Kenmore Soccer News. Volume 7, Number 9 Kenmore/Tonawanda, New York October Fall Academy Session Off and Running

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1 Kenmore Soccer News Volume 7, Number 9 Kenmore/Tonawanda, New York October 2013 Fall Academy Session Off and Running The Fall session of the Kenmore Soccer Academy is off and running on Saturday mornings at the Hoover Middle School soccer field. The 90 minute sessions focus on the basic individual elements of soccer dribbling, passing, and shooting. Although most of our older players are unable to attend due to their commitment to the scholastic soccer season, attendance has averaged 45 players at the sessions to date. The Fall session will operate through October 26th from 10:30am-Noon. Following a brief break, the Academy will commence its winter indoor session in mid- November. That schedule will post to the Club web site by mid-october. Kenmore Soccer Girls Play at Buffalo State Matches Kenmore Soccer had 2 teams play twelve minute halftime matches during recent Buffalo State women s games. The Under 10 Kenmore Krazies played a team from St. Amelia s on September 27th during the Buffalo State/Geneseo State match, while the Under 12 Kenmore Bandits played a team from Lancaster on the following day during the Buffalo State/Brockport State game. The games not only gave the girls a chance to play in a college stadium, but also allowed them to experience the intensity and skills required to play college soccer. The Kenmore U-13/14 girls will play a halftime scrimmage on October 19th during the Buffalo State/Potsdam State game. 1

2 Registering with Kenmore Soccer for Registration for the season is now open using the Join Kenmore Soccer link at Returning players are guaranteed placement on a travel team if they register before October 15th. Fees for will remain at $150 if paid by that date. Starting with the season, dual registration will no longer be permitted in any age group. That means that you will not be allowed to play for more than one soccer club, although players can attend training programs for multiple clubs. Kenmore Soccer continues with its policy of not conducting formal tryouts, since we believe that does not allow for coaches, players, and parents to best determine if a team is the right fit. Instead, we will continue to invite interested new players to attend training sessions to see if Kenmore Soccer is a fit for them. We encourage our existing players to invite interested friends to register on-line, and we will invite them to attend upcoming team training sessions. Questions regarding our programs can be directed to Ken Voght, our Operations Manager, at If you know someone interested in joining Kenmore Soccer, please encourage them to register ASAP. Trivia Question (answer on page 7) Who scored the goal for the United States in their 1-0 defeat of England in the 1950 World Cup, widely consider as the greatest upset in soccer history? 2

3 ORDER YOUR KENMORE SOCCER CLUB APPARE L TODAY! We have partnered with Adpro Sports and Required Team Gear... to bring you the best prices on your Kenmore Soccer Club Apparel Go to then click 'Create Account' and enter the Special Code below to buy your Kenmore Soccer Club Apparel. Kenmore Soccer Club Package Code: EXPIRES: 10/31/ For any questions contact Required Team Gear or customerservice@requiredteamgear.com 3

4 Kenmore Soccer Coach Named Varsity Boys Coach at Cardinal O Hara Our congratulations to Tom Appenherimer on his selection as the varsity boys soccer coach at Cardinal O Hara High School. Tom is the head coach for the Under 13 Boys Kenmore Fire. New Uniform Kit Selected The Nike Rio kits that Kenmore Soccer has utilized for the past 3 seasons have been discontinued by Nike. We were successful in securing a sufficient quantity of Rio kits to fill in for existing teams which have added new players or where returning players needed replacements. We have selected the Nike Striker kit as the new uniform for Kenmore Soccer. In doing so, we have retained our existing colors of royal, gold, and white. The new kit components are shown below and have been added to the uniform page of our Club web site. Three teams will be moving into the new Striker kits for the season the Under 10 Boys Kenmore Blue Devils, the Under 10 Boys Kenmore Krushers, and the Under 13 Boys Kenmore Fire. Fittings will be completed over the next 6 weeks. The remaining Kenmore Soccer teams will move into the Nike Striker kit for the season. 4

