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Kenmore Soccer News Volume 11, Number 1 Kenmore/Tonawanda, New York January 2018

Kenmore Elite Girls Get Off to Fast Start in Super Series

The 17 and Under Kenmore Elite Girls jumped off to a fast start in the 2017-2018 Super Se-ries at Sahlen's Sports Park. The 12 game event is set up in a league format, with games spread out over a 4 month period. Opening games in their age group were held on Saturday December 9th. In their initial match versus the Rochester FC Blue, Brianna Zayatz scored into the upper cor-ner from a direct kick, while Erin Stockman punched one across the line from a scramble in-side the six yard box. The defenders held the opposition at bay, with the ball rarely crossing midfield, in a 2-0 Kenmore win. The Hamburg Monarchs were the opposition for the second match that day, which also re-sulted in a 2-0 Kenmore victory. Alyssa Arcand blasted a shot into the lower corner to open the scoring, while Megan Persico beat a defender around the edge to score an insurance marker. Play resumes on January 20th with 3 more games to be played out of the 12 game total.

Kenmore Elite 15/17 Girls Combine to Sweep

Buffalo State Futsal Tournament

The Kenmore Elite 15 and Under team combined with the Kenmore Elite 17 and Under team at the recent Buffalo State Holiday Futsal Tournament. Split into three groups, with members of the 15s and 17s on each team, they combined to sweep the 17 and Under division with a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place finish. Tara Perreault was selected as the Tournament MVP which awarded her with a soccer ball autographed by Shannon Boxx of the United States Women’s National Team. Congratulations girls, and thanks to their parents for giving up a day in support of their daughters.

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Kenmore Express Boys Capture

Buffalo State Futsal Tournament

A split squad from the Kenmore Express captured their age division in the Buffalo State Holiday Futsal Tournament. The winners are pictured below with their champi-onship trophy. High scoring round-robin preliminary games led them to face their teammates in the final. Congratulations boys!

Kenmore Thunder 10U Girls and Kenmore Spurs 11U Boys

Have Strong Futsal Tournament Results

Playing together for the first time, the Kenmore Thunder 10U girls rolled through to the final of their age division before succumbing to a strong South Buffalo squad in the final. The girls worked hard and earned their solid second place finish. On the boys’ side, the Kenmore Spurs 11U team qualified for the championship game in the 11/12 Division where they battled the Kenmore Elite team in a fairly even match, until late in the game when the Elite team took control. Congratulations to both teams for their efforts. Futsal continues to be a great method for learning the game of soccer, with Kenmore Soccer being a leader in this area. Kenmore teams captured all of the age divisions in the tournament except for the 10U girls where they finished a strong second. We are looking forward to the next Futsal Tournament in late March.

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Kyle Martino: How I’d Fix US Soccer,

Who’s Forgotten Its Youth by Kyle Schnitzer

The script is becoming repetitive by now: American soccer is broken. The men’s national team won’t be in next summer’s World Cup in Russia and the women’s team looks less dominant than ever, all while everyone is pointing fingers at who’s to blame.

But in February, the tired narrative could all change. The United States Soccer Federation (USSF) is about to pivot in a new direction for the first time in 12 years after President Sunil Gulati announced that he would not be running for a fourth consecutive term, a decision that in itself was a slight shock if not totally unsurprising.

Gulati’s exit presents soccer in the US with a brand new opportunity to fix itself. It just depends on who gets the unpaid job of doing so.

In total, nine candidates are likely to be gunning for the presidential title. All have talked about a broken system, but not to a degree that really offers much change from the status quo.

Kyle Martino wants to flip the equation — in fact, he wants to give American soccer a bottom-to-top makeover.

A former MLS player with a few caps internationally for the US, Martino didn’t initially bite at the chance to challenge Gulati because the presidential post comes with no salary. Martino has his “dream job” with NBC Sports on their weekly Premier League broadcast, where he is the lone American voice covering England’s top soccer league on American TV.

Still, the urge to tackle the problems ingrained in the system tugged at him. Martino, 36, thinks Ameri-cans have focused too long on the search for the next coach and the World Cup failure.

