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After this weekend of make-up games

Your Winter 1 Sole Roll Champs!

Mat III

Team
1: DIS MINI TIGERS 02B
2: GENIUS
3: FC DALLAS
4: DALLAS INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL DIS III TIGRES
5: WHITE LIGHTNING

Winter 1 season at sole roll..

Congrats to all the players. We saw a lot of improvement in this short season.

WAY TO GO MAT2,
Looks like the winter league has officially ended and the overall results have been posted.
With the DIS Tigers taking a well deserved 2nd place finish.

Team
1: SOLE ROLL
2: DIS II
3: GENESIS '03
4: BEARCATS
5: THUNDER 02
6: SHARKS
7: KICKING PRINCESSES
8: SHARKIES S.R.


Detailed results maybe viewed online at:
http://www.gotsport.com/events/results.aspx?EventID=1964&Sex=Boys&Age=5

Congratulations and thank you all for playing.

-Ryan

U7

Team
1: SPFC 01
2: LHSA WHITE WILDCATS
2: NONE FC HUSKIES
4: BARBIE GIRLS
5: DALLAS INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL DIS TIGRETTES
6: NTX STRIKER - LAWSON
6: UNICORNS

U11 DIS Tigresses

Team
1: PURPLE THUNDER
1: DIS TIGRESSES
1: SOLE ROLL GORDON
4: FC LAKEHILL
4: CFBSA FIRECRACKERS
6: YMCA STRIKERS

Goalie practice at DIS this Monday

Jesse Llamas will hold a Goalkeeper practice this Monday, January 14 from 3:45 to 4:45 (Maternelle to CE1) and 4:45 to 5:45 (CE2 and up) at the DIS field.

This weekend in DIS Soccer

Futsal 3-5



Indoor Mat 2



Futsal DIS CM1



Mini Tigers



Indoor CM2-CM1



Futsal DIS CM2 - 6éme

How We Develop Players Article 4: The Proper Role of Parents

How We Develop Players Article 4: The Proper Role of Parents
by Elaine Mendelssohn 2/27/2006

(Editor’s Note: The author has been a parent and coach of high-level college and club players.)

The proper role for parents in elite youth soccer is an important issue facing the game today. It’s not an exaggeration to say that failure to understand that role, is one of the biggest problems facing youth soccer in America.

Because we have a pay-to-play system, parents are likely to feel that they have special rights compared to parents of youth players in the rest of the world. That is ironic because most parents here are probably less likely to understand the game very well, compared to parents in other countries who do understand it, but generally don’t get involved.

I think there are three things parents should try to remember as their kids go through the elite youth soccer experience: 1) The importance of being realistic; 2) The importance of supporting the coach in his mission TO DEVELOP PLAYERS; and 3) Knowing the right way to make a change, should the time come for change.

The importance of being realistic

As great as it is to see how popular soccer has become around the country, popularity is not necessarily a better thing when it comes to understanding what the proper role of parents in elite soccer really is. Years ago, when you were on a Select/Travel/Elite soccer team it really meant something. You truly had to be of a certain caliber to be on this type of team.

Today, as long you pay, pretty much anybody can be on a Select team. It would be pretty unique if you wanted to have your child play Select and couldn’t find a team to take you on. So this “popularity” pretty well dilutes the idea of being on a Travel team.

If player development was truly going on everywhere, it would be wonderful to have all these teams, but you have to be realistic and say that’s not the case. Neither coaches nor players are automatically high quality just because they are playing on a Select or Travel team.

I think by default a lot of parents think their child is the next Mia Hamm or Pele when they get started. When kids are 8, 9, 10 and you ask them where they’re going to college, any boy says Indiana or UCLA and any girl says North Carolina – but a lot of parents at that age really think that’s what will happen. But in reality, even very good players may not get that chance.

You can choose to support your coach in making your child a better player, or you can decide that your child is better than all of that. It’s not hard to find parents from the latter group and they have a way of making their presence felt on sidelines and on road trips that is not always very pleasant.

And to be fair, there are a certain number of coaches coaching travel soccer simply because there are parents willing to pay for their child to be involved in travel soccer. It’s important to find a club that knows the difference.

So parents need to be realistic about where their kid really fits in. They need to be honest about what they can realistically expect their child to achieve, and that should tell them something about how much time and money to invest. It’s important from that end to make sure they can find an honest coach who is not just going to tell them what they want to hear – and it’s important for them to accept an honest answer.


2. The importance of supporting the coach in his mission TO DEVELOP PLAYERS

Soccer teams set out to win matches. They always have and they always will. But at the youth level the primary mission of a good coach is to make his players better. That’s not a completely separate concept from the goal to win games. Good players are who help teams win games after all, but at these younger ages, coaches should mostly be teaching and players mostly learning.

A common problem with parents is that the only way they know how to judge what the coach is doing is to see if the team won or lost, and that’s a big mistake.

