Kid's football - pitch sizes

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It must go with the territory. This is the out of office I got from my kids mini league chairman...basically don't bother emailing!

Thank you for your email.your email will be filed and stored and I will reply to you as soon as I possibly can.

Due to the tremendous amount of emails I receive daily I will prioritise my responses as detailed below :-



1) Personal and business emails

2) YYYY FA emails

3) Emails to XXXXX Football League from Club Secretaries

4) Emails to XXXX Football League from Committee Members

5) Festival of Football enquiries

6) Other
 


Stevie Freestein II said:
Training on Friday was hilarious.

3 coaches. As they were dicked by about 12 goals the week before they are implementing a sweeper system. My son described it as a 1-4-2-1-2 or something. The keeper didn't touch the ball during the 30 minutes that I was there. A kid at the other end had to pretend to be the oppo and launched the ball as far as he could to test the new sweeper system. Each time a different coach went to speak to the keeper to offer advice about being ready for the ball, another coach from another team even had a minute or two talking with him.
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If you're getting beat by 12 goals I don't think the tactics are the primary issue. Even a clueless Yank like me can sort that.

Stevie Freestein II said:
I haven't involved my kid's mother yet .... she will either go mental at me or the chairman or possibly both.

The kid likes playing there, he's got some skills but is usually sub and is unlikely to get more playing time at other clubs. Plus a lot of kids from school are at the club and it's only 10 mins away to walk to games.

So everything apart from this has been good and I don't want to ruin it for the sake of my principles.
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If the kid is enjoying himself, he's going to be a bit irked with you if he gets pulled out of the club.

Mind, I am a bit puzzled how the chairman's position has gone from "don't contact the secretary again or ..." to "CONFIRM you won't contact the secretary again or ..." The requirement for confirmation isn't in the first letter.
 
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I Claudio said:
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If the kid is enjoying himself, he's going to be a bit irked with you if he gets pulled out of the club.

Mind, I am a bit puzzled how the chairman's position has gone from "don't contact the secretary again or ..." to "CONFIRM you won't contact the secretary again or ..." The requirement for confirmation isn't in the first letter.
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The only other thing that I can consider is that perhaps I inadvertently got the club into trouble with the league for having the wrong pitch size. In which case I should have been told. I still don't know what I've done that's so shockingly bad for the club. If it's his preference then he needs to hoy something into the club policy document for parents to sign.

I'll email him later and play game so that the kid can stay there for this season then I'll have to have a ponder. I'd be a tw@t if I spoil his fun and I might as well bite my lip as I don't get involved with anyone at the club on a social aspect. Cheers.
 
From what I've read and maybe I'm wrong
  • The kids played on a pitch too big for them (if it was an away game not a on going problem)
  • You've mentioned the coaches arnt up to much
  • Your kid dosent get a lot of game time
  • The club are threatening to remove your child's registration for you mentioning the first point

I don't know why you would stay, me personally I would drop a division (if possible) and get my kid playing the most he could in a decent set up.

He might be leaving his friends but would make new ones at a new team.
 
mogget said:
From what I've read and maybe I'm wrong
  • The kids played on a pitch too big for them (if it was an away game not a on going problem)
  • You've mentioned the coaches arnt up to much
  • Your kid dosent get a lot of game time
  • The club are threatening to remove your child's registration for you mentioning the first point

I don't know why you would stay, me personally I would drop a division (if possible) and get my kid playing the most he could in a decent set up.

He might be leaving his friends but would make new ones at a new team.
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It's division 2 ..... out of 2!

He played for another team a couple of seasons ago and got even less playing time. To be honest he's a bit of a show-pony but I'm proud in a way as he is a lot more skillful than I ever was. He didn't play last year as I was hoping that he'd put on a bit of size and I wasn't prepared for him to turn up every week and then get disappointed when he played 5-10 minutes or not at all which is what happened at the last match of the season. His mother went ballistic.

I'll bite the bullet for now but might look for another club next season.

Cheers.
 
Hammie said:
This for me. The reaction from the chairman seems to be way out of proportion.

Bit confusing, really.
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I'll ask him when I see him but for now I'll have to stop the email tennis and show a bit of humility.

Ta for all of the replies. Hopefully my son will get fed up of footy and turn to ballet or bodybuilding.
 
That does seem daft, it is almost as if their policy is "We think everything is fine, we don't want to hear polite constructive comments to say all is not well".

I was thinking about kids football a couple of days ago while they were talking about netball on the radio. In netball certain players are restricted to certain areas of the pitch. As a result, you have to build your attack and you have to play a passing game.

In my old blokes football, occasionally someone will bring their teenage son and they all just want to pick up the ball from the keeper, run the length of the pitch and score. I see so many young lads who would rather take on 3 players and lose the ball than to make the easy pass. It would probably be good for kids to play on a small pitch with netball style restrictions, just to get those concepts of move, pass, control and look around drilled into their heads. They would still need to play normal rules too, so they learn the actual game, but have the restrictions as a training aid or one-off tournaments.
 
DaveH said:
That does seem daft, it is almost as if their policy is "We think everything is fine, we don't want to hear polite constructive comments to say all is not well".
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Quote from chairman in one email was:

... this club has been built from nothing to what it is today by sticking rigidly to it's principles (even if not written in a policy manual) and I won't bend for anyone including friends or family.

That was after I was told that I'd broken a rule in the policy manual! To be fair I do respect him as on Friday there must have been about 15 different teams training of various age groups. But the irony is that as the club is more successful he'll have to open up to more people or he could end losing it all. I was going to ramble onto him about the decline of the Roman Empire as an analogy but he could think that I was a mentalist!

