Let Them Play

Thomas Cooke
Nov 6 · 9 min read

Back in the fall of 2014, myself and a few fellow soccer dads gathered around a kitchen table to plan our next move. Our daughters had all concluded a successful season of youth Rec. League soccer in our small, sports-minded western mountain town. Success was defined by all of us dad coaches as making it through the season with minimal amounts of tears and meltdowns, and maximum amounts of cheers and ice cream parties. There were no shouting matches with refs, in fact sometimes us dad coaches had to ref the games. There were no angry confrontations with parents about playing time, or position choices, or our win/loss columns. No one will remember the scores of any of those games, and the town’s recreation district didn’t keep track of standings. It was pretty much all about green grass, brightly colored jerseys that were way too big for every girl, cupcakes, and crazy hairstyles. Lots of crazy hairstyles, and ponies inspired by the women of the USWNT. Every team had a crazy name picked by the girls. Ours was The Wonderful Watermelons. There was a sense of joy back then that if I could have bottled and kept in a cool dark place and only pulled out over the course of the next five years to sprinkle over the nasty little cuts that come from “comp” (otherwise known as club) soccer as a curing ointment, I surely would have, had I known what was coming*.

The Wonderful Undefeatable Watermelons, 2014 Champions of my Universe

The next move was not so clear as we sat around that table. The rec. program wasn’t known for supporting older kids as they made the jump to middle school grades, and due to dropping numbers and or kids trying other things (which is totally ok), we knew if we wanted the fun bus to keep rolling, we were clearly done in our roles as dad coaches, and we needed to find other places for our girls if they wanted to keep playing. The town’s well-known “comp” soccer team was the logical next step, however we had been warned of the cost, the year-round commitment, and some social challenges of “rec girls” breaking into the hierarchy of established “comp” teams. Crazy to think that there was a perception of if your kid isn’t already a comp team player at ten, it would be really hard for her to make the cuts, but it was there, and it was real.

A note about cuts: no youth sports program, comp, rec or whatever, should have cuts of any sort for 10 year olds (especially younger). Period. End of story.

The biggest challenge for all of us Dads Of The Round Table was the year-round commitment, as all of our girls also did different winter sports. Not so crazy to imagine, because we lived in a ski town. What sounded more crazy was there were kids who didn’t ski in our town because they were too busy playing indoor soccer through the winter, but that is another story. In this case, all of our girls either ski raced, played hockey, or figure skated (remember, ten year old girls), and a few of them did all of it. These were the tender ages of sampling, and if you asked any of these girls what their favorite sport was, the answer would have been whatever they were doing at the moment you asked the question. We held regular meetings to discuss the options. Join the town’s comp club? Try to start our own club from scratch? Stop playing soccer all together? What we remembered was the way it used to be for us, when we were kids. Why did it all get so complicated? We were all “Multi-Sport” athletes back then simply because soccer/football was in the fall, hockey/basketball was in the winter, lacrosse/baseball was in the spring.

The thing about the modern concept of the Multi-Sport Athlete, or just the term Multi-Sport: it’s almost like a buzzword the C-Level board members of comp clubs have heard of before, and don’t really truly understand what it means even though the two word components describe it exactly as it is: more than one sport. They throw it around with cursory knowledge and nod their heads, “oh yeah, for sure, multi-sport, there is a lot of evidence there, that’s what college coaches are looking for, we’re big supporters of multi-sport athletes.” On the pitch, it’s a different story. In every club in every sport in every town, there is that prototypical kid who is a little bigger, a little stronger, a little faster, and no coach in any sport wants to turn that kid down. But that is NOT what catering to or promoting Multi-Sport is all about. But I digress.

Later that following spring, one the Dads Of The Round Table took a Powerpoint to the board of the club. He asked for 15 minutes of time during one of their board meetings to share some thoughts on why supporting Multi-Sport athletes was good for the health of the youth sports community, and why it would be forward-thinking for this comp club to accommodate and integrate a new group of soccer players into their structure, even if it didn’t follow their current norms, which at the time meant fully committing to soccer, and sadly, soccer-only. That may be a little harsh, it was more like soccer-mostly. The presentation had several slides with evidence-based statements about how Multi-Sport athletes were generally more physically fit, more accomplished with physical literacy, and less prone to injuries from overuse. What followed was a quick and simple pitch: take our group of girls, and form a team for them to play on during the fall season only, and let’s see how they do.

Let them play.

The current thinking at the time was more along the lines of skepticism, because how could you be a better soccer player if you were doing other things than playing soccer? If you were doing other sports at such a young critical age, within the sweet spot window of skill-acquisition, that meant you were not acquiring skills when other kids were, and if you were not getting better, you were actively getting worse. I hate to say this, because it sounds harsh, and nobody on that board or coaching staff ever said it directly, but it was very much felt by the parents of our little group that someone was saying “your girls won’t be able to compete. It won’t work.” Keep in mind we are talking about pre-pubescent girls here. But don’t think for a minute our girls didn’t know what was going on. Chip, meet your new friend, Shoulder.

