Today's subject deals with having only one good player on a team.
This is more of a ramble than a newsletter but I am wondering how many
of you find yourself in
similar situations.
Too often, I have noticed that when speaking with parents from some
of the teams I work with, I hear about how the team has only one good
player, or the team has only one player who tries hard, or the team
has only one player with a good attitude. The reason this is
interesting to me is it seems I could speak with 5 different parents
from the same team and in each case there is one "special" player and
not too surprisingly, that player is their son or daughter.
While every parent should think their son or daughter is special
(and you could argue that everyone is special in their own way), the
discussion never seems to end with hearing how good their child is.
Next the people seem to want to explain everyone else's limitations.
I hear that player A is lazy and player B has a bad
attitude. So now, it's not good enough to say how wonderful their son
or daughter is, but they then have to tear everyone else down.
At
some point, people are going to have to realize that to be truly
successful, players have to participate on a team in which the whole
is greater than the sum of it's parts. To be a top soccer player, a
player must make all of the other players around them better. This
can be done any number of different ways. It might be a case of the
player setting a good example by working so hard that the other
players on the team feel they have to improve their work rate to be
competitive. It might be a case of the top player stopping and showing
the less experienced player how to do something better. It might be
the top player making the correct pass at the correct time enabling a
teammate to score the goal. There are numerous ways for players to
help their teammates become better soccer players (which in turn makes
them better soccer players) but one of the first things that needs to
be done is a better job of educating the parents, coaches and other
adults involved in youth soccer of the importance of encouraging the
youth players that they will look better trying to make their
teammates look good than if they try to make their teammates look bad.
The other part of this is that players, parents,
and coaches really should concentrate on the positives of all rather
than the negatives of some.
While it's very rare for me to ever have a conversation with
someone about their playing time, if a player asks what they can do to
get more playing time, that is a perfectly acceptable question.
However, as soon as it turns to" Why is player B getting more playing
time than me?" it becomes an unacceptable question. When a coach and
a player or parent speaks, it should be about that player and how they
can improve and NOT about any other players.