I hate tryouts. I’ve always hated tryouts. Kids are stressed. Parents are stressed. Coaches are stressed. Some of it reasonable, some of it not. In some areas with large programs, it…
Raise your hand if you’ve worried about how much your kids do in a given year and if you are ruining their lives. Come on – you over there. As soccer season kicks off and schedules get…
Pretty scary how fast the summer can fly by! The fall season is already underway for our Rec teams and most of our travel teams have been in pre-season tournaments before the start of their…
Sorry for disappearing! The end of the season is always crazy hectic. I’ve been dealing with a ton of makeups due to all the rain, end of season tournaments (Going to Wilmington NC this weekend -…
As the severity of the H1N1 or swine flu pandemic increases, governments are taking significant steps to deal with any severe outbreak. The US has already authorized the release of significant…
A league in Bethesda, Maryland, has tried fining parents who misbehave at youth soccer games, but that didn’t work. They just paid it and kept yelling. So now they banished them from the sideline…
As players get older and matches get more intense, rough play is something you have to deal with and work with your team to handle. No amount of yelling at the referee is going to change things if…
Seeing the reaction to the ‘Green Death’, it amazes me the primal reaction people have to stuff like this.
- “You can come coach my kid ANY day!”
- “Find your sense of humor! It was a joke!”
As we all know, there are bad coaches out there who don’t have perspective or a long term view of a player’s development. They don’t get that at younger ages we should be primarily concerned with…
Many people don’t realize how insane the crowd noise can be at some soccer venues. We Americans like to think that our football games with 80-90,000 fans are loud, but there is loud and there is …
I found this note from an experienced referee (FirstTouch at the NC Soccer Forums) who had an insightful post about the differences in how boys and girls may retaliate at the older ages. The…
As I noted earlier, Twitter has completely changed things here at On The Pitch. Every day I see cool articles, posts, and other tidbits that I want to check out and share, but then real…
I’ve coached girls in soccer, either as part of coed teams or on girls travel teams, for a number of years now. Yet it’s still an amazing learning experience as a coach, especially as a male…
