and my son didn’t.  It must be you that’s wrong.

Since my kid didn’t make the team she wanted, she’s going to quit.

Yeah, and you’re going to let her.  What the heck kind of message is that for your kid to learn?

The last couple of posts I’ve been on a theme around the importance of development and in particular inclusion.  Now, it’s time for a much tougher message.

LET YOUR KID FAIL!

Yes, be an advocate for your child.  That’s something that I don’t think was present in our childhood and it is something we are trying to correct for our children.  But don’t meddle.  Meddling is not advocating.

At some point, you have to stop fighting the system, accept things and start working with it.  Realize you can’t change it.  Don’t EVEN consider removing yourself from the situation as that’s just totally the wrong message to give your kid.  Accept and move on.  Help fix the things that went wrong.  Make it the situation that your child does want.

This is where I’m convinced from what I’ve seen that we’ve lost our compass that builds self-esteem.  Here I go saying something controversial now.

There’s way too much praise being dolled out to kids.

Now please don’t confuse praise with unconditional love.  I can love you without praising you.  And maybe that’s what the problem is.  The two things are being confused.  We feel that the more praise we dish out, the more our kids will know they’re loved.  So we dish it out even when there’s really no good reason or need to do so.

After all, praise is a reward and I’ve certainly tried to make the case that rewards don’t work.  They only work as long as the reward is present.  Rewards don’t motivate people in the long-term to continue to do or feel the way they do when the reward is there.

So we praise and we praise and we praise some more.  Kids feel great and appear strong.  Why wouldn’t they?  But it’s not a stable and internal sense of self that they’ve built.  You want your child to develop good self-esteem?  Love them unconditionally and let them fail.

Oh, honey…you didn’t make the soccer team.  That’s okay.  That’s they’re loss.  You’re still great.  Here, let’s find you an activity where you are the best and will make the team.

In other words, let’s shelter you from dealing with failure.  Why do seemingly reasonable and intelligent people do that?  I guess I’m about to find out that ‘why’ for myself.

For 25 years I’ve coached.  Not because I had a kid involved that needed a coach but simply because I fell in love with coaching.  In the coming days, my life will change forever and that scares me.  I fear that I’m about to lose that objectivity.  I’m terrified I’m going to become one of those parents that loses touch with their child’s true abilities and goes over the top to try and protect him/her from failure.

I’ve seen the kids that have been allowed to switch soccer clubs when they didn’t make the team they wanted.  It doesn’t usually end happily ever after.  Because they become nomads.  They go to a new club and find that that isn’t what they’re looking for either so they move on to another.  And then another (and even sometimes come back to where they started).  For these people I say that you can find exactly what you are looking for by staying in the first club and dealing with what happened there.

For the people that do stay where they are and work at accepting their situation for what it is, I can’t say that it does always end up happily ever after.  Such is life.  Sometimes the universe seems to reward (or punish) people for making choices they really shouldn’t be rewarded for (or punished for).

Of course, life is rarely always fair.  I think that’s a message kids need to learn sooner than later.  I know I will try teach my child this. I will try to teach my child not only to work harder but smarter in the face of failure.  I will also try to encourage my child to get back up when he/she has been knocked down.  And finally even when my child doesn’t do some or any of these things I will try very hard to make sure I’ve put no conditions on my child’s love.  Lastly, my child will know that quitting is a very distant last place option.

But is there a logical and practical time to cut your losses and throw in the towel?  Can quitting ever be a viable option or are quitters always losers?  I’d like to talk about that next time.

Next post April 2nd.

Wow!  March already.  I am in the midst of competitive team tryouts where I work.  It is a small but seriously significant part of my job.  And it’s amazing how something so small, relative to the rest of my job description, can cause such big problems and take up so much of my time.

I toil a great deal trying to implement a tryout process that is seen by the membership as fair and transparent.  Fair and transparent?  Did you ever have a fair and transparent tryout when you were growing up?  More importantly, did your parents get involved in the whole thing if you didn’t make the team?

