Revisiting a Good Soccer Book

During the height of the pandemic, I was in Florida and getting ready to be the assistant coach of my son's soccer team. I'd played before, but never coached, and they needed a volunteer who knew something about the game.

Naturally, days after I volunteered, I learned I'd essentially be the coach for the first two months of the season since the head coach would be on a military deployment.

Wanting to prepare myself, one of the things I did was to read Travis Norsen's excellent Play With Your Brain: A Guide to Smarter Soccer for Players, Coaches, and Parents, having heard about it fairly recently. I found it very helpful, although it was geared towards kids older than my son, who was seven at the time.

That said, I was still glad when the other guy arrived: You need to be bigger and, more important, a lot louder than I am to get and keep the attention of kids that age.

I was able to retire from coaching after that season and we let my son, who wasn't that interested in playing, do other things after another year.

Since our move to Louisiana, though, he's become interested in playing soccer (and now seems to have a good eye for the goal), thanks to playing it at recess a lot at school, and he'll be on a team again this spring.

I'm not volunteering myself as a possible coach this time, but I will read the book again so I can give him decent advice, if he wants it or a good opportunity arises to volunteer some advice. (The ideal long shot would be to get him to go through the book with me, but we'll see how this unfolds.)

And, of course, if his interest is as great as it seems this time and he does end up needing a coach, I want to be ready to do that, too in the future.

--CAV

P.S. This post was prompted in part by an interview with the author that I encountered.

The following was particularly interesting, given that the circumstances around the pandemic kept him from seeing how well he could implement his approach:

The other thing your question made me think of was the fact that some of the kids that I've seen improve the most, from reading the book, have been of this somewhat shy, less flamboyant, personality category. I mean the sort of kids who are described by the slogan "still waters run deep" -- kids who are super-smart but quiet and perhaps not the fastest or most aggressive on the field. For kids like that, the book seems to have been incredibly valuable. They just needed somebody to explain clearly what they should be trying to do, and why, and they're immediately able to start contributing positively instead of disappearing into the background. And needless to say, this can really help the team in addition to being great for these individual kids. I mean, what coach wouldn't want to convert a quiet background role-player into a little mini Sergio Busquets?

Two thoughts come to my mind: (1) I wish there had been a book like this when I was a kid, and (2) I don't know if future Sergio Busquets in the cards for my boy, but I can dream.

-- CAV