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Context. It may be my favorite word, but even then it would require more context! I had a wonderful conversation not too long ago with Sefu Bernard, who is a professional and youth basketball coach as well as coach educator. Some of our discussion centered around this topic, and in fact Sefu has written a great article about some of what we discussed which you can check out here!
I often hear youth clubs proudly proclaim that they place their best coaches at the youngest ages. Man, talk about something that sounds really progressive and forward thinking. Surely, these are the people that get the development process! Or do they? Over the last few years, articles, talks, and presentations on multi-sport development have skyrocketed. In fact, as more and more people have come out to criticize the “dangers” of single-sport participation as an extreme on the development spectrum, multi-sport development has become the panacea that everyone has looked for! It’s easy to find articles that talk about the hidden dangers if your child only plays one sport growing up, but for some reason articles questioning multi-sport development seem to be much harder to find.
Do you know what World Class really is?
We have become accustomed to describing things as "outstanding," "world class," or even "the greatest." In fact, the terms come most often when discussing players or teams. This 15 year old is world class, that U10 team is outstanding. This morning, I watched a video that claimed "soccer players need several hundred to a few thousand touches each WEEK to be OUTSTANDING." Read it again, let it sink it. It couldn't be further from the truth. I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that this was part of a marketing video that promoted a product for moms and dads to buy their aspiring young players. There has been positive and negative uproar over the past couple of days regarding the new initiatives recommended by US Soccer. If you somehow missed it, they are as follows:
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