Rick’s Rants and Raves

In early September, I got an e-mail from the Youth Sports Director at our local YMCA with this plea:

Would you want to coach again with an assistant? :):):):):) I may need one more….are you in? PLEASE

She followed this up with a phone call and another plea to the three most likely dads on the team:

The 3 of you have had lots of experience with YMCA Soccer!  I have total faith in you to help out with the 7-9 team that needs a coach!   I have placed [your kids] on the same team so you 3 could help each other with covering games and practices.

My “lots of experience” consists of watching my kids’ games for a couple of years, and assistant coaching my son’s team this past spring. I’ve never played soccer. I was a bit skeptical that I was a good choice for the job, but I didn’t want there to  be three co-coaches. Without a clear leader, I was afraid that would lead to confusing practices, and potential conflicts of leadership style (or lack thereof). So I replied “I’ll take the lead role.” And with those 5 words began my first ever experience as a coach of a sports team.

Fortunately, the YMCA sports program is low competition. That means I was coaching for participation and could spend time working on basic skills rather than trying to figure out how to win games. I checked out a couple of books from the library, and read through the material provided by the YMCA, and formulated a plan for my first practice. I used much the same plan for every practice:

• warm up and stretching
• low stress ball handling practice (dribbling with various goals)
• speed and physical mobility (short sprints, stops, turns)
• medium stress ball handling (one-to-one team work, one-vs-one handling, “knock-out”)
• scrimmage, forcing everyone to play every position

When I coached the games, I had a clip board with a grid of the kids names on rows, and four columns to write their positions for each quarter. I had witnessed as a parent other parents questioning coaches as to how much their kids played, and whether or not they got their fair share of time. So I wanted to be sure I was as fair as possible, and in the first couple of games, I tried to rotate the kids through a variety of positions so that they could all get a feel for them. In the later games, I tried as much as possible to honor the kids’ requests for their position of choice.

I was really fortunate in the kids that were on my team. Of the 11 kids, I had one fantastic player, 8 reasonably strong players, and only 2 “Space Cadets”–the term one of my friends uses for the kids who just don’t seem to get it. I was typically able to keep the Space Cadets separated, and paired with a stronger player to help compensate.

My assistant coaches were decent guys and were generally helpful during practices and games. One of them, Kent, had a habit of constantly yelling instructions at the kids during the game. “Get on that ball. Go! Go! Go! We’re going that way guys! Get down there. Go! Go! Go! Pass it to the center! Pass it to the center! Get up the field!” all in the space of about 10 seconds. It was incredibly tiresome, and drowned me out on a number of occasions. Rather than tell him to tone it down, I just let it go, and instructed the kids as much as possible during play stoppage.

Kent also had a habit of getting onto the field by a step or two. Normally I didn’t worry much about it especially when play was not close to us. But one time he was about three steps into the field, and play had come pretty close to us. I was afraid the referee was going to reprimand him so I said to Kent “You may want to step off the field.” His response? “You should read the rules. We’re allowed to have one coach on the field.” I corrected him: “I have read the rules, and that applies to the younger groups, not this age group.” He stepped off the field. The next game when he found himself accidentally on the field, he quickly stepped off.

In the end, it was a positive experience. The kids were a lot of fun, and the parents were generally communicative when their kids weren’t going to be at a game or practice. At the end-of-season “banquet” a number of them thanked me for my efforts. I’m glad did it.

Oh, and by the way, our record (“We don’t keep track at the Y”) was 6-0.