5 Soccer Academies Bad News for High Schools by Eric Sondheimer The demise of quality high school boys' soccer in California is underway, thanks to the U.S. Soccer Federation's insistence on forcing top high school players to choose between its academy program and high school competition. As Sasha van der Most, the youth academy director for Chivas USA, puts it, "The players make the choices. We train four days a week, nine, 10 months a year, play top competition and don't charge the players anything. If you're in the soccer world, you know the best players don't want to play high school anymore. If your dream is to play professionally, our way's the best." Except, how many of the players actually make it to the pros? And what about the players' education? Chivas USA has 120 academy players on six teams ranging in age from 13 to 23. This year, after criticism about the lack of an education component, Van der Most said Chivas USA is adding an educational counselor to work with players, along with a tutoring program. "We're highly aware soccer is not a secure future or career and the majority on our teams won't be professional players," he said. Henry Santiago, Bell High's athletic director, has become a vocal critic of the idea that teenagers must decide between high school or the academy program and can't do both. He said Bell has lost at least five players in recent years to the Chivas USA and Galaxy academy programs. "It really upsets me kids have to make that decision," Santiago said. Woodland Hills El Camino Real, one of the top City Section soccer programs, has four students who won't play for the high school team this season, Coach David Hussey said. "They're put into a difficult situation," Hussey said of the high school players. "I don't know what the right answer is." Van der Most said soccer's governing body wants players to train year-round. "You make a choice," he said. "The reason behind it is the level of soccer at our academies is higher than high school soccer. You lose two, three months of quality practice [in high school]." But there's always someone willing to test the system. Last year's Gatorade national player of the year, Cristian Roldan of Pico Rivera El Rancho, played in high school and got a scholarship to the University of Washington. Roger Blake, the executive director of the CIF, said he met with an official from the U.S. Soccer Federation last spring to express his displeasure with the system. "We continue to be in active conversation because we adamantly disagree with their philosophy," he said. "We believe kids can do both. It makes me sick to my stomach. "The U.S. Soccer Federation believes they have to do this so we can win a World Cup and Olympic gold medal, which are great things, but the U.S. team is 30 people. They're telling thousands of high school kids they have to give up their high school careers. It's such a wrong message." Neil Buethe, a spokesman for the U.S. Soccer Federation, said, "High school has a place in the soccer landscape," but his organization believes "a focused environment with more training and fewer matches against better competition" can help elite players catch up with their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere. So, if anyone spots a great player in the high school ranks this coming season, go shake his hand and offer a big "thank you" for putting his school and teammates first and believing that he can be successful a different way. Indoor Training Schedules Will Post by mid-october 5