Times have changed.  No more lists on bulletin boards.  Gone are the days of reading off the names out loud at the end of the last tryout. Oh, the humanity for those that didn’t hear their names and had to do the walk of shame past those who did.

As a player, I remember my most significant cut.  It was for a provincial team.  I was 14.  The coach called me as he said he would do.  He was very nice.  Very apologetic.  Even to this day, I know that it was a hard thing for him to do.  I could hear it in his voice.  It did impact my life in a significant way though.  A negative way unfortunately.  Getting cut really can scar you for life.  Or I guess I let it do that.  And following that event, there were no talks from parents after that to help me deal with it and keep it in perspective.  Instead, as I remember, the conversation went something like:

“Did you make it?”  ”…No…”  ”Oh…that’s too bad.”

Go to the internet and Google ‘cuts in youth sport’ and a zillion articles on how to help your child deal with not making the team pop up.  Yes, things have changed.

And now here I am almost thirty years later taking part in the very same process of deciding on the soccer fate of so many kids.  Presiding over who is in and who is out.  Potentially affecting in a negative way a number of young and impressionable peoples’ lives.  The thought of it is enough to make you freeze up and reconsider your decisions.  But yet at the same time there’s a voice inside of me that goes “This is part of life, kids need to learn to deal with this.”

Those that support the process of cutting in youth sport team selection would say the same thing.  Getting cut prepares children for the adult world.  Life’s a bitch and then you die.  It’s a dog-eat-dog world.  This is certainly how I remember it when I grew up.  We were thrown in the deep end and left to fend for ourselves.  How we got to the top and broke the surface to catch our breath didn’t matter just as long as we weren’t the ones on the bottom.

Maybe you experienced the same and it has left you as a parent now telling your own kids to suck it up buttercup.  I can’t help but ask the question where is the middle ground in all of this.  I do believe learning to deal with failure and set backs is an important part of life that our kids need to be exposed to as much as possible.  The sooner the better.  I don’t think that that destroys self-esteem.  I think it builds self-esteem.  I think constant praise – praise for no reason and avoidance of any failure – builds false self-esteem.  The kind of phoney self-esteem that bursts like a balloon when poked with real life difficulties.

Yet the process of cutting kids is becoming more and more maligned in our culture today as sport psychologists and sociologists explain to us the negative impact that they can have.  Brooke DeLench writes on her site called momsTEAM, according to the title the trusted source for sports parents, a number of reasons why cuts should be re-examined within the school sport system.

1. Cutting hurts the children who need sports the most

2. Cutting is exclusionary and promotes elitism

3. Cutting puts kids at risk of anti-social behaviour

4. Cutting creates a self-fulfilling prophecy (of not being able to make the team)

5. Cutting sends a mixed message about the value of athletic participation

6. Cutting turns kids off to exercise

7. Cutting reduces the talent pool

Those are the key ones worth mentioning.  She also includes one about no cuts means equal playing time for all players.  Her focus of the article was around middle school sports and the process of cutting and she also mentions that budgetary constraints are therefore not a valid reason to cut either.

Why do we make cuts?  Maybe because the rules of the sport require us to.  Try out for basketball and only twelve people may get selected.  Try out for soccer and eighteen people may get selected.  Or maybe because the rules of our sport governing bodies make us.  For example, after March 5th, your roster must be set and there can be no more changes.  There’s not always a great deal we as coaches can do about those.  The one that I like to remind people of in my soccer world is that we cut certain players because they will not improve our team’s chance of winning.

Well, there it is.  The ugly truth.

