Silicon Valley Eagles Blog

Fall is here, which means school and extracurricular activities are here, too. One of the many sports popular during the fall is soccer. As with any sport, you can’t just show up for tryouts and expect to make the team, you’ve got to invest the time and effort necessary to show coaches that you have what it takes.

Here are some tips to help set you up for success.

I’ve been coaching soccer for many years. I’ve instructed all kinds of players: the uninterested four-year-olds, the unusually talented 10-year-olds, and high school seniors doing their best impression of the Bad News Bears. The winning is always great, and there’s much to be learned from losing, but it’s nowhere near as satisfying as having a player tell you how much fun he’s had.

Especially for the younger players, I’ve always felt a responsibility to create fun and lasting memories…win, lose or draw. Along the way, I’ve been lucky to have tremendous support from the vast majority of parents who’ve trusted me to do the right thing.

But occasionally, coaches encounter troublemaker parents. This can ruin the fun for everybody: players, coaches, and entire teams and families.

The U8 team was formed a few months ago after a lengthy tryout process. A few practices were held during the summer to help the players get familiar with each other. Coaches even had a trainer work with them a couple times per week for the past three weeks in preparation for their first tournament. Coaches, parents and players were eager to participate in their first tournament as the “A” team from the club.

They lined up for their first game, and before you knew it they were down 3-0. Coaches were scrambling to change the formation, parents were screaming “boot it,” “run harder,” “get more aggressive,” and Soccer-Player_webplayers were terrified and wanted to stay on the bench. The team did not win a game the entire tournament, and everyone was wondering what exactly went wrong.

I can tell you from experience, especially at the younger ages, tournaments are for the team bonding experience and nothing more.

There are so many variables that affect results in tournament games that you will drive yourself crazy if you treat it as something anything more than a social event. But Coach, “We played them in the regular season last spring and only lost by a goal. They just beat us 5-0”.

Participating in a sport is supposed to be fun. In fact, a recent survey conducted by the American Psychological 

Children taking part in competitive sports often feel stressed, but the cause of that stress may be surprising to some parents. Often, it isn’t the coaches or your children’s teammates that are causing the stress; it could be you — and you may not even know you’re doing it! Are you guilty of any of these stress-inducing behaviors? Avoid stressing your child out during sports activities by remembering these stressful behaviors parents engage in during games, practices or even around the house.Association estimates that 9 percent of all children use sports to help manage stress. For those children, sports can be fun, but for many children, sports can be extremely stressful.

It’s late in the fourth quarter, the third period, stoppage time or even that last mile. That is when athletic trainers, strength and conditioning specialists and coaches find out if all of that investment of time and money in physical endurance training was worth it as they watch to see if their athletes will have enough left in the tank to finish. Often though, its not necessarily the muscles or physiological systems that shut down but rather the brain in an overprotective mode. Researchers at the University of Copenhagen think they have found the exact process that contributes to this sense of fatigue while engineers at the University of California – San Diego are piloting a wearable patch that can warn when an athlete is about to hit the wall.

In his 2007 book Brain Training for Runners, Matt Fitzgerald, long-time running columnist and author detailed the role of the brain in controlling physical endurance. Traditionally, fatigue used to be considered a breakdown of biochemical balances with the buildup of lactic acid or depletion of glycogen for fuel. However, research in the 1980s showed that this breakdown did not always occur and that athletes were still able to push through at the end of a game or race even though they should have been physically exhausted.

A new theory of the brain as a “central governor” emerged. Like a warning light in your car, the brain calculates the time to physical catastrophe or total exhaustion based on the current pace and feedback signals from the body. When it feels you won’t make it to your desired finish line, it begins to lower muscle output and sends messages to your conscious brain that its time to quit.