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Post by Soccerhouse on Jun 14, 2017 15:25:58 GMT -5
So you learn something new everyday. Tryouts are over and everyone was/is chasing the best/highest level team your kids can make or achieve. Interesting article on Pulisic, with a few facts I didn't necessarily know. Yes, comparing him to the everyday kid, is a terrible comparison, but for what its worth... sports.yahoo.com/christian-pulisics-upbringing-change-athletes-developed-u-s-210726336.html?curator=SportsREDEFarticle highlihts and summary is from this -- bleacherreport.com/articles/2713937-the-christian-pulisic-blueprint?_branch_match_id=403271276012690981The comments that stood out to me: "A story by George Dohrmann last week – “The Christian Pulisic Blueprint” – revealed that his upbringing was pretty simple. His parents didn’t push him to train a million hours a week, overburden him with private coaches and welcomed participation in other sports. Those are all important items. He spurned the academy team of the Philadelphia Union, a unit consistently more talent-laden and successful than the PA Classics.
“When you are the best player on your team but your team is not as good, it means you handle the ball more, you have to do more to carry your team and in the process, you are developing your game,” says Richie Williams, an assistant coach with the U.S. men’s national team who coached Christian, then 15, at the U-17 residency program in Bradenton and in the 2015 U-17 World Cup. “If it is a loaded team, that same player might be identified as a role player and never develop those skills.”American youth sports almost always push good players to the highest level of competition, thus surrounding them with the most amount of talent so they are most likely to win. Bigger is almost always considered the best route to development. It is the basic stable of all travel teams, high schools and NCAA programs.
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Post by gaprospects on Jun 14, 2017 23:44:01 GMT -5
I see your Dan Wetzel article and raise you this one, from Will Parchman: www.topdrawersoccer.com/the91stminute/2017/06/the-christian-pulisic-blueprint-is-that-there-is-no-blueprint/Particular passages that stand out, picked out to contrast those picked out above: "But what I want you to see about Pulisic, and in truth about all supposedly elite young players, is that the club complex is merely a repository for the talent, a place to stash it and watch it grow as opposed to the creator of the seed itself. We’ve grown so enamored with the idea that coaches and systems Make Players that we’ve largely forgotten that the best ones are knitted together at birth and largely nurtured in the most substantive ways at home and in the street."..."As Exhibit A, I present a video of Pulisic embarrassing children as a microscopic 9-year-old. This is not normal, nor was it coached into him by any holistic club system. It was his father, a former player himself, working with him for hours and hours on end. It was Pulisic working in unstructured environments at 6, 7, 8 years old, hitting balls alone against backboards and house siding and playing 3v3 with friends with coke cans and sweatshirts as goalposts."I'll leave you to click on the article to see the mentioned video, and it's worth clicking on it since he goes into a lot more than what's mentioned here. It's always interesting to see player development debated in a public arena like this, especially when non-traditional soccer outlets like Yahoo are involved (I mean, you would expect to find something like this on TopDrawerSoccer). I do agree with Parchman that the DA and MLS are better served figuring out how to pump out players like Kellyn Acosta as opposed to trying to replicate the same circumstances that helped create Pulisic.
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Post by Soccerhouse on Jun 15, 2017 8:19:10 GMT -5
Biggest thing I've seen and the take home is how willing are folks to nurture players like this. I hear comments all the time from certain individuals in the scene that "he won't be crap when hes 14, I've seen it over and over again."
Well lets give the kid a chance before we starting making assumptions and slapping him down at age 10. There is a lot of special kids in this soccer community, lets not turn our backs on them, lets pick them up and make them work harder and get better. To make special players, the community needs to support them, not just an individual coach or club.
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