Risk and the soccer field

I coached little league soccer for all three of my sons. Not because I knew anything about soccer, but because I felt that I could teach the little that I did know and get better results than most of the coaches I watched. You could call it arrogance, or maybe it was simply gifting in me. Anyway, I could not stand on the sides and watch, so I signed up to coach.



It was not too difficult with the little kids. If you cold effectively teach them to make good plays in several crucial areas, well then the rest of the game it was pretty difficult to score and you could always be competitive. We would work and role play several situations where 70% of all goals are scored. If we could be successful on those, well we would end up winning a lot of games. I was good at setting up the senario, controlling the chaos of the practice field, and teaching so that everyone knew what they were supposed to do.



For example on break away's where a strong player from the other team would drive the ball and get loose, everyone knew the first defenders job was to not get the ball, simply not let the man with the ball dribble past them. It was easier to run fast with out the ball than to run with the ball. So even with athletic mismatches, our player would be able to keep running back to keep between the ball and the goal. He was not however required to try to take the ball away. The would be dangerous by yourself because if you missed, the player then was unopposed to the goal, just him and the keeper. So we all knew the first player would give ground until he was at the goal line. The second defender back had a different job. He was to get into the middle of the player with the ball, so close that he could tell what he had for breakfast. We taught that. A third defender would give support, but if a defender that went in was beat, the next guy would step up to stop the ball.

Another principle we taught was that on defense, when we gained possession of the ball we were to support the person with the ball helping him to know where to go. We also all knew that our goal was to take the ball up the side line. Now the first thing in teaching the kids on how to help the person with the ball was what not to do. In this case you were not to yell the kids name. Yelling his name gave him know help, it was hard to hear where the yelling was coming from and often kids at this level would have a hard time taking their eye's off the ground where the ball was that they were supposed to kick and control.

So we would practice yelling what options the player with the ball had. For instance, if you were outside of the player towards the sideline, you simply said, "I got your line", or "you have a trail", or "through ball". Each of these statements meant something to the player on the ball. I got your line, meant if you were able to kick the ball towards the sideline, you had a player over there expecting it who would most likely be able to get to it and continue the advance, or if you had intense pressure in front of you, and someone was in a trail position, you could pass the ball back to him where he might be more open and have more time to move the ball where you had a man open. And finally, the through ball meant to kick it forward because you had a player running full steam ahead and if you put it forward he would be able to run onto it before the defenders could turn around.

All of this was done with a team apporach. We respected the man with the ball, and tried to give him options, and the option he felt he could to the best was the one he tried. If you get a group of 11 year olds all running and communicating like this, its not hard for them to leave the other team standing wondering what happened. It also made it easier for the guy with the ball to be successful, because we were communicating options that were available, he could take the easiest option and not even have to execute with precision and still be successful.

This leads me to the last issue that was a huge obstacle for a recreation soccer team. This had to do with the fear of failure. I observed kids who were not as talented as the athletes on the team and there always is spectrum of players good to bad. The kids know it too, they are not dumb and they see who is good and who is not. So the problem I observed with the average to below average kids was that they did not want to fail. One of the ways that they could keep from failing was to never put themselves in a position of having the opportunity to fail. If they never touched the ball, well then they would never miss kicking it, or having it stolen. You would see these kids run along side of a play, but never risk getting involved in the play. They did not want to take the risk for fear of failing.

So we tried to encourage risk taking and effort. When a goal was scored we would try to encourage the risk that was taken by one of our weaker players that contributed to that goal. My goal scorers did not need as much praise as my players who were struggling with risk taking. We would encourage the effort, the attempt and really be excited about someone doing something for the first time. Taking the risk to take the ball from someone, running up the line to give someone the option to pass the ball to you.

We also were never critical of effort. I would tell my kids that had not taken shots on goal before that they needed to miss 10 times before they would most likely score. I would challenge them to set a goal of shooting and missing in a game. Because they would never score if they never tried.

I found this fear of failure and avoiding risk to be an interesting dynamic in a team. I think we have people in their places of work who have this same fear of failure and risk avoiding tendancies. They avoid taking the lead on a project, become paralyzed in what to do next and thus avoid responsibilities. It is why I use the expression lead like a sinner. If the people who are good at what they do, make a point of exposing where they fail and come up short, it will make it easier for a person with this fear to be willing to take a risk. It will make the failure seem more normal and less attached to the actual success of a project. Because success is not a matter of being perfect and never failing, but rather a matter of going in the same direction for a long time. A matter of practice and endurance and perseverence.

As we get all of the parts of our team working without fear, we will find the team can accomplish dramatically more than we ever imagined.