“[It’s] the symptom of a problem that we’re not growing a soccer culture because we’re not focusing on the right things,” Martino recently told The Post over the phone. “We’re trying to build a soccer culture from the top-down and everyone knows you have to do it the opposite. You have to flip the pyramid and begin to grow the experience.”

Martino recently held a two-day summit where he met with former players, youth and adult associa-tions, as well as fans and business people to help hammer out his vision for US soccer, which will be pillared by three core principles: Transparency, Equality, and Progress.

Those conversations revealed just what many have feared — how distant the USSF has become from the youth level. In a way, Martino came away impressed by how grassroots organizations adapted and strengthened without proper guidance from its overlying body.

The USSF, as a whole, has detached itself from its membership, according to Martino. He feels that US Soccer has become too focused on success at the top of the pyramid, those at the senior levels for both men and women, when in reality, the USSF has been neglecting what matters most in all sports — youth development.

“We are not doing a good enough job of plugging into the grassroots movement and finding ways to grow the game in inner cities and making it available to demographics who are being sliced out or for-gotten,” he said.

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Changing the narrative in youth development will indeed take time, Martino warns, but a more imme-diate boost could come fairly quickly within American cities. It’s happening already in New York City, with Mayor de Blasio’s New York City Soccer Initiative (NYCSI) working together with New York City FC to build mini-fields, 50 in total, throughout the city’s five boroughs over the next five years.

Then there is USSF’s “It’s Everyone’s Game” initiative that plans to create 1,000 fields throughout the country by 2026. It’s an idea Martino applauds, but even good ideas come with poor optics.

“Building fields in the inner cities is an expensive initiative,” he said. “If you build a field down in the East Village, it’s going to be tough for kids up in Harlem to get there… the difficult part about inner-city initiatives is it’s typically high-cost, low-impact.”

Martino envisions adding soccer posts below the hundreds of basketball hoops New York City already has, which would replicate a similar scene around the globe that gives children different options to stay involved. In his view, that’ll create access around the corner for kids, not “a few subway stops or trains away.”

“We need to build a pickup culture. Because winner stays on is the best competitive model you can create,” Martino said. “That’s why our basketball is so amazing and why at Rucker Park you can de-velop top talent because when you lose and you have to wait and play again, there’s nothing in life that’s made me more angry than waiting to get on the next game.

“It’s a blue-collar sport in every country but ours. … We’re under-serving that community.”

That’s not to say that youth development in the US is a complete wash. The professional leagues, like MLS, NASL and USL, have produced talented players who’ve thrived at the senior level and flirted with playing abroad, a most recent example being Schalke midfielder Weston McKennie, who is a product of FC Dallas’ youth academy. But one glaring issue continues to hang over the domestic leagues — kids aren’t being given enough minutes.

Borussia Dortmund starlet Christian Pulisic recently let out his frustration of MLS and the lack of op-portunities it provides for its young players, saying it’s hard to watch America’s best youth getting “rostered” instead of earning minutes on the field.

“I watch that, and I just think about how I was given a chance … a real chance … and it changed my life,” he wrote for the Players Tribune. Why then are we seemingly hesitant to allow these other tal-ents to blossom?”

17-year-old Josh Sargent, who will ship off to Germany in 2018 to play for Werder Bremen, sees sim-ilar shortcomings in MLS. “When you look at MLS, you don’t see many young players getting minutes,” Sargent told American Soccer Now. “But Weston and Christian are getting minutes. I don’t know how you can refuse that.”

How is it possible that American teenagers are getting first-team minutes in Germany’s Bundesliga but not in MLS? Martino says “short-termism” plagues coaches, both here and abroad, which stymies development. Writing rules for MLS teams to follow isn’t going to fix it either, but Martino agrees with Pulisic.

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“Are we closing the gap? Is there less disparity? Absolutely, we deserve credit for that, but there are better options abroad,” said Martino, who thinks minutes should be earned, not rewarded. “Our focus should not be on forcing kids to stay here and forcing MLS clubs to play through them. The focus should be on improving our academies, improving the quality of coaching and increasing the opportuni-ties these kids have to play. Abroad is always going to be an option, but when we have a commensu-rate option here, kids are going to stay and we’ll improve.”

