Sporting memories: Getting a coaching job with completely unqualified partners

There are a lot of opportunities to be coach in youth sports in the USA and much of this stems from the fact that most of these coaching jobs are volunteer positions that are unpaid and just something parents feel like doing. The "job" is normally pretty easy to find a "coach" for and I don't recall at any point in my life there not being enough adults to go around to do the coaching, if you can even call it that.

The unfortunate side-effect of having coaches with little to no background or even knowledge of the sport is that if you are being taught by someone that doesn't know what the hell they are talking about, there is a good chance that you, the players, are not going to so much as have an opportunity of getting any better.

So every now and then they will bring in a coach that is also a youth player themselves in a assistant capacity, and that was one of my jobs when I was a mere Freshman in high school.

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The team in question was a girls indoor soccer (football) team and this was fine by me but there was one problem: Ok, there was more than one problems but one of them was that I had never actually played indoor soccer and was kind of unfamiliar with the rules. I had a tremendous amount of talent in the outdoor game though, and was old enough that the 3rd and 4th grade girls were going to listen to me.

The other problem was that the head coach was an obese woman who had her leg in a cast so I think she was merely there because they were likely legally required to have someone over 18 be the actual coach. Needless to say, and especially because of her inability to walk properly, I was doing a vast majority of the actual coaching.

We would do drills and I'll admit, most of the drills that I had the girls do were just repeats of drills that my own coaches had me doing. I wasn't sure if they were effective, but I presumed that at least some of them were because I was pretty darn good at the sport at the time. The kids were really too young to notice any sort of standout talent, but I do recall one thing for sure and that was that one of my players scored an own goal in one of our first matches and part of the reason why that was the case was because of what we had been working on in practice.

In youth soccer / football in the US, a big problem is the almost omnipresent sense that the ball always must be moving forward at all times. Youth soccer in the States didn't focus much on the importance of maintaining possession including when playing backwards. In youth soccer in USA, it was actually pretty darn easy to catch the other team off guard by passing the ball back to a defender because it was so rare to see that the other team would normally go a bit nuts and over-pursue with half of their team and when done correctly, this could make a huge advantage for my team downfield. Honestly, it was that simple and it worked over and over again.

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I had been working with the girls that week about this type of play and it was kind of a disaster when the very first time they tried it, one of the midfield girls, who was just trying to do what her coach told her to do, passed the ball back to the keeper FAR too aggressively and the ball just winded up in the back of the net. I think at least one of the girls cried after that but thankfully we ended up winning the match and therefore they didn't do a little girl mutiny and just decide to not listen to the teenage boy giving them silly plans.

It was reasonably fun to do this gig and honestly, I don't know how I had the time. I do know that I didn't have a car so I have to really hand it to my parents. They drove me to practices and games of my own and also found the time to drive me to practices and games of the team I was coaching.

I was never paid anything for doing this but I suppose I felt a bit of a sense of pride for helping out, especially because my younger sister was on the team.

She ended up becoming really good at the the game as she got older and if she had dedicated herself to the sport a little bit more than she did, she probably could have been a star at it. Just like her older brother and sister, she was quite gifted athletically and at around 5 foot 7, she was quite tall for a girl.

These days she is still athletic and has some memories of me coaching that team but not very many. You don't retain a great many of your memories from 3rd grade though, and I guess that is ok :)