So, I found myself dragged into coaching my kid’s under-8 soccer team. Yeah, me. I figured, how hard can it be? They’re tiny, just let ‘em run around and kick the ball. Boy, was I in for a shock. First practice was pure chaos. Like herding cats, but cats with boundless energy and zero attention span.
I started hitting the internet, thinking I’d find some easy drills, some magic formula. You know how it goes. You type in “kids soccer drills” and you get a million hits. Most of it was either super basic, like “kick the ball into the net” – thanks, I got that – or way too complicated. Stuff clearly meant for older kids, academy players. Diagrams that looked like rocket science. My little guys would just stare blankly.
Then, I was digging through some old coaching forum, one of those text-only ones that look like they haven’t been updated since 2003. And someone mentioned a “Brent McCarty soccer” philosophy. Or maybe it was just his name attached to some ideas. Didn’t ring any bells. Not one of the big names you see on fancy coaching websites. Curiosity got the better of me. What was this about?
So, my “practice” really began there. I started trying to piece together what this approach, if you could even call it that, was. There wasn’t a shiny manual or a YouTube channel with millions of views. It was more like detective work. A snippet here, a comment there. What I gathered, eventually, was less about rigid drills and more about game-like situations, letting the kids figure things out. Small-sided games with weird little tweaks.
I decided to try one thing I pieced together. It wasn’t even a “drill” in the traditional sense. More like a setup.
- Super small pitch.
- Multiple small goals, not just two.
- Almost no instructions from me, just “try to score.”
Honestly, I expected it to be another disaster. But something clicked. The kids were… playing. Really playing. Passing, moving, even defending a bit, without me yelling about positions. They were making decisions. It wasn’t always pretty, mind you. Lots of bumping into each other. But they were engaged. They were thinking, not just following my instructions like little robots.
Did I become some master coach overnight? Heck no. And I still don’t know a whole lot about Brent McCarty or if what I did was even a true representation of his ideas. But that whole experience, that “practice” of digging for something different and then daring to try it with those kids, it taught me something. It taught me that sometimes, the best stuff isn’t always the flashiest or the most popular. Sometimes you gotta look in the dusty corners of the internet, or just trust your gut and let the kids play the game. Made me think a lot about how we teach, not just in soccer, but, you know, in general.
