Interview with Coach David

Coach David talks about the National Youth License, structures surrounding youth development, and how coaches can analyze their self-development.

Dr. David Carr has spent the last 45 years coaching at all levels of the game: youth, high school, college, and professional. He helped form the Vermont Youth Soccer Association, was Director of Coaching for the West Virginia Youth Soccer Association, acted as Division Director for Ohio University’s graduate program for Coaching Education, worked for US Youth Soccer as a National Instructor, played a key role in co-creating the USYS Coaching Manual and Nation Youth License, and is currently next in line to be President of the United Soccer Coaches organization. I’m so excited that he took the time to chat, and he gave great insights into how coaches can analyze and break down what they do to further their professional development.

Coach David, thanks for your time! Now you helped create the National Youth License which was a wildly popular course. Can you talk about the process that led to its creation?

Well I was brought into the development team because my doctorate research was focused on coaching youth soccer. Specifically, what coaches do, how coaches learn, and how coaches process information and change their coaching perspectives based on the information given to them.

The first thing we did was create an identity statement about the game in the child, and then we looked at what coaches could do to bring out the game that – in theory – lives within every child.

We asked “What can we do to bring that game out? And how does it work with kids at different developmental levels?” Because there’s a big difference between 5- and 6 year-olds and 9- and 10 year-olds. They’re at different stages of their physical, cognitive, and psychosocial development because they’ve been in school for two or three years and their world has expanded more.

We didn’t focus on the X’s and O’s or how to teach dribbling or passing. It was: What activities can we create that address the developmental needs of 5 and 6 year-olds? What should the game look like for our earliest participants? Where are they in their approach to playing a game? How does it evolve as kids gain more playing experience and get a little bit older?

We had a series of sessions with all of the top level folk and we looked at the coach education offerings that the Federation had. There was nothing that addressed the youth coach who was working with kids under the age of 12. Everything focused on an 11-a-side, adult-oriented game structure. There was nothing that focused on what you do with a group of 7 year-olds.

At the time, there was no real structure for youth soccer. We were trying to take adult rules and adult structures and apply it to younger kids. Every youth program for small children was 11v11.

Using our research and information, we structured a game in the child approach for the youngest kids that was basically one player, one ball. Everyone needed to have a ball. And knowing where young kids are in the different states of their development we learned that 4-a-side made sense. We took goalkeepers out and game structure out and removed throw-ins. The goal was to put the ball back in play quickly with a dribble just to keep the game moving.

So we went through all of that and launched the very first National Youth License in January of 1996 in Florida. And now United Soccer Coaches has taken it on and turned it into the National Youth Diploma with all of the foundational stuff we created 27 year ago as well as what we learned after 25 more years of research. We’ve had really good feedback so far from a lot of people regarding what it is, what we stressed, why it is important, how we ran the course. It’s very very very different from what the other courses are.

Can you talk about the game structure that you set up for these young players?

Most youth soccer was played 11v11, where it’s basically the kid with the ball against 21 other kids. Everybody wanted the ball or they stayed away from the ball because they didn’t know what to do if they got it. So practice had to involve kids getting used to having the ball and doing lots of things with it.

Kids at that age only move it around the field by themselves. Passing and receiving is not really a factor for 5 and 6 year-olds. They end up with the ball somehow and then they go until they lose it. But as they get a little bit older and a little bit wiser they start to figure out that “I can kick the ball toward my friend over here and then run and hope to get it back.”

What we found physically is little kids go 100 miles an hour until they stop, and then they have a relatively quick recovery. So I created a structure for a dual field approach with two small fields next to each other and rosters of 12. We played two four-a-side games at the same time and the coach and the extra players were in the middle and all the parents were on the outside.

Kids would sub on and off like hockey and every kid got to play 85 or 90% of the game. We didn’t need a coach for 6 players, we could have a coach work with 12 players because the game involved 8 players at a time with this rapid substitution process. Every kid got tons of meaningful minutes running around the field, kicking the ball, being with their friends, and the parents got excited. We de-emphasized a lot of competitive outcomes and it was okay if the final score was 17-13. The outcome of those games is meaningless unless someone makes the outcome important.

You said your research looked at how coaches learned. I’m curious about what you found and how it can be applied.

Well first I identified 8 coaches who fit my definition of novice. They were in their first or second year of coaching and had no formal coaching education background. I asked if I could observe, videotape, and interview them, then we’d give them a free coaching education course and I’d follow-up to see how their coaching changed.

During this process I identified 7 discreet behaviors that we consistently saw across all 8 coaches. Most every coach would start practice by having all the kids come to him or her in a semi-circle and explain what they were going to do. I called that behavior Lecture-Demo. It’s when the kids are not active and the coach is talking or demonstrating.

We actually saw very little demonstration with these novice coaches because the majority didn’t know how to pass or dribble a soccer ball – Let alone give players feedback about whether they were doing it correctly or not.

After Lecture-Demo the kids got active and the coaches tried to coach them while they were active. When the kids were active, and the coach was actively coaching, I called it Active Instruction.

There were times when the kids would be playing and the coach would then stop talking and just watch. They’re not really doing any teaching or coaching, just kind of watching them play, and that’s what I called Monitoring. Those were the three behaviors that happened most often.

Now in between activities, coaches would have to move the cones or the goals or put on scrimmage vests. There was a Management component.

So if there were 6 stoppages during practice and they averaged 3 minutes each time, that’s 18 minutes over the course of an hour where coaches weren’t doing anything except picking up cones, putting on scrimmage vests, or doing something else. That become a huge issue because upward of a third to a half of these coaches’ practices was just moving cones and goals. It wasn’t playing.

