Another great article from Coaching Outside the Box, and painfully true… if only clubs made it a priority to educate parents and coaches, and work together with other clubs, rather than work against each and play one up with their trophies and medals. Kids are missing out due to ego’s and unrealistic promises from clubs.
Coaching Outside the Box: Changing the Mindset in Youth Soccer
Mission Statement:
Our Soccer Club is a business. We focus primarily on driving profit margins and making as much money as we can. Therefore, we aim to have as many winning teams at each age group as possible because many parents who will pay our fees want their child to be part of a winning team, and/or perceive winning teams as success and a great place for their child to be developmentally. Therefore, our club is short-term results-oriented and we are 100% focused on winning as many tournaments and leagues as possible.
From this approach, we know that there will be so many casualties (kids dropping out of sport, losing interest in soccer due to bad experiences etc.), but this is not our concern. Furthermore, even though we are not doing what is optimal for kids’ best interests, we will still naturally have a small percentage of players who are genetically outstanding and will survive our approach and continuously having their own individual needs neglected in order to focus on building and employing winning teams. Additionally, some of these exceptional players will receive a college scholarship, and maybe even a minuscule amount of the tens of thousands of players that we coach may go on to experience playing professionally or even for the national team. This is very important for us and great for our business model. Because when this happens we can promote and market how these players reached these accolades SIMPLY because of how effective our club and coaching style is, and how powerful our training and philosophy (which we will claim is on ‘player development’) can be for young players. This in turn will attract so many more parents and players, allowing us to reach our main objective of making as much money as possible. We look forward to having you be part of our club, and allowing us to take your child to the ‘NEXT LEVEL’.
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