That reason for cutting we can do something about.  We can control it.  We can focus more on developing youth athletes and less on results when it is appropriate to do so.  Certainly, below the age of twelve we don’t need to be making cuts.  Where I previously did work, we had set competitive teams and cuts under twelve and where I am now we don’t.  Boy, what a difference!  I’d never go back to the old way again if I could help it or make them change immediately if I did.  But where I worked last, we had those set competitive teams because there was a competitive league with standings.  We don’t have that where I work now so people aren’t frothing at the mouth to see their little Timmy beat up on Sammy’s team from the next community over.

Fortunately the practice of keeping standings at the younger ages is changing too, which I mentioned in my last post.  And where I worked last is now moving away from that process.  Thank God!

With no standings, there should be less of a need to make winning the main reason for playing.  With less of a need to win there can be more focus on developing players.  With more focus on developing players the approach taken to forming the team can be more inclusive and less exclusive.    It is absolutely true that the players that need the sport (and the training/competition they would get from being on the team) the most are the ones that get cut.  When this does happen, the cycle begins.  They get cut.  They get a less desirable development experience.  They come back the next year.  They are not much better and get cut again.  Repeat ad nauseum until they get discouraged and quit altogether.

There’s the segue to the next point.  Cuts absolutely do deplete your talent pool.  This is where we really see the impact of cutting players that will not help us win.  If you’re not big enough, strong enough, fast enough, aggressive enough or athletic enough then you will not be selected.  Most of those things a player can’t control though.  Mother Nature does.  As DeLench notes in her article on team selection, it is like cutting off a bud on a tree simply because it hasn’t bloomed yet (hence the term ‘late bloomers’ she says).  We never give them the chance to realize their full potential.

And when you’re cut, the subsequent emotional and psychological feelings are those of hurt and inadequacy.  You feel that you are just not good enough.  Get cut by the same coaches in the same sport year after year and no wonder the talent pool shrinks.

Cuts create for me what I call the two E’s.  First off, cuts are exclusionary.  Some people are in and some are out.  After a few years, it tends to be the very same people that are always in and the very same people that are always out.  The people that are always in become entitled – the second E.

In my job, I have had to deal with entitled parents, players and coaches.  It is an awful experience.  They no longer have a grasp on the reality of their sport situation.  All they know is that because this is the way it was last year, it should be the same again this year.  And the longer that exclusion goes on, the greater is the entitlement and the more difficult are those people to assuage.

Cuts are necessary and the older a player or athlete gets or the higher the level played, the more those cuts are required otherwise we’d probably have no Olympic, professional or elite sport.  Elitism does come from cuts but sometimes that may be just what you are going for.

But that’s not most of us.  So most of us don’t need to do cuts.  And even if we do need to do some segregating, we should be keeping the boundaries between teams as blurry as possible.  After all, what we see in tryouts today from a set of players – one cut, one not – can change completely after a couple of weeks.

I find it amusing when soccer clubs select their outdoor teams during the fall the year before.  The current outdoor season has just barely finished and here they are holding tryouts.  That time period, take stature as one single example.  From fall to late winter a kid could grow three inches and/or gain ten pounds (or not grow three inches and/or gain ten pounds).  In starting sooner, all you do in this situation is increase the negative power of cuts by giving some players the opportunity to advance while taking it away from others.  Of course the majority of players you give the opportunity to are going to get better and the majority of the ones you don’t aren’t thereby justifying your cuts.

Duh!

And why start earlier?  Why, to get a leg up on your competition so that you can beat them of course.  Why else?

Players do need to be grouped.  Often times, it is much easier to coach them when they are in a homogenous unit and all more or less at the same level of development or understanding.  But those groupings don’t need to be so finite and so rigid.  We need to start lobbying those that make the rules to change the rules in order to allow more flexibility and more roster circulation to promote more inclusion in youth sport.

Even an heterogeneous environment can be a valuable one.  Better players, their parents and their coaches often don’t want to train and play with weaker players.  They say there is nothing in it for them.  I think this is where the traditional school system that most of us went through and our kids still go through makes the difference.  The kids don’t see themselves as coaches.  They’ve been taught that learning is something you do on your own without the help of others.  They don’t appreciate the power of peer teaching.  They don’t understand that by helping someone else learn something,  you – yourself – actually learn it better too.