One of my sons played on a very successful team that won the national championship for an older age group. What people probably don’t know is that some times when the team was younger, the team’s coach made it clear that them learning how to play the game was more important than their winning a given game. The team did win a lot, but I remember the coach would sometimes tell the team as they came off the field in a game where they had beaten, that had done well because they worked on the very thing he wanted.

He told them he would rather see them lose the game and play well, then to kill a team and sacrifice what he was teaching them. He made that clear to those kids, and this all paid off in the end. That team learned how to play, the players learned and they won a national championship. As many players as wanted to were able to go on and play college soccer.

But if the parents had gotten all worked up about the scores of some of those games when they were younger, it never would have worked. At our club there is an unwritten rule about how parents are to act, and you don’t hear much on their sideline. So the club has to set the tone. But again, you have to find the right coach and trust him.

Now along with not worrying so much about winning, compared to learning, a parent also needs to make sure he or she is not interfering in the real nitty gritty of the coaching decisions. Again, parents often feel that because their child is so great (in their eyes) and because they are paying the bill, they have some natural right to get involved, but in truth, that is the worst thing they can do. The parent’s job is to support the coach in his efforts.

In our family, our kids have played for us and for other coaches. My husband and I both have a good soccer background. If we really want to, we could coach, but if you make the decision to let someone else coach your child, you had better go all the way and let them do it. We’ve told coaches “You are the coach, we’d just like to watch.” You have to get to a point where once you make a decision to put your kid on the team, you are going to trust the coach.

You can do this both within the parent group on your team and with your own child.

We see parents complaining about this or that decision all the time. A common complaint is over what position the child is playing. I’ve had parents try to get me riled up as a parent because my child wasn’t playing as much or wasn’t playing a certain position.

I try to answer by saying things like “I like him being versatile. I‘m impressed that he can play more than one position. Now we both had coaching backgrounds but we didn’t want to be interfering in that role. I think it’s logical to think that parents who don’t have any soccer background should also let the coach do their job. Yes you’re paying a lot of money, but that’s just the way the game works in this country. It still doesn’t help if parents are getting involved with the coach’s decisions.

You can help set a tone as a parent by not getting involved in these little beehive discussions where a coach’s decision in a U12 game gets treated like a decision to double the income tax or something. Remember, his job is to coach, and you need to support him in that.

Otherwise, you’ll drive yourself crazy over ‘my son should play a different position’ or ‘my daughter should play more,’ or whatever the case may be. You have to remember that the team plan does not revolve around your child.

As I said, the other way you can really help support the coach is in reinforcing his work with your own child. You should encourage your children to whatever potential the coach is encouraging them toward. If your child gets in the car after practice and says “coach said I need to do this and that, then you need to trust it and say that’s a good thing.

So many times, I’ll hear a parent leaving the field with their child and saying something like “He’s an idiot. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Now how is a coach going to have a chance with a player if his parents are talking about him like that?

3. Knowing the right way to make a change

Ultimately you have to have faith in your child’s coach, or your child shouldn’t be playing. Letting go of that level of control is one of the hardest things for a parent.

But it’s also true that there are very real reasons for a player to leave a team. You may have a genuinely talented player whose ambitions lie above those of his teammates. With there being so many travel teams now, some teams may have a foot firmly planted in rec soccer mentality, while others may be looking for every competitive and developmental opportunity. As your child gets older, you don’t want to be unequally yoked.

But there’s a right way to go about this. It’s a good chance to model something for your child as far as handling yourself professionally, being honest and sincere. Too often soccer team switches are conducted by parents like some political deal in a smoke-filled back room. Too often team moves end up being like nasty church splits, business breakups or messy divorces. If you are looking after the best interest of your child you can be discreet without being sneaky.

The best rule of thumb to follow is to be up front about everything. If you have different goals than your teams, just recognize it and find the right opportunity. You also should concentrate on your own child. If another situation is better for your son or daughter, you don’t have to try and convince half of the team you are on to do the same thing. Let people make up their own minds.

If people on the team you are leaving start sniping over your decision, just let it go. To do otherwise is simply to get your child embroiled in a controversy that will only detract from their enjoyment of the game, and their chance to succeed at it.

Summary

Now I know none of this is as easy as it sounds. But it really is a pretty simple formula You need to be realistic about goals. You need to find a coach who can do the work of training a player, and trust them, and always remember that there is a right way of going about it when changes have to be made.

This experience should be a healthy thing. Let yourself and your child enjoy it. If the child can feel good about the role they are playing, they are going to learn more and play better. You should see yourself as much more of a custodian than a driver in the process. They are still “your” kids of course, but that doesn’t make you a soccer expert.

It’s so much more simple and enjoyable for you to watch your child play when you’re taking it a year at a time and keeping it in perspective Yes there are exceptions when you know something is wrong and you have to move on, but you have to trust for it to have a chance. It’s very sad how so many parents it takes until their kids are 15 or 16 before they realize they were spending all this time stressed out.

If we’re going to spend all this time and money on this, we might as well enjoy it along the way.