Successful Soccer Experiment

Today we tried an experiment in youth soccer in Arlington.

School holidays, especially one-day ones, are always a challenge for parents, looking for something to occupy their kids.

So today the Arlington Soccer Assoc. (the Curmudgeon is on the Board of Directors) held a free pick-up tournament for youth soccer players. The format was 4 v 4 games of 10 minutes, with no referees and no coaching. We had six "fields" marked out on a large artificial turf field. We assigned kids to teams as they walked in--if they showed up as a team, they played together, otherwise we just put them on the next team. And then we let them play.

It was a smashing success. In the first group, which was third through sixth graders, we had 140 kids show up, enough to form 24 teams. Had we known the demand was that high--and now we do know it for the future--we would have given this age group more time, or tried an even larger field space.

Still, it was pretty amazing. The ASA Technical Director, Bob Bigney, single-handedly organized the 24 teams into a mini-tournament, with 12 teams playing on six small fields at one time while the others rested. Once the games began, the kids were the masters of their fields. This is the true model of youth soccer--letting kids play in a safe environment with minimal adult intervention.

We also had a similar format for older kids, with a decent turnout--about 12 teams for the middle schoolers, and a few teams for the high schoolers.

We'll probably do it again on school holidays in the future, but with a few modifications based on what we learned from our experiment. We might need to group just third and fourth graders into one time slot, with fifth and sixth graders in another, to keep the numbers more reasonable (and get in more games for each team), and we might need more sign-up time at the front end.

Oh, and a coffee vendor for the adults!