Island Soccer’s Low Bar: How We Cause Our Own Problems, Part Two
Last time around I shared my experiences with the sub par standards that exist for organized soccer on Prince Edward Island. PEI Soccer does not spend enough time and money on helping the clubs learn how to help their youngest and most impressionable players develop. That also goes for the parents of those kids — they’re young and impressionable as well and get little to no help from either province or club. But man! This is the opportunity to start things off right. Instead grassroots players and their parents get started off wrong. Very wrong.
Babysitting (not even the gloried version) is what happens for soccer players age 9 and younger in PEI. And so right from the very first kicks of the ball, the standard is set and those young players and their parents learn not to expect anything more.
Soccer: The Never Ending Relief Effort
With the occurrence of natural disasters on the rise, the term relief effort is one we’ve become all too familiar with in the last couple of years. I would never make light of individuals unfortunate enough to be victims to a natural disaster and be in need of such relief. I have been using that term, relief effort, to describe the delivery of soccer programs at the grassroots level for many, many years. A time when you only heard about a natural disaster happening once in a while. It may be that I need to update my metaphor, however, I will continue to use it for now.
Why is soccer a relief effort here in PEI? Because every little bit helps.
The disaster that gets created every spring when clubs open their soccer registration is that the majority of the coaches that will be needed haven’t even been identified yet, let alone trained. The sport of soccer has always had a great appeal for families looking to get their little ones off to a good start with organized sports. Registrations for primary school, kindergarten (and even younger) children come in droves.
And it’s at that point that clubs start (scrambling) to find enough coaches…sorry strike that…to find enough warm bodies to babysit all these kids they’ve let register. My idea? Start with your number of appropriately trained coaches and then create a registration cap based on the correct coach to player ratio for each grassroots age group. If the cap is reached and parents that haven’t been able to register ask what they can do, you can tell them coaches are needed and show them what they need to do to become qualified to lead kids at that age level.
But who wants to turn kids away from soccer, right? Take ’em all you cry! Well, is it any better when those very same kids drop out of soccer because of poor experiences caused by poor organisation and lack of quality coaches?
While this does also happen in other organized activities, there are certainly some groups that have their standards firmly established and don’t waiver from them. One parent, with kids in ball, tells me the coaches at the Rally Cap level (ages 5–8) are very well trained. This parent also has kids in soccer and when I asked how it was going, let’s just say there was a fair amount of eye rolling and sighing coming from this person.
And from my own experiences with kids in hockey, that’s a sport where you’d never see teenage hockey players being the ones to do the coaching at U7 or U9. No sir, they’d all be adults. And when compared with adults volunteering to coach in soccer, adults coaching in hockey have far more playing experience to boot…er…excuse the pun. It doesn’t really take that much. A season of rec league hockey is still more soccer playing experience than the majority of the adults that coach grassroots soccer have.
But that’s what we do.
You can coach but you can only coach on Monday nights? No problem…every little bit helps!
You have hockey coaching certification from a decade ago? Great! Every little bit helps!
Let’s get teenagers who play in our club to run these programs and stand there while the kids climb all over them and each other! Awesome idea! Every little bit helps!
You’ll coach but you don’t have time to do any coach training. Hey, that’s fine, even though extensive certification has been implemented in EVERY OTHER PROVINCE IN CANADA, PEI Soccer only asks you to have the basics. After all, every little bit helps!
Is there any wonder then that expectations for Island soccer are so low?
TL;DR
And yes, that’s true about the coach certification. PEI Soccer only requires coaches to have two courses. They’re very important courses, however, they’re general coaching courses, meant for all coaches in all sports. The soccer-specific courses aren’t even enforced as required. They’re just nice-to-haves. Can you imagine a Triple A baseball or hockey team being coached by someone completely lacking sport-specific coaching qualifications or a background in the sport? Maybe it does and if it does, I’d love to know who else is seeing the same sorts of low standards.
This blog about raising the bar and having genuine regard for higher standards is why (shameless plug) I started Delta Soccer. I’m completely fed up with trying to change a system that refuses to change. My programs aren’t big. I control the numbers. And that way I can be sure I offer participants not only a safe and fun experience but a developmentally appropriate experience where they actually learn the game of soccer. What a radical concept, eh?
