How to teach the children well, the Ajax way
The New York Times magazine commissioned author Michael Sokolove to visit the Ajax youth academy to see “How a Soccer Star is Made,” and the writer couldn’t help making repeated, inevitable comparisons to the fragmented youth soccer system in America:
“Americans like to put together teams, even at the Pee Wee level, that are meant to win. The best soccer-playing nations build individual players, ones with superior technical skills who later come together on teams the U.S. struggles to beat. In a way, it is a reversal of type. Americans tend to think of Europeans as collectivists and themselves as individualists. But in sports, it is the opposite. The Europeans build up the assets of individual players. Americans underdevelop the individual, although most of the volunteers who coach at the youngest level would not be cognizant of that.
“The American approach is the more democratic view of sport. The aspirations of each member of the team are equally valid. Elsewhere, there is more comfort with singling out players for attention and individualized instruction, even at the expense of the group. David Endt, a former Ajax player and a longtime executive of the club, told me, ‘Here, we would rather polish one or two jewels than win games at the youth levels.’
“Americans place a higher value on competition than on practice, so the balance between games and practice in the U.S. is skewed when compared with the rest of the world. It’s not unusual for a teenager in the U.S. to play 100 or more games in a season, for two or three different teams, leaving little time for training and little energy for it in the infrequent moments it occurs. A result is that the development of our best players is stunted. They tend to be fast and passionate but underskilled and lacking in savvy compared with players elsewhere. ‘As soon as a kid here starts playing, he’s got referees on the field and parents watching in lawn chairs,’ John Hackworth, the former coach of the U.S. under-17 national team and now the youth-development coordinator for the Philadelphia franchise in Major League Soccer told me. ‘As he gets older, the game count just keeps increasing. It’s counterproductive to learning and the No. 1 worst thing we do.’ ”
The U.S. Soccer Development Academy system is being touted as the elite of the elite youth system in America, under the auspices of the U.S. Soccer Federation, and seeksto limit games for the sake of training and skills development.
Says D.C. United president Kevin Payne, whose academy program trained phenom Andy Najar, now starting for the MLS team at the age of 17:
“A lot of research showed that a lot of the best young soccer players in America were playing way too many games — in many instances over 100 a year — and way too many of those games were not of very high quality. We had our ratio of training time to games inverted to the rest of the world. Countries that are really great at developing players routinely try to establish an average of four- or five-to-one ratio of training time to game time. And we were the opposite. We had to turn that on its head.”