Next post March 19th.

The Brighton and Hove Albion centre back lay in his net with a look that seemed to say, “That’s deja vu all over again.”  Brighton had just scored their third goal – on themselves – as Liverpool FC took a 5-1 lead mid way through the second half of their fifth round FA Cup game.  Three own goals in one game?  Unbelievable.  As the Seagulls cautiously kicked off again, the Liverpool home crowd could be hear chanting we want six.

Rewind about 24 hours.  I am getting reports on the outcomes of some soccer games that a group of U12 boys have been participating.  10-0 and 9-2 for the good guys.

Hmmmm….

I wonder if any of the parents present were heard chanting we want another?

Amidst these events, from coast to coast, the country is gripped by the debate between keeping standings and not keeping standings in youth soccer.  Some say taking away the standings takes away the competition.  In doing so, you are ruining the game.  Those on the other side say that there is too much focus and too many adult-driven bad decisions made in the name of winning.  Player development is therefore sacrificed.

Whether standings are kept or not, youth soccer teams will continue to compete against each other.  Some of those games will be well contested and close in score while others will be blowouts.  Maybe a more important question then do we keep standings in youth soccer is how do we avoid blowouts?

Just because we put a child into a competitive sports program does not mean the outcome for that child and his/her teammates will be a competitive one.  What we really want is a challenging game.  One that pushes the players out of their comfort zones and forces them to confront their weaknesses in a growth promoting way.  As Bob Bigelow has said a competitive environment is not necessarily challenging but a challenging environment is going to be competitive.

So while we do our best to ensure that we provide children with challenging contests, there will be the occasional whale versus the minnow.  And even if it the players are more balanced than that on paper, kids are kids.  One day the team you coach can be amazing, the next you can ask yourself if they’ve ever played the sport before.  Development is a roller coaster.  Try as we might, there will be times where we could be blown out or we could do the blowing out.

If you are the team that is or is going to do the blowing out, what do you do in those situations?  Do you keep scoring or do you call the dogs off?  Is running up the score a display of poor sportpersonship?  I don’t know if there is a right answer.  I think it depends.  For me, the first and most important thing to do is to honour the game.  And honouring the game will look different depending on the participants taking part in the contest.    I don’t approve of fans taunting a team by calling for their own team to score more goals.  However, if you’re a player that makes your living by playing the game of soccer and you find yourself getting trounced and taunted than so be it.  Chalk it up to a tough day at the office.

In many professional sports, calling off the dogs actually does happen.  The star players are withdrawn and the second stringers get to play more.  However, in professional soccer it can actually be a sign of disrespect to do call in the replacements, and take the foot off the gas.

I agree.  To honour the game, you cannot take your foot off the gas.  That is just as disrespectful to your opponent as running up the score.  And at the youth level, where players are trying to develop their skills, playing at less than their highest intensity isn’t going to push them from their comfort zones to help them improve further.  We have ourselves a conundrum then, don’t we.

My advice to teams when I have coached in this situation is that four goals is our limit.  Once we have a four goal lead, we change our plans – not our intensity.  This now presents us with the opportunity to work on other things – things that we might not be that good at yet.  In attempting to do these things in a game, sometimes parity begins to reestablish itself.  Our opponents are working their buns off to try and save some face.  We are working our hardest as well but the things we are doing are out of our comfort zones.  What got us the four goal lead would have been things that we were good at, things that were in our comfort zones.  In doing this we honour the game, respect our opponents and continue to challenge ourselves.

In youth soccer, there are plenty of challenges you can pose to your team when they have reached their goal scoring cap.

