Soccer Talk with Adrian Parrish – All Your Questions About the Game Answered

Thanks to everyone who joined the webinar with FC Cincinnati Academy Coach, Adrian Parrish, where we discussed all your soccer questions - whether you wanted to know the pros and cons of your child playing up, thoughts on the amount of time coaches should be talking during a game, how to support a child with performance anxiety , it was great to hear from you all!

Here you can watch a snippet from Wednesday's webinar, but you can re-watch the full 55 minute session with Adrian Parrish on the Soccer Parent Resource Center now! If you're not signed up, you can grab a 3-Day Free Pass below!

We hope you enjoy!

Watch Snippet Here

TRANSCRIPT:

Skye:
Okay. Moving on. I love this question. I think it's a really, really, really important one. In fact, I was being interviewed this morning by somebody from a newspaper in the Chicago area, I think, and she asked this of me, as well, and what parents should do. "Our coach doesn't yell or provide instructions to the team during the game and this is not helping my daughter develop. What can I do to help her without becoming an overbearing parent?"

Let's just dive in, to start with, to the different qualities of coach communication that we might run into over the course of our children being involved in soccer and the pros and cons of having a very talkative coach and having a very quiet coach.

Adrian Parrish:
That goes back to that other question that you asked there about the difference of having different coaches throughout your time, as well. You're going to experience coaches that may just sit back and enjoy watching you play. You may experience coaches that are going to yell and scream at you the whole entire time. You're going to experience different types of coaches, or you're hopefully going to experience different types of coaches, throughout your child's playing career.

And each player is going to react differently. You're going to get players that may react differently to, again, it goes back to the teaching type of things. You're going to get players that are going to react differently that, "Yeah, I need to be yelled at to get motivated. I need to be pushed." You're going to get players that are like, "I just need you to shut up and not talk to me." You know what I mean? So you are going to get players that are going to want different things throughout the time.

So if your child is one that needs to be motivated and pushed, you've also got to ask her, again, having these conversations with each other, what can she do to herself to help her push herself more? What can she do? Why is she needing someone to push her and yell and tell her what to do? I think we often have this conversation about decision making, and whether players are making the decisions, and the players have to make the decisions and we're just joy-sticking them as coaches. Why are we not helping them as coaches?

So there has to be some guidance. I'm not saying that, no, we just are always going to tell players what to do and direct them the whole entire time throughout their 17, 18, 19 minutes or whatever they're playing, but I think there has to be something that you also have to find out, yourself, because most of the time, when you find yourself out there coaching, and obviously I'm still coaching, you find yourself out there and you're trying to put some information across, kids aren't listening to you, anyway.

You can throw out little bits of information, but if you're having to continuously yell and scream and motivate and push the child, my question back to that would be, why is your child not necessarily motivated and pushing themselves? What do they need? Why do they need that? Do they actually want to play the game or do they really want to have somebody just yelling and screaming at them?

Skye:
Yeah. And I guess also the question there is, "Our coach doesn't yell during the game and it's not helping my daughter develop," whoa.

Adrian Parrish:
Yeah, because the development takes place in training.

Skye:
Yelling during a game doesn't help develop it. Can we just be very clear about that?

Adrian Parrish:
Yeah. The development takes place in the training. So I don't know whether this person's coach allows them to watch the training sessions. They may be one of these people that are a big believer that they do all the training sessions, they do all the information giving at the training session. Listen, one of the hardest things we always say is we watch the league and we see the coaches on the sideline, kicking the ball within every single 19 minutes and running up and down. It's a different game. It's a different game because it's also a different outcome that, yeah, they have to be involved a bit. They're emotionally and mentally involved in it because it's their jobs. It's their livelihood, as well.

Skye:
And not all coaches are like that either.

Adrian Parrish:
No.

Skye:
There's some top-level coaches that aren't like that, too. It comes down a little bit to the personality.

Adrian Parrish:
Yeah, it does.

Skye:
I would also say that, as parents, our number one decision is making a decision about the playing environment for our child. So if this is not just about the game and this is really your child isn't developing because the coach isn't providing data points to them or isn't doing a good job, then that's something to be cognizant of, as well, but we also, and we talk a lot about this in the Sideline Project and in the Sideline Project course that we have, is that there's a lot of research that providing instruction in the middle of performance does not help long-term cognitive growth. [inaudible 00:31:37] provided these data points in their research.

And so while coaching in the moment might seem to help, for instance, your child picks up the ball to throw it in and you see Charlie wide open and you say, "Throw to Charlie," and they throw to Charlie and then Charlie has a breakaway, you think, "Oh, that was great. I helped my child. They learned," but actually, well, did they learn? And the question is, would they have been better off for longterm learning if you hadn't said anything and, instead, your child had scanned and looked for opportunities and made a decision, good or bad? Would that learning happen faster?

So just food for thought. There's really not an answer to that because maybe you giving that information to them that once helps them look for that in the future on their own, without you cuing them, but it's a lot of question marks. I think the biggest question here or the thought here is that I applaud this parent for not wanting to be that overbearing parent and it's hard and tricky to find that space that is okay to help support, guide, instruct, empower, be a part of the scocer experience with your child, and so much of that comes down to our kids' personalities.

Adrian Parrish:
I agree. I think that you've got to give kudos to the parents. I think that's because we do see that the parent does want to get involved a lot, but listen, I think you're going to find that, well, your child will experience different coaches and will go through that.