UK: Child footballers banned from reading results

The Telegraph ^ | 9/18/2008 | Jon Swaine

[spetznaz]

Oh Britain ....once you were Great.

[Myrddin]

Totally stupid. Perhaps they will limit participation to eunuchs. The concept of "building character" through competition and learning the concept of winning and losing is important. If you never learn to recover from failure and press ahead, you will fall on your ass the first time you fail in the real world. Lots of "feel good" for pansies.

My experiences in the Boy Scouts provided lots of opportunities to excel...and fail...and overcome failure. I learned tenacity and pressed forth to Eagle Scout. Much success in the real world is more tenacity than talent. Too many people give up when faced with minuscule challanges.

Over the last two weeks I've resumed riding motorcycles on the street and dirt. I took my big 384 lb Suzuki DR 650SE to a very remote mountain at 6200 ft elevation. No cell phone coverage. I laid the bike down twice...once on my left leg with the me and top of the bike pointed downhill. There was no rescue fairy around. I did see some bleached bones in the brush. It was totally up to me to recover and get out of the area. I still have a big bruise on the back of my right thigh from pulling a muscle on the first lay down.

This evening I traveled from the Trail Creek trail head to Michaud creek road. It was quite climb up on a decent gravel road. The descent down the other side was a very rutted double track. Lots of loose sand. A tough traversal in my unpracticed state with barely suitable offroad tires. The dirt road on the descent had lots of animal tracks...coyotes, deer, big cats and snakes. The big surprise came when I looked up just in time to roll my front tire over a stretched out rattlesnake. It was no time to panic or pause. It was a challenging ride. Solo again.

[Charlespg]

Comment----"This is so stupidly PC it beggars description. The UK is becoming a nations of whooly woofters. We used to be a great nation now we are a universal joke. Get real you idiot cretins. Life needs winners not softy babies."

Then why dont you run these idiots out of town

[Lazarus Starr]

The U.K. ceased to exist the other day when they adopted Sharia Law. Soon they will be the same as any islamic country in the mideast, and will see their lefties, whom invited this whole thing, stoned to death. The surreal thing about this whole affair with the U.K. and their rush to be more P.C. than any other nation is that they didn’t even see the viper they invited into their homes.

But I’d have to say the most frightening aspect of this is that America seems to want to follow them in the same path. Really odd. I’ve been around a long time now and really begin to think I’ve outlived my time. It’s like seeing a child stick their hand into a flame and get a severe burn and then with determination, do it again and again... Each time unable to connect the pain with the flame. What’s even worst is we have a whole educational system we’re paying for encouraging our children to burn their hands in the P.C. flames.

Sometimes I think that the U.K., Canada, and Australia should send all their Conservatives to the U.S. and we should return the favor by sending them our Libs. It’s sure make life easier for both ideologies. The libs could all self destruct while being cheered on by those of like mind and the Conservatives could raise their families in peace, without any BS. But then that’s a pipe dream for sure. /sigh

[Fluke Codewriter]

It’s the story of Harrison Bergeron and the Handicapper General coing to fruition...

http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/hb.html

[Gemsbok]

Exactly, If your beautiful (you must wear a mask) If your athletic (you must wear weights and shackles to encumber your performance) If you’re capable of intelligent thought (You must be crippled with a bug in your ear, screaming interruptions into your every thought).

If you revolt, they will eliminate you.

[ohioman]

Those policies are not here where I live in Ohio. We actually keep score for all kid’s sports.

[dfwgator]

OK, boys! Let’s go out there and NOT WIN today!

Future Derby County players.

[ohioman]

Sounds fishy. We keep score for all kids sports in Ohio and do none of the PC crap you mention. Your post is sickening. What part of the South are you in? Some liberal Atlanta suburb full of Yankee transplants.

[TKDietz]

I'm not in a liberal place at all. We're Republican all the way. You need to go out and watch little kids play soccer some time. With the young ones try as we might there is no strategy. It's a bunch of little guys all running after the ball. Passing is minimal or nonexistent. They just run around in a little mob following the ball. You'll have 5 and 7 year olds on the same team, 7 and 8 year olds, etc. There is a huge degree of developmental disparity between them. Some are tall and strong and fast, others are teeny tiny, slow and can barely kick the ball. One good kid on a team will score all the goals. If there are two good kids on the team that team will dominate the league. I've coached football and soccer and there is a big difference in how well kids are able to play these sports. In football you tell the kids where to line up and give one the ball and tell him to run. People will block for him and the defense will tackle. They don't need a great deal of skill at first. Soccer is a lot more tougher game for them to understand. It requires skills up front that take a while to learn. They have to be able to control the ball, make good passes, spread out and stay in their positions. It takes a few years to teach these skills. Some kids will grow so much faster than others. Some pick up the game a lot quicker. What we'll do is have all the kids from the same age group in our league practice together mostly. We'll mix them up and put them in smaller groups and run the groups through stations where they'll do drills and have scrimmages. We have a little bit of separate team practice to get ready for our Saturday games. We go into the games to win, and the kids certainly know whether they win or lose, but we try not to make it all about that. These are little kids who are still learning the fundamentals of the game, and invariably we'll have a couple of kids that are miles ahead of the others on one team so that they just dominate all the other teams. It's devastating to these kids to have these games where they won't score a single goal and the other team will score 14. The differences between these players aren't really something you can do much to correct by teaching them better or making them work harder. The kid who had a growth spurt and stands a foot and a half taller than the other kids is going to be able run faster and run over all the little ones. Get a couple like that on a team, and it's over for the rest of the teams. We try to make everything as even as possible but we always have a team or two that lose consistently and one that just dominates all others. It's just luck of the draw.

