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Rachel Unitt (England and Everton Ladies) photo: footiechick.com |
Balls, cones and kidsthe soccer coaching newsletterIssue 7 - July 2005 |
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Gender issues in youth soccer coaching by Steve Watson Women's football (soccer) is not new. In England the 'fairer sex' have been playing the 'beautiful game' since the nineteenth century and on Boxing Day, 1920 the premier women's football team of the day (Dick, Kerr Ladies) played another Lancashire team, St. Helen's Ladies, before a capacity crowd of 53,000 at Goodison Park with another 10 to 15,000 fans locked out. In the same year the Dick, Kerr Ladies toured the USA where they played eight games against male opposition, winning three and scoring 35 goals.
However, female participation in football in England was actively discouraged by the Football Association until quite recently (the FA banned women from using it's grounds for fifty years between 1920 and 1970), and is still widely considered as a 'man's game' in which women are seen as marginal, both as players and even as spectators. Yet by 2002 football had become the number one female participation sport in England. Today it is the country's fastest growing sport and the coverage of the England women's football team competing in Euro 2005 on prime time terrestrial television will surely result in more and more girls wanting to emulate their new-found sporting role models. The scale and speed of this explosion of interest in English female football is demonstrated by the facts: in 1993 there just 80 girls teams. In England today there are more than 7,000 teams and over 100,000 registered players. Female interest in playing football is not limited to the birthplace of the 'beautiful game'. In the USA the game really took off after 90,185 fans watched the women's national team beat China in the final of the 1999 World Cup. Today, an estimated 6 million American girls play soccer regularly and in many other countries there are large and growing numbers of girls and women playing the game. The fact that female soccer is so popular today inevitably means that many coaches (especially in the younger age groups) will suddenly have girls in their squads for the first time. Other coaches will be switching from coaching all boys teams to coaching all girls teams. This will, understandably, result in some anxiety for soccer coaches who will wonder if girls should be coached in the same way as boys. They won't know if the coaching techniques they have used with boys in the past are transferable to girls and male coaches may worry about how they should treat girl players who get injured. Female coaches may have similar concerns. These worries are perfectly understandable but not often expressed. The fact that football coaches (who are, of course, predominantly male), are so reluctant to voice their concerns about coaching girls might be because they interpret 'equal opportunities' as meaning that all the children in their charge must be treated exactly the same. They may believe that to consider treating one group of children differently to the others is inappropriate, old fashioned and even reactionary. However, this ignores the fact that boys and girls have been shown to differ in the way they react to feedback as well as their attitude to rules, winning and 'playing fair'. These differences need to be understood by soccer coaches if they are to coach boys and girls as effectively as possible.
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What's new on footy4kids?The marking game - designed to reinforce good marking techniques and the role of the sweeper. Why is 'football' called 'soccer'? soccer physics (or "why does the ball do that?") soccer related games for very young children Shuttle passing - A passing, receiving and conditioning soccer drill for groups of three players.
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Got a comment to make about this newsletter or any other soccer coaching matter? send me an e-mail |
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