6 Losing Is Good for You by Ashley Merryman (New York Times) As children return to school this fall and sign up for a new year's worth of extracurricular activities, parents should keep one question in mind. Whether your kid loves Little League or gymnastics, ask the program organizers this: ''Which kids get awards?'' If the answer is, ''Everybody gets a trophy,'' find another program. Trophies were once rare things -- sterling silver loving cups bought from jewelry stores for truly special occasions. But in the 1960s, they began to be mass-produced, marketed in catalogs to teachers and coaches, and sold in sporting-goods stores. Today, participation trophies and prizes are almost a given, as children are constantly assured that they are winners. One Maryland summer program gives awards every day -- and the ''day'' is one hour long. In Southern California, a regional branch of the American Youth Soccer Organization hands out roughly 3,500 awards each season -- each player gets one, while around a third get two. Nationally, A.Y.S.O. local branches typically spend as much as 12 percent of their yearly budgets on trophies. It adds up: trophy and award sales are now an estimated $3 billion-a-year industry in the United States and Canada. Po Bronson and I have spent years reporting on the effects of praise and rewards on kids. The science is clear. Awards can be powerful motivators, but nonstop recognition does not inspire children to succeed. Instead, it can cause them to underachieve. Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, found that kids respond positively to praise; they enjoy hearing that they're talented, smart and so on. But after such praise of their innate abilities, they collapse at the first experience of difficulty. Demoralized by their failure, they say they'd rather cheat than risk failing again. In recent eye-tracking experiments by the researchers Bradley Morris and Shannon Zentall, kids were asked to draw pictures. Those who heard praise suggesting they had an innate talent were then twice as fixated on mistakes they'd made in their pictures. By age 4 or 5, children aren't fooled by all the trophies. They are surprisingly accurate in identifying who excels and who struggles. Those who are outperformed know it and give up, while those who do well feel cheated when they aren't recognized for their accomplishments. They, too, may give up. It turns out that, once kids have some proficiency in a task, the excitement and uncertainty of real competition may become the activity's very appeal. If children know they will automatically get an award, what is the impetus for improvement? Why bother learning problem-solving skills, when there are never obstacles to begin with? If I were a baseball coach, I would announce at the first meeting that there would be only three awards: Best Overall, Most Improved and Best Sportsmanship. Then I'd hand the kids a list of things they'd have to do to earn one of those trophies. They would know from the get-go that excellence, improvement, character and persistence were valued. It's accepted that, before punishing children, we must consider their individual levels of cognitive and emotional development. Then we monitor them, changing our approach if there's a negative outcome. However, when it comes to rewards, people argue that kids must be treated identically: everyone must always win. That is misguided. And there are negative outcomes. Not just for specific children, but for society as a whole. In June, an Oklahoma Little League canceled participation trophies because of a budget shortfall. A furious parent complained to a local reporter, ''My children look forward to their trophy as much as playing the game.'' That's exactly the problem, says Jean Twenge, author of ''Generation Me.'' Having studied recent increases in narcissism and entitlement among college students, she warns that when living rooms are filled with participation trophies, it's part of a larger cultural message: to succeed, you just have to show up. In college, those who've grown up receiving endless awards do the requisite work, but don't see the need to do it well. In the office, they still believe that attendance is all it takes to get a promotion. In life, ''you're going to lose more often than you win, even if you're good at something,'' Ms. Twenge told me. ''You've got to get used to that to keep going.'' When children make mistakes, our job should not be to spin those losses into decorated victories. Instead, our job is to help kids overcome setbacks, to help them see that progress over time is more important than a particular win or loss, and to help them graciously congratulate the child who succeeded when they failed. To do that, we need to refuse all the meaningless plastic and tin 6

7 Trivia Answer - from page 2 Joe Gaetjens scored the game's only goal. If you got this, you are really good, or you looked it up. At the time, the English had a reputation as the "Kings of Football", with a post-war record of 23 wins, 4 losses, and 3 draws. They had beaten the Italians 4 0 and the Portuguese 10 0 in Lisbon two weeks before that. Conversely, the Americans, despite having reached the last four of the inaugural 1930 World Cup, had lost their last seven international matches (including the 1934 World Cup and 1948 Summer Olympics) by the combined score of 45 2, including heavy losses to Italy (7 1), Norway (11 0) and Northern Ireland (5 0). The odds were 3 1 the English would win the Cup, and for the U.S. Nonetheless, the U.S. team, which was comprised of part-time amateur players, defeated the full-time professional players from England in what became known in the United States as the game of their lives Elmwood Avenue in Kenmore serving the area's best pizza, and supporting our youth soccer teams Submissions Anyone???????????? We want this to be your newsletter. We also want you to be a part of the Club web site. So, we are looking for your ongoing input articles, pictures, match highlights, team and player recognition, etc. Each team should consider having a designee that can channel information to the Club for inclusion in the newsletter or web site. Send your submissions to us at voght@msn.com. Pictures are welcome, but should be in a 7

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9 Kenmore Soccer Club Goals To be the best club in our community To recruit and retain the finest youth soccer coaches in Western New York To continually evaluate and revise our coaching curriculum to insure that all of our players are participating in practice sessions that are challenging, interesting, and fun To encourage our players to develop healthy and responsible goals of their own The Kenmore Soccer Club belongs to all of us, and we encourage you to bring your contributions and expertise to the club. If you have any suggestions or concerns, please speak to your child's coach or contact us directly at your convenience. Fund Raising The Kenmore Soccer Club is able to conduct fund-raising, but each activity needs to be approved by our Board of Directors. If your team wants to conduct any fund-raising, just us at with the details of what you propose, and the eventual use of the funds raised. We will get back to you promptly. Contacting Us Web Site Telephone Mail 57 Greenleaf Avenue, Tonawanda, New York Our thanks to M.J. Peterson for helping sponsor our teams 9