Felix A. Ulloa

Warren, N.J.

Our club has 21 travel teams from U-8s to U-14s. We have devoted one day a week training for each team with professional coaches. In addition, we have on Saturdays five sessions from 9am to 3pm devoted to skills, drills and tactics, also ran by professional coaches.

But our attendance overall has been very poor during the daily and weekly training (especially boys).

What do you suggest we do at this time to improve the attendance?

Mike Woitalla: Of course there could be all sorts of reasons why players don’t show up, but what stands out to me in your question is the reference to drills and tactics.

You are talking about very young children and I find it hard to imagine 7- to 13-year-olds getting excited about spending a Saturday doing drills or receiving instructions about tactics.

Could it be that pre-teen children don’t like doing drills? Maybe a 14-year-old who has decided he is willing to make certain sacrifices in order to play soccer doesn’t mind being trained like a professional, but young children are involved with soccer because it is playing.

These children get instruction all week long at school, and soccer practice is part of their play time. I don’t know the specifics of what your professional coaches do at practice, but if it’s anything other than letting kids enjoy soccer on their own terms, that may be why children aren’t looking forward to it.

And if you think it is necessary to drill youngsters or teach them tactics so that they can become successful, you should look at what the world’s great soccer players did when they were 8 years old. You will find that they played a heck of a lot of soccer without coaches standing over them like school teachers telling them what was correct and what wasn’t.

Skills can be acquired simply by playing soccer and emulating skillful soccer players. The more kids play, the more skillful they will be. Tactics can be taught later to a skillful player. But skill can’t be taught.

If your coaches are doing a good job making soccer fun, then not only will the kids show up, they may even play soccer on their own.

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