By Tim Bradbury, Director of Coaching, Eastern New York Youth Soccer Association
It is a drum I have beaten before, and one that is revisited on almost every coaching license or diploma course offered. Based on the many games I have watched this season, it is a drum worth beating again.
The conversation usually begins with a simple question: What makes soccer unique? From there, we connect the nature of the game to how players learn and what they enjoy most about playing.
Eventually, coaches arrive at an important realization: soccer is a game that demands players read and understand situations, scan constantly, and make countless rapid decisions based on what they perceive around them. Decision-making is not a small part of the game — it is the game.
There is often another breakthrough moment when coaches recognize something equally important: players actually enjoy making decisions for themselves. They enjoy solving problems. In fact, they are uniquely positioned to do so. Players know more about their own bodies, athletic abilities, technical skill levels, and emotional states than anyone else possibly can.
At any given moment in a match, a player occupies a unique position on a specific blade of grass, facing a specific problem in a constantly changing environment. Only that player has access to all the information needed to begin solving that problem.
Each decision they make, good or bad, becomes part of their growth. Every experience helps shape better decisions the next time around. Soccer truly is the players’ game, and players must be allowed the freedom to think within it.
As both a soccer fan and an educator, this seems obvious to me. That is why I am continually staggered by the drive, passion, and sometimes outright anger displayed by parents and coaches who spend entire games making sure players are either unable to think or too afraid to do so.
So, to every parent or coach who constantly shouts instructions during games, I would ask you to honestly consider the following questions:
- Do you value your child’s ability to reason and think independently?
- Do you recognize that soccer is a game in which every player makes hundreds of decisions each match?
- How would you feel if your child went to school and, while trying to solve a math problem, adults stood beside them screaming answers?
- What matters more to you: your child’s long-term growth and enjoyment, or the scoreline at the end of the game?
- By what process do you magically place yourself inside the player’s body — seeing, feeling, and understanding everything they do — so that you can decide the “correct” solution to the problem they face?
For educational reasons, developmental reasons, enjoyment reasons, and simply because it makes sense, make a pledge this season:
Let the players think.
Let them solve problems.
Let them grow.