The 5th behavior was Rest. Players got a drink, caught their breath, calmed down for a second, and sometimes the coach would reorganize the space during this time.

Now the one behavior that didn’t happen a lot was having their attention compromised away from what the kids were doing. I called it a Diversion. A parent would come over to take Johnny out of practice for a dentist appointment or someone would come up and talk to the coach about the field.

The last behavior was Behavior Modification. This was how coaches dealt with behavior issues that were fairly glaring, and the coach had to divert his or her attention away from what the team was doing to deal with a problem kid.

We then put them through the coaching course, observed them again, and I asked “How did you know what to do? How did you learn?” And the 4 coaches who took the National Soccer Coaches Course significantly changed their approach based on what they had seen the National instructor do on the field and the information given to them.

That research became the foundation for the National Youth License. Coaches didn’t know how to give feedback, other than saying “Good job, well done, nice try.” If the kid made a technical mistake, they might comment that “Well that was bad,” or “Well we’ll have to work on that.” But they didn’t know how to give them any information as to why it was bad and what they could do to fix it.

I talked to Coach Tom two weeks ago about how novice coaches struggle to correct their players’ techniques. Did your research find anything that could help coaches give better feedback?

I found 5 different ways I could code feedback. The categories were Positive, Positive Skill, Negative, Negative Skill, and General Informational statements.

If a coach said “You did a great job staying over the ball,” it was a Positive Skill feedback statement. If they said “That was great,” that was just a Positive statement, because it’s not related to a skill.

If they said “You were really stiff, that’s why it bounced away from you.” That’s a Negative Skill feedback because they commented on the mistake. [An example of Negative feedback would be just saying “Oh, that was wrong.”]

A General Informational statement would be “Run over here. Line up over here. Get a partner.”

I ask coaches all the time “In your self-analysis of how you coach, do you perceive yourself as being more positive or more negative in how you interact with your players?” A lot of coaches think they’re positive, but the only thing they comment on is when somebody screws up.

Early on, the coaches I studied rarely said anything specific to the skill. But after the soccer coaching course, they understood more about how the skill was performed and could spot when it didn’t go well and why. So we saw more feedback that had information that would help the players.

So we looked at how the coaches spent their time, what they did, how long they spent in each particular behavior, and at the end of a practice we could break it all down. “Okay, coach. You had your kids for 57 minutes and you had 4.5 minutes of Lecture-demo, 15.5 minutes of Management time, you were actively engaged with your players for 10 minutes, you Monitored them for 7 minutes, and your attention was diverted 3 times for 8 minutes.” That information combined with the feedback categories paints a really clear picture of what coaches do, how long kids are playing, and how much coaching is actually being done.

Was there an ideal ratio or a certain set of numbers that coaches should be shooting for?

The research suggests that the rule of thumb is 75% activity time. So if I have an hour, kids are active for 45 minutes. That gives me 15 minutes to do Rests, Lecture-demo, Manage activity transition time, that kind of thing. And for the National Youth License we incorporated a 3-to-1 activity to non-activity ratio because younger kids need more rest periods, but can continue playing after a short recovery.

So if you watch a video of yourself coaching and use a stopwatch to count how long the kids were moving during practice, then you can say “Well the kids were active for 37 minutes.” But what were they actually doing in those 37 minutes? And how much coaching did they receive in those 37 minutes? That’s where the rest of the data gathering needs to be used.

Did that study give any insights about the balance between coaching and observation?

When I coach kids that age I am very rarely not in active instruction mode. Even if the kids are scrimmaging I’m still moving around, commenting, suggesting, providing information, or in some cases interpreting a rule or enforcing a rule. I’m rarely in monitoring mode.

Young kids don’t sequence skills smoothly right away. Each thing they do has almost a defined pause between what they do next. They decide they’re going to go stick their foot in then suddenly they have the ball, and it’s like “Okay.. now what?” You can read their face and body language and see what’s happening in their mind.

As kids get older, those sequences of skills that are involved with how they play, become synced up and those little pauses go away. It becomes a flowing series of technical movements.

How can coaches help shrink the length of those little pauses?

Well every kid is unique, they’re at their own place developmentally. So part of our approach to the National Youth License was “How can we have this kid be successful today? Where are they in their development? What activities are they doing? What can they do to demonstrate to themselves that they are getting better?”

So we do a lot of games where players are asked to add one to their best. One of my favorite things is Dribbling Gates. You got cones spread out players see how many they can go through. But you have to know who you’re coaching. 5 year-olds can’t dribble through cones and count at the same time, but 7 and 8 year-olds can.

So we have those older players dribble through cones and eventually pass through the cones with a partner. They play for 45 seconds then we go around and ask how many they got. “How many did you get? I got 12. You? 11. How many did you get? 45.” But you know they didn’t have 45.

And you’ll get the other kid who really struggled and says 4. The average for most kids was 10-12, but you have one outlier who’s making up a number, and you have one kid who’s still figuring it out. So I tell coaches to play 3 or 4 trials and encourage players. Tell them: “Same amount of time. You know your score, beat your score. Don’t worry about getting the most. Beat your score.”

We watch the kid who said 45 to get a realistic number for him, and watch the kid who got 4 to make sure that they get a few more before saying “Time’s up!” Now I know that the kid who had 4 is now at 7 so it’s reasonable to assume that the kids who got 10, 11, 12 beat their score, and now I have a realistic number for the kid who had 45. I also do the same thing with juggling.

What still happens in games is that the bigger, faster, stronger, more dominant kids dominate the ball. They take more shots and score more goals. So we try to create as many different activities to goal so all kids can experience scoring a goal because every kid wants to score. So we look at how we can create opportunities to do things differently that build self-esteem, because a lot of kids just don’t know what to do, and we want to change that.