I really admire how much of their free time families in Denver spend to give their kids opportunities to grow soccer skills. From finances to driving to weekly training(s) and even trying to understand details of the sport to help the kids grow faster.
If I would give a general piece of advice it would be the following:
Stop trying to make your child win the game and instead help your child learn and love the game
For me, in this context winning means: How to score more goals next week? How to get picked in a team tomorrow? How to win this weekend’s game? All of these are short term results. Something visible as a result of a short term effort. A how to get rich quick hack.
The focus should not be the amount of goals scored or the amount of games won, but instead the progress on technical skills and decision making on a long term view.
Sometimes I feel like parents struggle with being okay with a worse result in the short term because it’s harder to explain to grandparents, friends, or others how great the decision to play that through ball was vs telling everyone that their son scored 6 goals in a game that ended 7:1.
It is important that parents develop a long term perspective for advancements to enable the kids to think the same way.
The question(s) should always be: How can I foster the love of soccer for my child and how can I help my child learn more tools and skills to use when playing the sport?
It is important to keep in mind what training, what skills, and what decision making understanding will help in 3-4 years (even if they don’t pay off on Saturday mornings or maybe even cause more games to be lost in the short term).
If you stop thinking about how to win this season or the game and start building abilities you will find that skill growth is like an S curve and there will be massive jumps in results in the future. I have seen this many times with families that act this way.
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