Mental Tragedy On The Soccer Field

What a great weekend I had! Well, most of it. I’ll explain why there were ups and downs.

On Saturday, I had the great opportunity to coach my daughters soccer team in a Kick It tournament that was held in Pflugerville. I can tell you that the 5 young ladies (we were called the Fire Ants) that were with me absolutely dominated this tournament…I mean dominated.

We played a total of 5 games. Our first game at 9:30 am and our last game at 4:30 pm.

During this time the Fire Ants scored 40+ points against their opponents while only allowing 3 points to be scored against them. Three of the five games were complete shutouts.

Now, I say I had the opportunity to coach this team but realistically I was there to support and guide these young ladies that were there to have fun.

My “pep talk” before the tourney took a minute and a half and here it is:

Hey ladies…Are you ready to have some fun? Good. Well, there are 4 things that I want you to think about and here they are:

Pressure the ball
Pass to your teammates
Press up past the half line
HAVE LOTS AND LOTS OF FUN

Then I asked them, “Can you do those 4 things?” The overwhelming response was, “Yeahhhhhh.”

Then they did in a dominating fashion.

I made sure that no matter what was going on, these ladies heard nothing but positivity and praise from me. They laughed, giggled and stayed very relaxed the entire day.

This was the great part of that 100 degree Saturday.

Now the down side is, there was one particular coach out at this tournament that struck me so deep with emotion that I could hardly contain myself at certain times.

You see, this coach had it all wrong.

He didn’t support his team. He didn’t encourage his team. No “good jobs”. No “great plays”. Not even a “good try”, a hand shake or a high five. In fact, it was quite the opposite with comments like this:

“Come on, what are you doing?!”
“Have we ever done that in practice…ever?!”
“Your moves are pathetic!” this was to his own daughter to whom he also said, “You’re so damn dramatic”, after she was hurt on a play.

You have to understand, all of these comments (and this is just a small portion of them) were said loudly in a manner that he wanted his team to know that they were messing up and doing things wrong (according to him).

This went on all day long in ever single game that this guy coached. The sad thing is, his team never responded to him so he continued to yell the same things over and over again.

Here’s the even sadder part: The parents of these 9 year olds just sat back and allowed their children to be downgraded, humiliated and mentally abused at the hands of this wanna be team leader, sometimes joining in the negativity.

The absolute tragedy of the whole thing is, those little innocent 9 year old children went home at the end of the day feeling like there was absolutely nothing that they could do right. Nothing.

And, for what?

Because we have parents and coaches who seem to forget that this world stopped being all about them when they chose to have children or take on the role of training and coaching children.

A child is not going to win just because you want them to. A child is not going to kick a ball harder just because you want them to. A child is not going to run faster or jump higher or play harder just because you want them to. A child’s perception of what needs to happen is much different than what we, as parents and coaches, so often expect of them.

Let’s stop the madness and get back to letting our children have fun at whatever THEY choose to do. Let’s take the unnecessary pressures off of our kids. Please.

Of course, children need to be guided and lead. But that’s just it…let’s effectively and positively guide them so that they can grow up confident and full of self-esteem.

Athletics is fun, so let’s fight to keep it that way and our children will love it for a lifetime.

I promise to do my part and I’m going to start by positively reaching out to that coach later this week. I’ll keep you posted.

Please leave your comments as I would love to hear your opinions on this.