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"A genius! For thirty seven year's I've practiced fourteen hours a day, and now they call me a genius! "
- Pablo Sarasate, violinist (1844-1908)"

This week, I had a chance to engage in great soccer conversations with an old friend who I met in Brazil many years ago. Vinicius dos Santos now heads up a youth soccer club in Phoenix Arizona.

There was one common theme in our conversations when we discussed the similarities and differences between soccer in Saskatoon and soccer in Phoenix. The matter of over-competing and under training has a common thread in both communities, and soccer minds in both areas are similarly frustrated when it comes to options to deal with the problem.

If you think carefully about what we do in Saskatoon, it really is ridiculous to say the least. For the most part, (and I want to be careful not to over-generalize), coaches and parents of our Premier level teams have one goal in mind - to make it to club nationals in October.

That goal in itself is not ridiculous, but our expectations certainly are. We fail to provide our children adequate preparation, yet we expect them to produce results at national competitions. It is impossible to provide adequate preparation when our players play more games than they have practices, when they have no proper periodization model and when they are continuously competing in non competitive leagues. Imagine a child being asked to perform at a national music, ballet or karate competition without adequate training and preparation!

Parents continuously equate registration fees with the number of competitive games played, and often see little value in practice. Perhaps we need to pay training fees as we do with piano lessons, and offer games for free. It is not the number of games that our youth play that is the problem, but the ratio of training hours to games certainly is, as is the quality of the competition and the lack of properly structured seasons that allow for proper preparation.

I am not sure what the answer is! Soccer experts in our Province have become afraid to address the issue for fear of the push back that comes from both parents and administrators of the game. I am pretty certain that nothing will change in the near future and definitely a lot of education will be needed before change is embraced.