In his book, Soccer Starts at Home, Tom Byer challenges conventional wisdom/intuition about sports development.
His biggest challenge is to the belief that soccer skills are too advanced for young children to work on. Conventional wisdom holds that these skills come later, after age 8.
Tom thinks (and has shown with his own kids and pointing out kids from soccer cultures) they can and do start to develop as early as the child can walk, with the right activities.
To improve the top level of talent we have to improve the bottom level.
They believe the U.S. has plenty of top talent, so they think the key to moving forward is a matter of devoting more resources to that top tier to make them even better.
It's easy to make this mistake. The top-talent seems to be there. They are really good.
But, still something seems to be missing in that top talent compared to talent from richer soccer playing cultures.
I've written about this before here, about an agent who places American players into European clubs. He says a key difference he sees between U.S. and European youth soccer players is the sense of where they are headed.
He said the American youth are happy to be best on their current team and there isn't a competitive atmosphere to inspire improvement. The comes through as relative laziness in practice and games.
The European youth are working toward making their club's first team someday and there's a much more spirited competitive atmosphere to demonstrate they are heading that way. They're competing for spots against other players who are just as good as they are, which motivates them to work harder on their own, in practice and games.
I'll vouch for what he sees on the American side of things. I've seen it first hand and from interactions with other coaches, it's common.
Take Byer's advice. We currently introduce kids to soccer through organized activities and expect clubs to teach them the skills they need to succeed.
He thinks that's backwards. The kids should have those skills first, before joining organized soccer.
I think this is more like how we know other sports work. Kids typically know how to throw, catch and hit before joining a competitive baseball team.
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