Re: training. When my kid was younger I thought that the coach should have shown kids how easy footy should be by lining them up from goalie to centre forward stretched along the length of the pitch at various points. They would then pass from the goalie right up to the striker who would score, they'd then rotate positions. Just as a demonstration that the ball can do the work. Then build in a bit of movement etc.
 
DaveH said:
That does seem daft, it is almost as if their policy is "We think everything is fine, we don't want to hear polite constructive comments to say all is not well".

I was thinking about kids football a couple of days ago while they were talking about netball on the radio. In netball certain players are restricted to certain areas of the pitch. As a result, you have to build your attack and you have to play a passing game.

In my old blokes football, occasionally someone will bring their teenage son and they all just want to pick up the ball from the keeper, run the length of the pitch and score. I see so many young lads who would rather take on 3 players and lose the ball than to make the easy pass. It would probably be good for kids to play on a small pitch with netball style restrictions, just to get those concepts of move, pass, control and look around drilled into their heads. They would still need to play normal rules too, so they learn the actual game, but have the restrictions as a training aid or one-off tournaments.
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We used to sort that easily enough by playing two touch football in all our practice games at training and then it would come more naturally to them at the weekend

Stevie Freestein II said:
Quote from chairman in one email was:

... this club has been built from nothing to what it is today by sticking rigidly to it's principles (even if not written in a policy manual) and I won't bend for anyone including friends or family.

That was after I was told that I'd broken a rule in the policy manual! To be fair I do respect him as on Friday there must have been about 15 different teams training of various age groups. But the irony is that as the club is more successful he'll have to open up to more people or he could end losing it all. I was going to ramble onto him about the decline of the Roman Empire as an analogy but he could think that I was a mentalist!

Re: training. When my kid was younger I thought that the coach should have shown kids how easy footy should be by lining them up from goalie to centre forward stretched along the length of the pitch at various points. They would then pass from the goalie right up to the striker who would score, they'd then rotate positions. Just as a demonstration that the ball can do the work. Then build in a bit of movement etc.
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I can see both sides to all of this having been on both sides myself (parent and coach) In fairness to the Club (chairman) I can see him being pissed off that you didn't raise any issue first with the Coach or with one of the Club Committee, it was just a general query/ observation so they would easily have been able to answer you. You find that League Committee members are your standard "Committee" men and will have jipped up with the Club after receiving a letter from a parent from the club, that will be why the Chairman doesn't want people going to them direct. However if you have any serious issues (Which yours wasn't) there should be an ability to correspond with the League and ultimately the local area FA.
Regarding pitches I can guarantee there wouldn't be enough in your locality for all the teams of that age group to play there games at the allotted time and it's common for full size pitches to be used at that age group, I know we were on them all the time in Notts. Clubs will make best use of the resources they have. The Club I was associated with had a constant struggle trying to find enough pitches (we were the biggest Club in Notts and supposedly the biggest in the Country) the pitch secretary would always try and allocate the younger teams onto the smaller sized pitches but if we had a lot of teams playing at home you got whatever was available and were thankful of it.
The one thing you have to bear in mind is that a lot of people are putting in a lot of effort and a whole lot of time facilitating the kids playing the game from the coaches, to the Club Officials and League people and it's all done voluntarily. They might be useless and morons but without them thousands of kids up and down the Country would be sitting on their arses playing XBox. If you have such strong feelings about it and think you have good ideas for how to train the kids or run the games step forward and do it yourself, you'll soon then understand peoples frustrations when they're criticised (I did it for ten years and thankfully hardly had any issues with any of the parents but when I did the first thing I wanted to say to them was train the fucker yourself then!!)
 
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Billy Fish said:
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I can see both sides to all of this having been on both sides myself (parent and coach) In fairness to the Club (chairman) I can see him being pissed off that you didn't raise any issue first with the Coach or with one of the Club Committee, it was just a general query/ observation so they would easily have been able to answer you. You find that League Committee members are your standard "Committee" men and will have jipped up with the Club after receiving a letter from a parent from the club, that will be why the Chairman doesn't want people going to them direct. However if you have any serious issues (Which yours wasn't) there should be an ability to correspond with the League and ultimately the local area FA.
...
The one thing you have to bear in mind is that a lot of people are putting in a lot of effort and a whole lot of time facilitating the kids playing the game from the coaches, to the Club Officials and League people and it's all done voluntarily. They might be useless and morons but without them thousands of kids up and down the Country would be sitting on their arses playing XBox. If you have such strong feelings about it and think you have good ideas for how to train the kids or run the games step forward and do it yourself, you'll soon then understand peoples frustrations when they're criticised (I did it for ten years and thankfully hardly had any issues with any of the parents but when I did the first thing I wanted to say to them was train the fucker yourself then!!)
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You've made some good points mate and I might have dropped a clanger with the initial approach that I took. I don't mind if other adults tell me what I've done wrong and I'll apologise. But what irked me is that I still haven't been told what is so intrinsically wrong with sending a polite enough email to another adult. If it's caused hasssle between the league and club it'd be nice to know why directly from the people involved. There's a lack of transparency IMHO and I was pulled up on a policy that doesn't exist.

I'll perhaps speak to the people at the club when things have died down a bit but it's reinforced why I don't get too involved with kid's footy. You made a decent point about improving it myself if it's that easy. I made a point of commending the coaches in the first email that I sent and I do acknowledge the time and effort that is involved. But it doesn't mean that people are exempt from constructive criticism or observations.

Cheers.
 
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