“To see what children can do, you must stop giving them things.” – Stephen Chbosky

The last number of posts I have talked about the needs of the 21st century learner and how that has differed from the more traditional learning environment in which you or I was probably educated – or even by which we most likely do our coaching now.  The relationship between instructor and learner is crucial to the end result; that being the learning.

Why can a child remember everything about a video they watched on Youtube and nothing out of a school text book?

Motivation = meaning.  That Youtube video might be an annoyance as far as educational value is concerned, however, we all should sit up and take notice that it is through that medium that what is seen is most remembered.  I think it gets remembered because it is the child, and not the adult, that makes the choice to watch that video.  It is of interest to the child or the child’s friends and for that reason their is motivation to observe and comprehend.  Because there is motivation to observe and comprehend the content it is meaningful.  It sticks.

Therefore, choice, because of its powerful intrinsic motivation building powers, is important to the making of meaningful learning.

How much choice do school children get on what it is they learn?  How much choice do the children we coach get on what they learn?

For those committed to modern learning, the motto of a little goes a long way couldn’t be more true.  Beware of the curriculum that is a mile wide and an inch deep goes the common educational saying.  The translation?  Stop trying to teach school children everything and then getting poor results because there is never enough time spent on any one thing.  Instead spend more time teaching them a few things very well.

Could we or should we be doing the same thing in sport?  If we did, what would be those few things that you would definitely want to get across?

But there’s so much to teach our children in school and sport you say.  Sure.  As the saying goes though, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.  We can force feed kids all the things we think they should know (because it’s in the curriculum) or we can let their natural inquisition lead them towards what is interesting.  Who knows.  If they are fired up enough by leading their own learning, they just might eventually end up learning the stuff we wanted them to in the first place.

Process and content.

The process of instruction (how do I get across my content?) is important.  In regards to this, I think learning about learning is a key feature in becoming a competent human in the 21st century.  And the content we instruct is also important.  As we discussed above the learner him or herself should have a much larger say in what it is he or she is learning.  The first part – the process –  is very much in the hands of the individual teachers or coaches.  The second part – content – is a little more difficult to affect change on because it is at the level of the bureaucrats and politicians.  And those types make their decisions on whichever way the electoral winds blow.  Of course the problem as I see it is that we all exist in the 21st century but we don’t all collectively know what it means to be a 21st century learner.

So let’s assume you as a coach (or teacher) have the ability to instruct your content in a learner-friendly way.  We have talked in a previous post about creating the right type of learning environment in which to experience that learner-directed content.  But even with a learner-centred environment and content, learning may not be meaningful unless we consider the interaction that occurs between instructor and learner.

What does that instructor have to do or how does that instructor have to be?

Guide on the side, not a sage on the stage.

You may have heard this saying before.  It summarizes the role of the modern teacher or coach.  The traditional pedagogue has been a distributor of knowledge.  He/she has been a sage on the stage.  An expert to be relied upon.  A performer whom we listen to and learn from.

However, in a learner-centred environment with learner-driven curriculum, the instructor takes on a much less dramatic but by no means a less important role.  A modern day teacher or coach first captivates learners by posing a problem that is neither too hard nor too easy for the learners.  Next, this contemporary instructor guides a discussion between and amongst the learners but he/she does not control it.  At this point, mistakes are not corrected and certain (we might call them correct) ideas aren’t singled out for praise.

Alfie Kohn, in his book the Schools Our Children Deserve, provides a description of such an instructor through the eyes of a math expert:

“she listens and watches.  And only when the children seem satisfied with a solution does she put a further question, leading them to yet another problem, their own problem, which they feel compelled to resolve.  As she sees it, her task is to pose questions that will lead through – rather than around – puzzlement to the construction of important mathematical concepts. [Such teaching] cannot be scripted; rather, it depends on one’s capacity to respond spontaneously to students’ perplexities and discoveries.”

