BETWEEN THE TWO of them, Carlo Celli and Nathan Richardson—both language professors at Bowling Green State University in Ohio—have coached youth soccer for about 30 years.
Sweet, right? Actually, they say they were doing it all wrong. The problem isn’t that they were coaching improperly. It’s that they were coaching, period.
All kids really need to learn the game, Richardson says now, is “a ball, a place to play and some older kids to play with them.” Instead, we have delivered them into the soccer-industrial complex—a top-down, adult-run, structured, supervised system that drains all the joy out of the game and, not coincidentally, all the creative genius. Celli and Richardson submit that the reason the U.S. men’s professional team was knocked out of World Cup contention so early is that we’re raising “soccer robots.”
They didn’t always feel that way. For a long time, the two men happily put local kids through their drills, starting as young as age 3. Then one morning, two of their 9-year-old players showed up to practice with their younger sisters, and one brought along another kid who hadn’t played soccer before. The day was shot— they’d just have to let everyone goof off.
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