We also travel to tournaments that are a lot more competitive. What goes on in these is that we cherry pick these best kids from our local league who are ready for competitive soccer, practice a few times separately and take them to tournaments against other “all star” type teams. And of course the older and more experienced they get the more competitive it gets on the local level too. As the kids get older the huge developmental differences disappear. They all understand the game and have basic skills and their at roughly the same physical maturity level.

What's going on with the little kids is not what you think. They're having a great time and they're learning the game. We're playing to win on the local level too. I'm competitive by nature and I'm screaming at the kids to get up, stop crying, run for the ball and not be afraid of anything, etc. We're not just getting all mamby-pamby with them, but dang it we are talking about little kids here. I don't know. I didn't understand this at first either until I had kids playing in the league and started coaching myself. You just have to have to watch little kids playing soccer for a while, preferably in the way we're doing it and the way we used to do it, and you'll get it.

[truthandlife]

That is why the UK has done nothing on the international stage since the 60’s. They have the best league in the world the EPL but can’t produce any “homegrown” players to win international championships. They didn’t even make it to the final of the European Championship this year.

[ohioman]

Maybe the difference has something to do about the sport. I am a football guy (Roll Tide!) and don’t know squat about soccer. In fact my son played college FB.

For my grandson’s 6-7 year-old football team, we certainly keep score. I also admire our Pee Wee league’s deidication to competition. We even finished our football game after being hit by Ike in the 2nd Quarter on Sunday. The power was out, the scoreboard was damaged by 75MPH winds, but we finished the game. I admire how Ohio folks take their football seriously like they do in my home state of Alabama. BTW - It was a wide open area so we were safe from the falling trees. And we won too!

[TankerKC]

Soccer is the root of all evil.

[TKDietz]

It is the differences in the sports. When little kids play football it looks like football. They know where they are supposed to be each play and basically and what they are supposed to be doing. It's harder for them to get the big picture in soccer. It requires a fair amount of skill and knowledge before they can really play what resembles real soccer. They have to be able to dribble the ball, make a move and get around somebody. They have to be able to kick the ball hard enough and accurately enough to pass it, and to be able to stay in their positions as they move the ball down the field so that there will be somebody in the right place to accept a pass. I've got 8 and 9 year old girls now and a few of them who have been playing a few years are really starting to get it. It's exciting to see them figuring out the game finally. They're staying in their positions pretty well, moving the ball up the field with passes, centering it in front of the goal like they are supposed to do, and we're getting to the point where the center striker knows where she needs to be right in front of the goal when the ball is centered. My defenders are starting to pass the ball to my strikers rather than just kicking it away. I've got the team dominating the league now though, and of course some parents think we've stacked the deck because none of the other teams are playing at our level yet. That always happens. We haven't stacked the deck though and really it's not my coaching skills. I've just got a few athletic kids with experience and knowledge of the game. And for some reason on average mine seem to be a little bigger than the kids on the other teams, luck of the draw. At first in soccer that's what it's all about. If you have bigger faster kids you will win. They run around in a big mob and the ball ends up getting kicked out of the mob and then the fastest kids get to it first and get it down the field, not so much by dribbling, just by kicking it out in front of them and running to it faster than everyone else. They'll get more shots on the goal, and some will go in. It's really exciting to see real skill and knowledge coming into play with my kids now. That's the great equalizer in soccer. As they get older and learn the game and develop ball handling skills size and speed will still matter, but not nearly as much as it does for the little ones.

[ohioman]

If it fits soccer (of which I admit my ignorance of) then it’s fine by me. However if they did quit keeping score for the Pee Wee football her in Ohio there would be quit an uproar. Therefore, I doubt it ever happens for youth football here.

[TKDietz]

What they are talking about in the article won’t even happen with soccer here because they wouldn’t publish results of little kids games in the newspaper here to begin with. Do they publish the winners of pee wee football or baseball games where you live? The deal about giving all the kids trophies and stuff has been going on in all little kids sports since at least the seventies when I was a little kid playing sports. They’re little kids. We want to make them all feel good about themselves. We want them to learn team work and have winning attitudes and play with all their hearts too, but we don’t make winning everything and crush their little spirits when they get bested. You just don’t do that to little kids.

[ohioman]

They do publish the winners at the end of the season in the local small town newspaper. However, they all get a trophy for participating, which is fine by me.