Soccer for Schools
January 22, 2016
International soccer has provided me the greatest experience I’ve ever had as a sports spectator. Watching the Boca Juniors come back to win 2-1 in overtime in their historic stadium in Buenos Aires in November 2013 provided me an almost out-of-body experience as the home team fans, decked out in blue and yellow and waving flags, sang their way through the lows and dramatic highs of this match.
Soccer has been called “the beautiful game.” But of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder; and not all sports fans see beauty in a game that, at its highest levels, has so little scoring and so much flopping, and only one person knows how much time remains in the game. And of course, the sport has been supervised at the highest levels by individuals so corrupt that they make the recent scandals of this nation’s Amateur Athletic Union leadership seem like child’s play.
Soccer is a global game, and we – at the high school level – are not going to change the game at its highest level in the U.S. I don’t really care. I just want a more appropriate game for the interscholastic level.
We already have altered the global game’s substitution rules for the interscholastic level to promote greater participation and player safety. And we use a scoreboard that lets teams and spectators know how much time remains in each half.
To promote more safety, we could implement a football style practice policy that limits the number of practices when heading the ball can occur to one per day during the preseason and to two per week during the regular season.
To promote more scoring, we could implement a basketball style “over-and-back” rule at the midfield line, and also by prohibiting defenders from playing the ball to their own goalkeepers.
The beautiful game has imperfections – at least for our purposes – which we have corrected for our needs in the past and we can do more of in the future without challenging the global juggernaut that soccer has become.
What We’ve Learned
July 12, 2017
Here’s some of what we’ve learned from the first two years of having all Michigan High School Athletic Association member high schools report suspected concussions and make follow-up reports for each.
First and foremost, concussions are of concern beyond football and boys. While football – the highest participation sport – has had the most concussions, the sports that follow are girls basketball (second) and girls soccer (third).
Which leads to the second lesson: Girls report two to three times as many concussions as boys in basketball and soccer, as well as in softball compared to baseball.
Which leads to the third lesson: Whether girls actually experience more concussions than boys or are more forthcoming than boys in reporting suspected concussions, coaches need to coach and communicate with females differently than males; and coach educators must prepare coaches to interact differently with boys and girls.
We’ve also learned that more than 80 percent of concussions caused the athlete to be withheld from activity for six days or longer; and again, there was a tendency to withhold girls longer than boys. In any event, the data suggests that people are taking concussions seriously and not rushing students back into practices or contests.
The data also reveals that more than two-thirds of reported concussions arise from competition, and less than one-third occur during the many longer hours of practice. This is a reversal of the data we were provided a decade ago based on smaller samplings from other states; and this suggests that coaches are finding ways to teach skills and conduct drills without requiring as much player-to-player contact as in the past.
That’s good news. But we’ve also learned from the first two years of data that there is still more to research, more to learn and more to do to make our good games even better.