Youth football in USA has improved a great deal since I was playing

Playing football , or soccer, in the United States was pretty grim when I was a kid. It was then, and likely still is, the most participated in youth sports. I think this is because there is very little equipment, not much chance for serious injury, and at a very young level there isn't much need for any actual ability.

Unfortunately the sort of coaching you were going to get back in the days when I was young was also really poor.

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As I got older I started to understand that sport a lot better but this wasn't because of the coaching that I received. It was very common back in those days for all of your coaches to just be a parent of one of the kids on the team that of course, got more playing time than anyone else on the team. They often knew next-to-nothing about strategy and often weren't even 100% sure about the rules. I remember being regularly taught things that were downright wrong, and as I got older I started to correct the coaches when they would teach us bogus stuff.

This ended up getting me in trouble quite often with the coaches who didn't like being told by a "punk kid" how to coach the team. I was out of line, but I was right.

It is good to see that the US has better coaches now though, and much of this likely has to do with the USA being a pretty decent team in an international sense. The presence of MLS has something to do with this as well and there are even some academies in various cities. The talented youth can be discovered a lot more easily now, but back in the 80's and 90's when I was playing, it was just a free -for -all.

It's good to see improvement after all of these years.