The tone of this polemic brought this Classic to mind.
Anyway, here's the review sent to Amazon.
Two Stars: Not Far Enough Outside.
Coaching Outside The Box: Changing The Mindset of Youth Soccer is a 5 star indictment of the too common culture of youth sports, and not just youth soccer. However it fails to provide practical alternatives to the practices it condemns. Worse, it seems to miss completely the underlying purpose of these activities for kids.
Authors Paul Mairs and Richard Shaw explore in great detail several areas where a “win at all cost” mentality stifles longer term player development. (Coach Anson Dorrance at the University of North Carolina calls this “winning today at the cost of tomorrow.”) They examine the approach to games and tournaments, sideline instruction, dealing with mistakes, playing time and assignment to positions, talent identification (and recruiting), and the methods coaches use to challenge and train players.
They convincingly document common practices in each of those areas that can, and often do, impede the preparation of players for successful play at higher levels and lifetime enjoyment of the sport. Perhaps to a fault: the litany of things to avoid will surely lead some parents – a target audience for the book – to avoid youth sports altogether. Nonetheless, it is this element of the book that earns the two stars.
The book repeatedly references (with more than a little condescension) “self proclaimed leading clubs” that engage in these practices. As if leading clubs are the only ones. These things are found at mid and bottom tier clubs as well. Which makes the book’s meager roster of inadequate solutions – ideas and methods that can really change the mindset of youth soccer - all the more unsatisfying.
To use one example, the authors rightfully decry practices that diminish young athletes who make mistakes. Their solution is, essentially, “Stop doing that.” A truly “outside the box” solution embraces the mistakes and failures that inevitably accompany strong efforts - where an athlete seeks the limits of his or her competence, then takes the step beyond. Legendary basketball coach John Wooden said it best: “The team that makes the most mistakes usually wins the game. Doers make mistakes.”
The book’s most striking failure, however, is to ignore the fundamental purpose of youth sports. Positive Coaching Alliance founder Jim Thompson says this is to help produce “stronger, more responsible and confident persons who will be successful in life”. Outside the home there is no better venue to learn Positive Life Skills such as perseverance, discipline, accountability and so many more. Of course, the venue is just as fertile ground for nourishing the darker side of those same character traits. Any coaching philosophy that does not plan to instill the positive qualities has a fairly good chance of allowing the negative ones to grow.
Playing to win is a foundational element of American culture. Mairs and Shaw do a fine job of spotlighting all the wrong ways that coaches and other adults achieve that adult goal at the expense of the growth and enjoyment of young athletes. What they fail to recognize is that any culture that defines and values winning only by the numbers on the scoreboard cannot be broken until there is a well documented, replicable, player- centered approach to soccer development leads to that scoreboard success. Where teams win games not because they are trained to win games, but because the players on one team are, player for player, more proficient technically and in the essential elements of team tactics. The programs of Wooden and Dorrance offer examples of the impact of methods that blend solid fundamental instruction in a sport with a well planned program designed to instill strong positive Life Skills.
The same is doable in youth sports. It requires levels of preparation, patience and persistence on the part of coaches and parents that are hard to maintain in a hurry up society. So successful models tend to be small both in scale and number.
Until they become more prominent Jim Thompson’s books The Double Goal Coach (reviewed elsewhere) and Positive Sports Parenting offer solid prescriptions for coaches and parents respectively who are stuck “Inside the Box” – ways they can deal with and even combat dysfunctional youth sports cultures. For coaches who want the Master’s Degree version of Positive Coaching and ideas that are truly outside the box, check out Bruce Brown’s Teaching Character Through Sport (also reviewed.) All three books offer positive, proactive ideas for improving the culture and processes of youth sports that Coaching Outside The Box largely fails to provide.
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