Friday, January 15, 2016

Recreational Soccer

We enjoyed recreational soccer and are thankful that there are non-profit organizations to provide opportunities for the kids to practice soccr and play games.  It cost almost nothing for the parents.  The coaches are dedicated and really nice and they are volunteeres.
For the games they play, there were no score keeping.  Participation is encouraged.  At the end of the season, every kid will get a small trophy from the organization.

My kids played about 3 years’ recreational soccer until they moved on to join a club to play competitive soccer.
During summer and winter, there is no more outdoor soccer because of the weather.  But we have indoor soccer organized by some indoor facilities.  We’ve found it beneficial to move around with different teams and coaches.  Every coach will teach something different and kids learn different stuff from them.
The teams vary quite a lot.  Since the team size is small for young kids, a team can easily become a strong team if they have 2-3 strong players.  But after 2 seasons, many of the volunteer coaches will quit as they take their kids to try some other sports.  Unless some other parent step up to be the coach, the team will be split up and fed to other teams that are missing players.  The parents cannot pick which team they want their kids to go.  The organization will do the team assignment according to where the kids live.  
This happened to Alexander.  His first team was quite strong and they played for a year together.  After that, he went to a new team that most players never played soccer before.  It was hard for them to play against teams that most of the players already played for a year together.  They lost so many times.  Though there were no score keeping, at age of 6, the kids already understand scores and winning or losing.  It was tough trials for kids in the losing team.  They could turn pretty emotional.
Minglun went through a tough period of time.  When I talked with another mom whose son played in Minglun’s previous team also, she mentioned that his son was going through about the same after they had 6 or 7 straight losses.  He was angry with his parents after they were beaten up by a strong team and he asked why his parents didn’t sign him up with that strong team.
The only good thing that came out of it is that Alexander started playing really hard and became an aggressive forward player.  Before in the previous team, Alexander figured out how he should play and assigned himself to be a defender.  My husband helped to train him some defending skills.  Now as Minglun’s team kept losing, my husband told him that he had to try to score goals for his team to win.
At young age, the kids don’t play positions.  They pretty much play the way they want.  But for kids over 6 years old, some coaches started teaching kids about positions or keep a diamond shape when they play.  The teams that can do this can easily win the other teams whose players still run in a pack.