What was described as an experiment in supporting and growing Multi-Sport athletes in a small but growing suburban ski town predictably ended after only one season. The club discontinued the offering after one glorious fall season, and offered all the girls something else: the same as what they had before. Join the full year program, or quit playing soccer. Many opted to sign-up and continue for their love of soccer, but more than half the girls quit altogether. We brought a new pipeline of athletes to this club, and it was as if they opened a gate and let a few through, then shut it behind with no intention of opening it back up.

My daughter has always had a chip on her shoulder. Until fairly recently discovering the musculature of her teenage body, and the VO2 max of her World Cup mountain bike racing mother and fast twitch of her national level cyclist father, she was, how shall I say, a little small but at least she made up for it by not being very fast. What propelled her through those years then, when she was getting mostly opportunities to play on the “B teams”, never making it past the transactional coach as gatekeeper to the A team? Joy. She loved playing. And she was fierce. As a parent, I became continually frustrated with the cuts, the getting passed up (in my biased view) by players who were no better and worked half as hard. But it was always my goal, as long as she was experiencing the joy of playing, to find a way for her to keep playing. After a couple of years of feeling like she was always being held back a grade in her soccer class, my daughter got noticed by a club in the next town over, and was given a spot on a new team with a new group of girls she had never played with before. I’ll never forget the phone call with the DOC of our town’s club team when I told him we were leaving the club to try something new. As clear as a bell, he said “if you go play for them, your daughter will never play high school soccer in this town.”

Think about why youth sports is so screwed up in our culture, and remember that for the most part, we live in a world of transactional coaches rather than transformational coaches. It’s based on numbers, but they are not our numbers, they are their numbers: wins/losses, dollars in the club coffers, P1, P2, D1, D2, etc. There is no joy index, other than the one you create with and for your child. I recommend you come up with your own Joy Index, and you track it. My response to the DOC was pretty simple: “it’s not me that is going to play for someone else, it’s my daughter, and she has made up her mind.” I could have used a few swigs of the Joy Bottle at this moment, because this guy’s words stung. I could clearly see he didn’t want the player, he wanted the fees. Again, their numbers, not ours. This all happened during the craziness of the May tryout period, where jockeying to fill a roster can determine the outcome of whether fielding a team is a loss or a profit in the for-profit world of comp soccer. But what if he was right? There was that brief moment of doubt where I flashed forward and imagined all the scenarios where I as a parent in this one moment had ruined her future prospects. But only for a moment. I don’t hold a grudge against this guy, in fact, I always liked him. The girls liked him. But he tried to wield an ugly transactional scenario behind the scenes, and we were not buying what he was selling, even though it gave me pause to think about it.

“I keep saying you are Dancing, you are playing, you are winning no matter what happens…I am talking about the big D Dance, not the little d dance, the Cosmic Dance…” — Quote from Chungliang Al Huang, from an interview on Episode #134 of John O’Sullivan’s Way Of Champions podcast.

It took time to play out, but the DOC was clearly wrong. He had no power over my daughter then, nor does he now. Her power is inside her, burning hot, and fueled by the joy of the playing, all the while continuing to grow as an athlete in two sports. It has taken awhile to see the benefits of the Multi-Sport approach, and it hasn’t always been easy or evident. But after this most recently wrapped high school season, she not only played high school ball, but excelled, leading her JV team as a sophomore, getting called up to Varsity post season and earning Varsity letters, and earning Defensive Player of the Year for her team. The Varsity coach described my daughter as small but mighty. Her fitness gained from training for another complementary sport gave her strength in positioning, and she found a sixth gear in her speed that frankly I still have no explanation for, only that I know she didn’t get it from me. In quiet confidence, the Varsity coach told me “she has no idea how strong she is,” but clearly she must have some idea, and this coach had found a way to pull it out and reveal it to herself just enough that she started to believe it. This is the essence of what a transformational coach can do. If you are fortunate enough in youth sports to come across a coach that has this kind of positive effect on the development of your child, you will wish for it to never end. But just like that, the season ended, and my daughter was back with her alpine ski racing team, plugging back into dryland training to prepare for the upcoming season, even though the entire high school soccer season was preparing for the upcoming ski season. That’s the essence of what Multi-Sport is all about, and this whole eastern philosophy of Yin Yang is starting to make a little bit of sense after all.

*if you have a nine or ten year old girl playing rec. soccer, bottle up that joy. Store it in a safe place. Save it for those moments when a little extra joy is needed. The cuts, the scrapes. It will all work out as long as there is a little bit of joy in that bottle.

Thomas Cooke

Written by

Ski, Bike, Moto, Eat, Drink, Sleep, Dream, Wake, Think, Work, Hustle, Tweet, Laugh, High-Five. Co-founder of Rally Interactive, Astrolab LLC, CEO Freddie.

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