The teacher described above is a guide or a facilitator.  However, she does not guide by making things easier for her students.  In fact, she makes things more complex.  She throws them a curve ball just when it seems that they think they have solved the problem.  She ensures that her students truly understand, not simply equipped with the right answer.  She listens to what her students have to say and then through further questioning probes for weaknesses that require the students to do more thinking.

In this environment the 21st century instructor must allow as much time as is needed to make learning meaningful – a reason why the curriculum cannot be a mile wide.  If the pace is rushed (i.e., “Okay, I better give them the answer because we are running out of time and need to move on”) instead of leisurely, then this approach will not work.  Also, the modern instructor must allow for collaboration.  Learning is social, not solitary.  And working together is much more motivating than working alone.  If we allow players to learn together in a team sport like soccer than why can’t we do that in school too?  Why does learning from another student have to mean you are cheating?

Finally, and something that is covered very clearly and convincingly in Kohn’s book, the guide on the side has to be prepared for interdisciplinary learning.  In school learning is most commonly segmented into subjects – this room is English, this one math, this one science.  That appears to be one way to make learning less learner-centred.  We do the same thing in coaching.  For example, in soccer we teach passing and receiving separate from defending separate from transition separate from shooting and so on.  We coach children the way we have been teaching them.

I think that this brings us to an interesting point along this modern learning road.  For learning to have a better chance of being meaningful it seems it should be interdisciplinary.  That means combining topics, not separating them in our coaching of our players.  That’s the first point of interest.  The second comes from the Kohn book quote from above.  It is the notion that facilitated learning cannot be scripted.

And these two things I’d like to talk about next time.  Next post February, 20th.

So did you know that FIFA (soccer’s world governing body) has a big grassroots movement, complete with all the bells and whistles, going now?  And the great thing is that their message is that coaches should let the game be the teacher.  It’s funny though.  I’ve been in coaching for 25 years and I’ve heard that slogan plenty of times.  I think we’re guilty of being hypocrites.  We’ve been saying the game should be the teacher for a long time now but then we’ve turned around and consistently coached our players using drills.

I think the initiative or movement that FIFA has created is great news.  It means soccer, which traditionally is adverse to changing things or being at the forefront and blazing new trails (just look at soccer’s stubbornness towards the use of goal line technology) is showing that they are in touch with the needs of the modern learner in the 21st century.

FIFA says that the main things for a coach to consider during a training session is that it should be fun, the players should learn and that the kids should get to play the game (which of course can be used to achieve the first two things).  And small-sided games are to play a big part in the grassroots training session routine.  Says FIFA:

“The main way that children learn is by playing a lot; in this way the children enjoy themselves and come to love football.”

FIFA’s grassroots website goes on to give some great information on the importance of small-sided games to learning and development and also presents some fantastic visuals on structuring training sessions for players under the age of twelve.  Their suggestion is to divide the session into three phases (warm-up, main part and cool down).  Warm-up and cool down should feature fun games that provide the opportunity for the children to have fun while engaging in good habits.  That’s a good start.  The best part though is what they recommend should be done during the main part.  They call the sequencing of the main part global, followed by analysis and then another global sequence.  In other words, FIFA is saying that we should start with a game, then do something more drill-like and then finish with a game.  A common theme can and should run through the sequencing of the global-analysis-global main part of the session.  This is what connects the three segments and helps to provide context and meaning.

You can learn more about FIFA’s grassroots training session recommendation by clicking here.

For those of you involved in soccer in Canada, the news gets even better.  The Canadian Soccer Association is also embracing this approach.  Recently, the CSA launched Volume 2 of their LTPD documentation.  Unlike Volume 1, it’s not a document that has been made readily available to the soccer public.  It’s only been distributed to technical folk that are tasked with the day to day operation of clubs and other soccer organizations.  Volume 2, which I think could be nicknamed ‘The Matrix,’ is full of tables and charts that outline what we should be teaching to the players and when we should be teaching it.

