I coached Youth Soccer for 5 years, so I say this with a little experience. There is something fundamentally wrong with a sport that routinely ends up in a tie. As a coach, soccer parents are by far the most liberal types I’ve dealt with as a group. That includes football, wrestling, baseball, softball, and volleyball parents.
Look at a community’s youth athletics programs, and you will be able to tell the ideological makeup of the community by what sports are at the top of the list in participation and support.
Just my 2 cents.
I always loved watching my daughter play soccer. She’s typically been coached by people who don’t always have a lot of experience with the game beyond basic rules (and this includes me—I served for a year as volunteer coach). Still, every coach she ever had seemed to try their best to help these kids improve, have fun, and maybe pursue the sport further as they got older.
In my daughter’s case, over the 7 years she played, she was sometimes on teams that won nearly all their games, and on teams that nearly lost them all. As a coach in a situation like the latter, you need to be constantly encouraging in order to keep the kids interested and motivated. Everyone, in my experience, understood that winning was the goal—but it wasn’t “everything.”
My voting station is a local elementary school and, while standing in an unusually long midterm election line, I had the opportunity to read the stuff on their walls. There were a multitude of signs, each with a highlighted inspirational word and a definition to go along.
One sign said “With the proper ATTITUDE, anyone can win.” It's adjacent neighbor said “Anyone can WIN if the rules apply equally.” These seemed somewhat contradictory. When rules are equal, winners win and losers lose. Only when rules are unequally applied can everyone win. And then, what's the point?
I also saw that “LOYALTY means keeping ones commitments.” I always considered that to be more to do with integrity.
I refrained from comment at the time, but it is rather a sad thing that our schools are so badly run.
I’ve maintained since the last Israel/Lebanon/Gaza dust-up (and seen demonstrated in Iraq, and Afghanistan) that the ‘Civilized’ Western Nations want to conduct warfare by T-Ball rules - “no winner, no loser, and nobody gets hurt”....
Unfortunately, our adversaries have never even *heard* of T-Ball....
I live on Long Island where you either have 8 year olds playing for “nurturing” teams or you have them on leagues where the parents are like animals taking the athletic maneuvers of their children way too seriously. I agree that it gets kind of ridiculous to have teams that want to win, but do not give them the tools to do so. However, neither do these teams have try outs, which enables just about any kid to join. If you have that kind of dynamic , then how can a coach refer to a standard? My sons were involved in soccer, little league and football. They were very good athletes and were frustrated at times with the boys who were not. This was certainly true when they were elementary school age and the majority of boys are pampered. I always felt this was so because parents today like many parents of all generations, tend to live vicariously through their children. Surely this was the case at the schools my children attended. These were predominantly high achieving public schools in a certain Long Island Jewish neighborhood. These kids were on every team and were cheered on encouragingly by fathers who in their youth most likely were not even asked to haul water for the athletic Irish kids on the team. So now that they hold the cards in their districts, their children are not going to go through the same disappointment as they did. For these kids all this coddling is ultimately meaningless, sportswise, because once they enter the 9th grade the team sports are over. The risk of injury is too great, I was told, to threaten future surgeons.If they play a sport at all, it is tennis. I know it sounds silly, and maybe it is because I am a mother and not a father, but I thought it was kind to have all kinds of kids on the team when they were little. When my sons were in high school, their team was not coddled, and I recall the coach doing a lot of yelling. I don’t know. They say the British Empire was created by the public (private) school boys who were cricket players in their youth. They took it very seriously.
If you don’t like soccer, just come out and say so...why post a useless article that could apply to any sport nowadays.
All 3 of my kids play soccer, and the athleticism and stamina they’ve achieved through this sport is fantastic. Whether they play baseball or football, they can run circles around non-soccer playing kids.
I am 60+ and still play “football” on Sundays. I can assure you that my team has few liberals on it, though assessing someone’s political philosophy based upon a sport is absurd.
I coached both my boys. My expectations were you have fun, you try your hardest, you persevere, you show good sportsmanship and teamwork, you think and you learn. Coaches who do not add value by selecting the right positions for their players and suggesting ways individuals can improve, will quickly find that the fun goes out of the game, people stop trying, teamwork disappears and nobody learns about life or the game.
On the other hand, the notion of organizing team sports for 8 and 9 year olds strikes me as exceedingly odd. They can and do manage quite nicely on their own.
With this kind of indoctrination a kid could very well grow up to be a democrat senator or even president. At the very least they can become teachers or college profs.
That says it all.