Stephen Parker's Library tagged kids →  View Popular, Search in Google

Paul Currie: Well, the textbook answer would be that the Golden Age of learning is between 11 and 14. That’s when you can absorb the most information.

 

If you think about it, you can’t really talk to most 7 or 8 year olds for more than a couple of minutes because they get easily overloaded and blank out.

 

So I think they are right about the Golden Age. I think U11 is when you can assimilate information a little bit easier.

 

And then I think the best players at U14, generally speaking, are the best players U16, and the best players U18 and the best players at U20. This is not always true but in general.

 

SN: So you can tell at U14 who is going to be great at U18? 

Paul Currie: At the end of the day, natural talent. It’s natural talent and working out, being dedicated to your craft and having a great attitude. But mostly it’s natural talent.

 

I grew up with so many great players in England, and some super-naturally talented players wasted it because by the time they got to 16 or 17 they got involved with drinking and girls and all the rest of it, and they just stopped playing.

 

The time to get really serious about soccer is when the players are 15 and 16 years old, and if the players are really into the game. If the parents are more into soccer than the players, then there is something wrong. It has got to come from the kids.  

 

SN: And what makes a good coach?

This is the age of the youth-sports industrial complex, where men make a living putting on tournaments for 7-year-olds, and parents subject their children to tryouts and pay good money for the right to enter into it.

There are buzzwords in this business, sure to coax the gullible parent. The big three terms are "elite," "select," and "travel ball." Oh, the power of those words. Waving the prospect of "travel ball" under the nose of the ambitious father of a talented 9-year-old is like wafting a steak under the nose of a sleeping dog. After all, the more you travel and the farther you go to play a sport, the better you must be at that sport, right?

Dr. Jim Taylor, a psychology professor at the University of
San Francisco, put it best when he wrote in the Huffington Post about parents and their roles in developing or supporting a child's athletic prowess.

 

"If your objective is to turn them into champions, the odds are that you're wasting your money and time and your children's happiness. Sports are metaphorically littered with the scarred psyches of children whose parents tried and failed to do what Earl Woods and Richard Williams succeeded at doing. Your goals as parents are for your children to have fun, learn life skills to succeed later in life, value health and fitness, and develop a love of sports. If by some freak chance you give them world-class athletic genes, they love the sport enough to work incredibly hard, and they get the right kind of support from you, and they become professional or Olympic athletes, then
that's just icing on the cake."