More importantly for this discussion though is their belief of the importance of small-sided games.  Says the CSA:

“During game-like training situations, players learn to combine their technical skills with tactical decision making under realistic playing conditions.  Moment-to-moment decision making is critical to their long-term success in the game.”

They then go on to finish with something that, if you’ve been reading this Blog religiously, you’ll know right away I’d probably like to disagree with.  They suggest within a note contained inside a set of brackets that players must first have mastered technical skills before applying those skills to tactical decision making within small-sided games.  Of course, you know I think this is completely untrue.  If it were true then no adult recreational sport leagues would exist.  After all, many of the people that partake in those particular leagues have little or no prior skills training at all.  Yet they can play the game and improve at it – both technically and tactically but more so tactically – simply by playing the game.

Anyway, let’s stick to the positive.

The CSA goes on to talk about the importance for players in learning to read the game and that soccer is very much a player’s and not a coach’s game (i.e., decisions have to be made within split seconds which means no time for coaches to be shouting out instructions which the players then process and follow).  Says the CSA:

“The best way to develop fast and accurate decision-making is to provide ample opportunities to practice decision-making in scrimmages, games and game-like drills.”

They go on to discuss that our approach in instructing players has typically been a behavioural/direct instruction-based one designed to provide enough repetition to make skills automatic.  They mention that current research on the modern learner suggests that training decision making is a better long-term development choice (behavioural/direct instruction is a good short-term solution if you are looking to get results on the scoreboard now).

And the CSA has obviously gotten on board with FIFA’s grassroots movement in the design and delivery of a training session.  Canadian Soccer officials are now recommending through their coach education programming that the method discussed by FIFA Grassroots be used.  They’ve termed theirs the GAG method (Game-Activity-Game).  You may know that the Canadian Soccer Association has revamped their coaching courses as of 2012 to better align with their LTPD.  The GAG method takes its place as the key instructional method for players twelve and under and older recreational players (interestingly enough, the recommendation – from FIFA – is that a more traditional skill development model be used in working with older elite level players).  Something to discuss another day I suppose.

From what I have seen of the new coach education system, I think things look great.  The courses will be taught treating you, the participant, as a 21st century learner and the content provided will be presented such that you see your players as 21st century learners too.  If you’ve got the old certification courses, you will be able to get equivalencies for them and not have to take the new courses.  However, I would strongly recommend any soccer coach out there consider making the time to take at least the equivalent new course required to coach at the level you will be coaching at.  I think you’ll enjoy it and I think you’ll find it worth the time and effort.

Next post February 6th.

“Teachers who want to encourage intellectual growth give students time to be confused and create a climate where it’s perfectly acceptable to fall on your face.” – Alfie Kohn

Active and passive.  Two states of being.  When applied to learning one suggests that learners are submissive receivers while the other sees them as direct participants in the act.  As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, the modern way of looking at learning is one that involves the construction of meaning and not the absorption of knowledge.  It is an active, not a passive process.  We do not come into a learning situation without some form of prior knowledge or beliefs.  Learning is the dissonance that occurs when what we thought we knew meets up with something unexpected.  To build agreement again within ourselves, we must resolve that conflict by restructuring what we thought to accommodate the new reality that has just been presented to us.

There is nothing submissive about this.  By its very nature, true learning is the result of a collision of beliefs or a clash of ideas.  Author Alfie Kohn, in his books The Schools Our Children Deserve, puts it this way:

“Thus, the source of all intellectual growth is conflict: conflict between an old belief and a new experience, conflict between two beliefs that are mutually exclusive, or conflict between your belief and mine.  We make sense of things and then remake sense of things and we do it from infancy to death.”

