I’ve coached youth soccer for about 10 years. Started out as an assistant for the town team that my twin daughters were on when they were younger. Eventually I started educating myself, read books, bought tapes and DVDs, watched games on Fox Soccer Channel, took the D, E and F licensing courses, watched other experienced coaches, and even played in a men’s pickup game for a couple of years until a severe leg injury ended my career. (I now referee to get my soccer fix.) Eventually I moved to coaching in a club with teams in the Mass Premier League (MAPLE) and Mass Soccer Conference (MASC). As the years have passed I realized that our youth soccer programs do things backwards. We appoint or accept parents who might have never touched a soccer ball in their life and let them coach kids at their formative years when they need a good foundation in technique. The higher licensed coaches whom I have met typically are working with older club teams when the kids are already past their formative years in terms of technique. Occasionally I’ve run into a town coach who played as a kid and/or has a license of some kind. I felt that the kids on those teams were lucky to benefit from this coach’s technical foundation. (Note: I recognize that having a license doesn’t automatically makes you a good coach. But it is an indicator of some commitment to coaching education. Many of the coaches I’ve met in the license course have good technique.)
From what I understand the structure of youth soccer in some states like Virginia is vertically integrated so that the town programs automatically feed into their premier programs. Here in Massachusetts the towns and clubs are mostly independent of each other. As a result some towns resent the clubs who they perceive are stealing kids from their programs. Therefore the towns do not actively promote moving on to club soccer. I’m not saying this phenomenon is true for all town programs. From visiting the web sites for many of the towns in the Boston Area Youth Soccer league (BAYS) I’ve noticed that some have a Director of Coaching, insist on minimum licenses for coaches, run clinics for the coaches, have ties to a local club or are involved in teaching technique to the younger age kids. Their teams seem to do better overall than towns that do not.
