downside to reading McCormick is that a lot of youth coaches will tend to drive you insane
Yes the solution is to coach yourself
Which leads to parents driving you insane
Been coaching 5th grade girls soccer since they were in Kinder. I never played soccer and my knowledge before coaching was basically "don't use your hands". It's one of my favorite parts of my life. In the fall we went 5-3 and they worked their butts off. My daughter could totally go "competitive" but we're waiting another year to do that and sticking with rec until middle school.
What is your goal such that you would go competitive in middle school, but not now? I understand why you would rather have it be more relaxed now, but what is the goal in going competitive?
Kind of weird question.
Let her play on better team against better competition. I don't look at playing sports as something with a "goal" at the end (play in HS or college etc) but we as a family look at the value of learning to compete, be a teammate, be active etc. I watch folks who start travel sports and whatnot at a young age and it's just not for us. But if daughter really likes soccer as a 7th or 8th grader I'm fine letting her try to get on a good team that plays more games with more coaching etc. This year a lot of her old team went "competitive" and my daughter is the best player left, some of the games were frustrating to have her not playing on team with similar skill from other teammates.
For our family dedicating entire weekends and thousands of dollars to travel ball and junk is not for us, at least yet.
I understand just wanting to compete and not have a goal. I coach my daughter's U14 Girls team that won Division 2 of Heartland League in Kansas City (cross-post stud things thread). We will likely play Division 1 in the spring. It's a pretty remarkable accomplishment for a team from Manhattan. We homeschool, so my daughter won't be playing high school soccer and likely isn't going to try to play any college soccer, but we still like to see how high of a level she can play.
If you wait until 7th or 8th grade, you will be limiting the level your daughter is able to play at and the kind of team she is able to make at tryouts. Yes, there is catching up with the coaching and higher-level competition, but it takes a number of years to make up that gap. We had a girl that moved here from Utah and had never played soccer above a rec level. It has taken her a full year to really get up to speed with the rest of the girls and there are still some things where she can't play as intuitively as other girls. She was kind of lucky in moving to a place like Manhattan, because she was able to get on a high level team due to there not being many girls that tryout. If she had been somewhere like Kansas City, she would have been relegated to a much lower level team and not have developed nearly as much.
I'm not going to say you're making a mistake in waiting. I realize there are tradeoffs for everything and premier soccer can come with a large commitment of time and money. I'm just trying to give you a perspective of a coach and parent that would gently encourage you to consider playing competitive soccer sooner rather than later. I think it will give your daughter more of an opportunity to see what her ceiling is in terms of hitting her potential.
Show Posts