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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DumbAmerican" data-source="post: 910936" data-attributes="member: 77777">I'm 34 years old. I played American football, baseball, basketball, soccer, and tennis at an organized youth level. I played soccer as a fall sport from around age 6-8, again at 11-12, and then for three years in high school. I played American football at 9-10, and then again in 8th grade just before high school.I never had a coach in soccer who played even at the high school level. It was always just some dad who bought a book which showed him some drills. Our high school team was club level instead of varsity. The coach was the school janitor who volunteered. In ever other sport from the earliest age on there would be at least one coach for each team who had at least reached the small college level as a player. Soccer was the one sport where you didn't have American parents yelling at each other, or the refs, or the coaches in the stands. You could tell they didn't care. (The Yugoslav refugee parents who were in both town where I grew up did lose their minds at the soccer games while their kids ran circles around us.) So you probably didn't have many dads doing extra drills with their kids. My dad definitely never drilled me like he did in other sports. Soccer wasn't the sport that kids played in the neighborhood played for fun after school (that would be football and basketball mostly). There's a saying that soccer has been the sport of the future in the US since the 1970s. That's because it's been one of the most played youth sports since then. I think it might have even been number 1 in participation numbers when I was a kid. What I'm saying is that while youth soccer was widely available across the country, it wasn't developed in large parts of the country and people didn't really care if their kids were any good.Now, I grew up in small towns, but there were kids who went on to play college ball in every sport except soccer. The youth infrastructure has gotten better. And the game is much more popular with kids who came up a decade after me, and then much, much more popular with kids today. But our youth structure is so radically different than what goes on in Europe and Latin America. I don't buy the argument that all we need is our best athletes to go into soccer instead of basketball and football. Athleticism isn't the problem for the US national team. We don't develop the proper touch from a young age, so our players are less skilled on the ball.</blockquote>

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