My U11/2013 daughter is wrapping up her second full year with a small club team in St. Louis. We originally picked this club in 2021 because they’re local to our neighborhood, and they try to field teams of kids from our town and a few surrounding towns, resulting in a really tightknit group. On a talent and competition level, they’re firmly in the middle of the pack, but that’s okay for us for our daughter's age. In a market dominated by a hyper-competitive clubs with high fees and several teams per age group, this club is more our speed. After a few months, we knew everyone at the club, and they knew us. It’s been a great setup.
My kid had been a defender out of team need, but last Spring they moved up to 9v9 and the team’s best forward switched clubs, opening up a spot for my kid to move to forward on a bigger field. It was an amazing opportunity and she ran with it. Try as I did to make her a no-nonsense defender like her old man, she has a nose for scoring goals and creating on the offensive end. Since switching positions, she’s been the team’s leading goal-scorer and top attacking threat. She’s comfortable creating for her forward partner or taking on defenders 1v1. Better yet, she takes all of the team’s offensive free kicks and penalty kicks. Well, she did…right up until the last game of outdoor soccer in the fall.
Beginning with that game and continuing to the current 7v7 indoor season, the coach has started allowing his daughter, the goalie, to take most of the free kicks in the offensive half and even some penalty kicks. This has not gone over well with my daughter and especially not with me as a knowledgeable soccer fan. My kid hasn’t missed a penalty for this team (6-for-6) and is one of the few kids who can drive the ball off the ground and over a wall (or goalie) from outside the box. She knows where the ball should go, when to pass vs shoot on direct kicks, and is the one who gets fouled to create the chances half the time. The goalie has the power to take goal kicks, so her free kicks can be okay, but her accuracy is dreadful, and her last two penalty kicks have gone several feet over the net. Her few goals have been high, lofting free kicks that happened to come down before the crossbar. She has yet to successfully convert a penalty (or stop one, for that matter). My daughter spoke to the coach and asked why the change, he told my kid he wants to give other people chances to take kicks, but it’s just his kid taking them.
We have voiced some polite displeasure with a few trusted parents and I’ve tried to approach everything from a common sense soccer point of view. Yeah, of course I want my kid taking these and racking up goals, but I’d even settle for a small group of outfield players who can place a shot stepping up as as the situations dictate. Our goalie is not very good at all at stopping shots; she sure as hell shouldn’t be running up to take them. One family shared with us that the goalie was also a part of a church league (CYC) soccer team, but she was not the starting goalie and her dad wasn’t the coach, and she quit that team because she didn’t play enough. On our club team, the coach rotates everyone evenly with hockey-style changes, which is another small annoyance. Everyone should play, absolutely, but there has to be a point in club soccer where talent dictates time. (I'm fully aware that sentence sucks for U11 soccer, but it's where I'm at with all of this.) Conveniently, his daughter doesn’t rotate with anyone, and I honestly don’t know if we have another goalie on the team or not—if we do, there’s no chance he’d let the two of them share minutes.
After this past weekend's game (they lost 7-2; my kid and her forward partner had the two goals; the goalie took one attacking free kick, a worm-burner hit directly into the first defender), I’m left with not entirely knowing how to proceed, and really trying to re-center myself to see this objectively. It’s U11 soccer, and this coach isn’t costing my kid a scholarship or anything, but she knows she’s getting a raw deal. She’s a good player, among the best on the team, and I know she could grow if she played on another team next year. That said, she’s 10, and she isn’t going to want to leave her friends on this team, especially as they start middle school together next year. My wife and I are convinced that we can’t be the ones to bring this up to the coach, because we don’t want it to affect our kid’s experience more than it has already. Likewise, it would be unfair for us to ask any other parents to do it as well.
Am I overreacting? Is there a way to tell him he needs to be a coach to all 18 players and not just his kid? I have considered trying to recruit a (better) goalie to our team and try and force his hand or suggesting to the club director that we have enough girls for two teams to move some pieces around the board, but I don't see that working out. A suddenly obvious drawback of the tightknit club is situations like this, where the coach's family has been involved at so many levels for so long that I don't see me changing any minds. Truthfully, just venting this here helps, since I’m less likely to do it on the sidelines within earshot of the coach’s wife. Any feedback or relatable stories welcomed.