As learning is an active process, it is vital that learners are allowed and expected to take an active role in their learning.  That means setting up an active learning environment which is one, according to Alfie Kohn, that includes the following:

1. The discovery of new things

2. A challenge to existing beliefs

3. Interaction with other learners

4. Sustained reflection

First, is the discovery of new things.  Learners are best served by instructors who don’t try to tell them everything to know (or everything they know).  It has to be about going beyond knowing what the right answer is.  It is more about providing the proper conditions for learning.   Second, active learning is a challenge to existing beliefs which I think we’ve already discussed in enough detail.

Third, active learning involves an interaction with others, not isolation from others as is often the case in a traditional learning environment.  To ask learners to work own their own is to take from them the opportunity to have a dialogue and a debate.  Learning is undeniably a social experience.  And finally in active learning comes the process of sustained reflection.  It is the continuous act of revisiting an idea that allows it to go from dissonance to resonance within our mind.  Reflection makes learning meaningful and therefore more likely to be a permanent feature.

An active learning environment features less time spent by the instructor doing all the talking or even knowing all the answers.  It certainly takes a great deal more instructional skill to figure out how to get learners to think for themselves then to simply tell them what it is they need to know.  Good instructors, instead of settling for the right answer, throw in a monkey wrench.  As Kohn puts it:

“They devise challenges and, if necessary, help illuminate for students what’s interesting about those challenges.  Sometimes they offer guidance and criticism, directions and suggestions – and sometimes they keep their mouths shut.  They might reflect back to a student what she said, subtly reframing her idea when necessary, using different words to bring out the underlying issues.  Rather than being the source of most ideas, teachers serve as mediators, standing between the students and the idea.  They offer what is needed for kids to take charge of their own learning, sometimes helping them along, offering temporary support until the students get it.  And they aren’t afraid to leave some questions unanswered, some explorations unfinished, because, well, that’s how life is.”

I think getting the right answer is to learning the same way focusing on winning is to developing players to play the game better.  Getting the right answer and winning share a great deal in common.  They are highly coveted in our society.  Getting the right answer means you are smart.  Winning means you are great.  The status conferred upon us for this is important to us.  Trying to win and trying to get the right answer involve a great deal of risk.  This can lead to students and players sticking to their comfort zones for fear of failure (“I’ll only raise my hand if I’m sure I know the answer”…”I won’t try to use my skills because I might lose the ball and give up a goal”).  It can also mean that only certain students (the ones that know the right answers) and certain players (the ones who can get the winning done) get the opportunity to show their stuff.  And as a result of the opportunities, those students and players get the praise, experience the – quote, unquote – success and then get even more opportunities to show their stuff.

Excellence then becomes the privilege of the very few instead of the right of all.

As coaches, to promote an active learning environment in sport, we must stop talking and telling athletes what to do so often.  We need to ask more questions to see what the athletes actually do know and we need to listen more, taking seriously what it is they are saying.  We need to have more patience as learning how to learn is a much more time consuming process.  The results won’t always show up in the short-term.  That requires strength of conviction.  There will be plenty of people to put pressure on us when we don’t get the results in the short-term.  As coaches we need to have humility.  We have to be comfortable saying we don’t know what the answer is and we need to be able to accept that sometimes our athletes won’t be where we’d like them to be – one step forward, two steps back.  We need to give up perfection.  Learning.  True learning is messy.  It is untidy.  It is not organized or structured or predictable.

And finally, in creating a more active learning environment for our players, we as coaches must keep the present and the future in their proper places.  We are always working to get our athletes to a certain point and that point is usually a future point in time.  Alfie Kohn calls this vertical learning, which is the need sometime in the future to know what it is that you are learning now.  But we can’t lose sight of our athletes in the here and now.  We also need to honour horizontal learning which is helping learners get what it is they need to know right now to solve their day to day problems.  This, to quote the kids, would be keeping it real.  We would be putting the act of learning into context for the learner.  And when content is put in context for the learner, it is hard for it not to be relevant.  Meaningful.  Useful.  True learning occurs.

Well, I’ve been having fun with this series of posts so far so I think I’ll keep going on the subject.  Next post January 23rd.