Improving Soccer in PEI: Two Simple Rules with an Exponential Impact, Part 1

When you lower the bar you don’t make the majority of people angry but you don’t make any of them happy either. It’s the safest play in the book. This, I alluded to in my post titled Island Soccer’s Low Bar: Losing Your Ass. For example, Island soccer desperately needs a recreational soccer program that spans grassroots to adult as I’d argued in last week’s post. I don’t think the typical Island soccer consumer realises this — unless they’ve lived somewhere that had a rec soccer program — but PEI Soccer? They should know better. However, bringing in a recreational program would involve introducing something new, introducing change, dealing with push-back and generally raising the bar.

I was watching a presentation by John Herdman, former head coach of our mens’ national soccer team. He was talking about what he and his staff did to build culture within their program. Herdman’s position is that there are four different types of culture created by two dimensions — the amount of demand (high or low) and the amount of support (high or low). The high support, low demand combination he called a submissive culture.

There is no doubt in my mind that a submissive culture is what we have allowed to form here in Prince Edward Island soccer. PEI Soccer is very supportive of its member clubs and so are the clubs of their participants. However, there is very little demanded from the clubs or from the participants in the clubs. Is it any wonder that most clubs, most team coaches and most participants just do whatever they want each soccer season?

High Support, High Demand Culture

Herdman called the combination of high support and high demand a gritty culture. I think that’s fine if you’re working with national level athletes but for soccer in general, I’d call it a developmentally appropriate culture instead. My definition of developmental appropriateness has always been this:

Doing the right thing, in the right amount, at the right time, with the right person.

That’s a lot of “rights” to get right. How can you ensure it happens? Enter Long-Term Athlete Development or LTAD for short. Taking a long-term development approach means using evidence-based research from the fields of sport science, instruction and human development to inform good practice. It’s not an elite athlete development model only. Instead LTAD is for every active person regardless of their age or ambitions. It covers every Canadian, from playground to podium and cradle to grave.

My graduate work in coaching at the University of British Columbia was in long-term development. That was like 25 years ago. Just as I was finishing up that degree, I came across a series of articles by two Canadian gentlemen, Richard Way and Istvan Balyi, on the topic of long-term development. This is the duo that developed and lobbied for what became LTAD in Canada. The majority of sports in Canada now have some version of a long-term development plan. With that said, I’ve been thinking about the developmental journey of soccer players over a life span for a very long time now.

Even though you won’t find it anywhere within the LTAD literature, there’s a concept that I’ve felt is foundational to the philosophies of long-term development within a sports system and it is this:

Get what you need, as close to home, for as long as possible.

Making Decentralisation Central

When Ontario Soccer overhauled their high performance arm of their system, as I’d previously mentioned in this post, there was a lot of push-back — especially from the folks involved in those programs. But the goal was clear. The development of players in Ontario, under a LTAD-centred approach, was the responsibility of the community clubs and not Ontario Soccer.

In doing so, provincial team players from outside Toronto no longer had to travel to the GTA on a weekly basis to attend training. The provincial programs still ran but now in a camp format. That is, players would gather around a series of games, and train together for a short period of time in preparation for those games. Then they would go back to their local programs until the next provincial camp.

Back here on the Island, the development of players is highly centralised. This is even more the case since PEI Soccer built an indoor facility in Stratford. All players involved in high performance programming from anywhere on the Island must travel there (or to Charlottetown in general) throughout the year to train and compete. And it’s not even that it’s only high performance players that must do this. It’s any player who actually wants to get consistently decent coaching season on season.

In the past, when I’ve coached provincial teams, I’ve moved the training around based on the percentage of players coming from each community. So it might look like 60% of the training delivered in one large community while 10, 10, 15 and 5% of the training is delivered in smaller communities. While this isn’t completely getting what you need as close to home for as long as possible, in my mind, it was a start towards it. I was trying to ensure that everyone had a chance to train or play “in their own back yard.”

The reality is that a soccer player that wants to realise their full potential will sooner or later have to start traveling further and further away from home to get what they need. PEI Soccer can certainly make sure that those athletes can get as much of that development at home or closer to home for as long as possible.

TL;DR

We could do so much better with our delivery of soccer programming here in PEI. Keeping two simple rules or principles in mind is key to that.

1. Do what’s developmentally appropriate.

2. Provide what’s needed to develop as close to home for as long as possible.

Of course, there is the obstacle of our small population size. Islanders will have to go somewhere central to get what they need much sooner than a place that has a larger population. While daily hour-long drives in the GTA are a given, that same drive would raise eyebrows for Islanders. So can we really decentralise soccer programming any more than it already is? That’s a question I’ll share some thoughts and suggestions on in Part 2, coming next week.