My kid had been a defender out of team need, but last Spring they moved up to 9v9 and the team’s best forward switched clubs, opening up a spot for my kid to move to forward on a bigger field. It was an amazing opportunity and she ran with it. Try as I did to make her a no-nonsense defender like her old man, she has a nose for scoring goals and creating on the offensive end. Since switching positions, she’s been the team’s leading goal-scorer and top attacking threat. She’s comfortable creating for her forward partner or taking on defenders 1v1. Better yet, she takes all of the team’s offensive free kicks and penalty kicks. Well, she did…right up until the last game of outdoor soccer in the fall.
Beginning with that game and continuing to the current 7v7 indoor season, the coach has started allowing his daughter, the goalie, to take most of the free kicks in the offensive half and even some penalty kicks. This has not gone over well with my daughter and especially not with me as a knowledgeable soccer fan. My kid hasn’t missed a penalty for this team (6-for-6) and is one of the few kids who can drive the ball off the ground and over a wall (or goalie) from outside the box. She knows where the ball should go, when to pass vs shoot on direct kicks, and is the one who gets fouled to create the chances half the time. The goalie has the power to take goal kicks, so her free kicks can be okay, but her accuracy is dreadful, and her last two penalty kicks have gone several feet over the net. Her few goals have been high, lofting free kicks that happened to come down before the crossbar. She has yet to successfully convert a penalty (or stop one, for that matter). My daughter spoke to the coach and asked why the change, he told my kid he wants to give other people chances to take kicks, but it’s just his kid taking them.
We have voiced some polite displeasure with a few trusted parents and I’ve tried to approach everything from a common sense soccer point of view. Yeah, of course I want my kid taking these and racking up goals, but I’d even settle for a small group of outfield players who can place a shot stepping up as as the situations dictate. Our goalie is not very good at all at stopping shots; she sure as hell shouldn’t be running up to take them. One family shared with us that the goalie was also a part of a church league (CYC) soccer team, but she was not the starting goalie and her dad wasn’t the coach, and she quit that team because she didn’t play enough. On our club team, the coach rotates everyone evenly with hockey-style changes, which is another small annoyance. Everyone should play, absolutely, but there has to be a point in club soccer where talent dictates time. (I'm fully aware that sentence sucks for U11 soccer, but it's where I'm at with all of this.) Conveniently, his daughter doesn’t rotate with anyone, and I honestly don’t know if we have another goalie on the team or not—if we do, there’s no chance he’d let the two of them share minutes.
After this past weekend's game (they lost 7-2; my kid and her forward partner had the two goals; the goalie took one attacking free kick, a worm-burner hit directly into the first defender), I’m left with not entirely knowing how to proceed, and really trying to re-center myself to see this objectively. It’s U11 soccer, and this coach isn’t costing my kid a scholarship or anything, but she knows she’s getting a raw deal. She’s a good player, among the best on the team, and I know she could grow if she played on another team next year. That said, she’s 10, and she isn’t going to want to leave her friends on this team, especially as they start middle school together next year. My wife and I are convinced that we can’t be the ones to bring this up to the coach, because we don’t want it to affect our kid’s experience more than it has already. Likewise, it would be unfair for us to ask any other parents to do it as well.
Am I overreacting? Is there a way to tell him he needs to be a coach to all 18 players and not just his kid? I have considered trying to recruit a (better) goalie to our team and try and force his hand or suggesting to the club director that we have enough girls for two teams to move some pieces around the board, but I don't see that working out. A suddenly obvious drawback of the tightknit club is situations like this, where the coach's family has been involved at so many levels for so long that I don't see me changing any minds. Truthfully, just venting this here helps, since I’m less likely to do it on the sidelines within earshot of the coach’s wife. Any feedback or relatable stories welcomed.