That sentiment also applies to the once-invincible women’s national team, as leagues abroad have be-gun to attract America’s top talent due to better resources and professionalism as a whole.

“We use their success to paper over cracks,” he said, referring to three-time women’s World Cup champions. “We use their success to try to demonstrate that we’re getting it right.”

If it hasn’t been evident by the women’s senior team’s underwhelming performances of late, Martino echoes that the rest of the world has caught up with the women’s team’s success because they have started dedicating more resources to the women’s game. Due to the national team’s long-term success in the States, US Soccer hasn’t committed to revitalizing the program, Martino argues.

“[Women] need to see the pathway and someone who looks like them to inspire to do that and the ratio is not good enough if you look across the board. It starts by paying our women what we pay our men at the top level, treating our women national team players like national team players and not cre-ating a gender-specific qualification for how they fly, what field they play on or what salary they get,” he said.

Of course, Martino’s visions will only happen if he is elected president in February. He said he received the necessary backing to make the run and is expected to be one of the nine candidates named some-time next week by the USSF. He’s publicly received support from international stars and former MLS players David Beckham and Thierry Henry.

He’s a glossy candidate, one who’s viewed as anti-establishment with a clear soccer background, quali-ties many think are needed in a president after Gulati’s reign. His professional career might not boast the credentials of Eric Wynalda’s nor does he have insider experience like USSF VP Carlos Corderio, Gulati’s right-hand man, or Kathy Carter, the president of Soccer United Marketing, MLS’ marketing arm and the first female challenger in the race.

Whether or not he’s the most popular candidate, Martino thinks he can become one of the best presi-dents US Soccer has yet seen.

“What we need is a president with a soccer vision,” he said. “We need someone who is actually quali-fied to be a technical director but not wanting to operate like one, not wanting to make unilateral deci-sions, not wanting to pick head coaches, wanting to work democratically to solve our soccer problem.”

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Hold Off on Sport Specialization by Dr. Travis Riddell

Wouldn’t it be amazing if my daughter became a professional skier? Or if my son became an Olympic swimmer? What parent doesn’t have those dreams?

Elite athletic achievement seems like the ultimate expression of success in nature and nurture. In my house, ski school started soon after potty training, and swim lessons started before walking.

Childhood physical activity has changed dramatically in the past 40 years. What used to be mostly charac-terized by unstructured outdoor play or playground pickup games is now dominated by adult-supervised organized sport. But coaches and parents often have different goals than kids. Children are driven more and more into early sport specialization — for some sports, national ranking occurs as early as sixth grade — and more parents enroll their sons and daughters in elite athletic programs. Sports specialization occurs when a young athlete participates in only one sport to the exclusion of other athletic activities and often year-round. A recent survey found that 27 percent of U.S. athletes ages 6 to 18 met that definition.

There are many reasons it’s better to delay sports specialization, in terms of health, happiness and even athletic success. Usually the goal of early sport specialization is to produce elite athletes. Reaching the highest echelon of any activity requires a singular focus and commitment at some point. The concept of “10,000 hours” of practice and repetition to reach mastery level is often misapplied to young athletes. (The 10,000-hour theory was based on a small number of chess champions and elite musicians; it is not a guarantee of athletic success.)

Elite athletes examined in studies — from Swedish tennis players to German Olympians to American pro-fessional football, baseball and hockey players — more often report participating in several sports through high school and specializing only later. One study reviewed the training history of 2004 Olympians and found that the mean age of sport initiation was 11.5 years.

In addition, the age of onset of sport-specific training is inversely related to the time required before the athlete achieved competition in an international championship. That has led many to theorize that early diversification followed by later specialized commitment leads to higher ultimate athletic achievement.

There are a few sports, such as figure skating, rhythmic gymnastics and diving, where early specialization may be competitively optimal because the athletes usually achieve peak performance at an age before complete physical maturation. Although there may be advantages to specializing early in those sports, there are also inherent risks.

Young athletes who specialize too early in any sport can be at increased risk for physical and emotional harm. Overuse injuries are common in sports, accounting for more than 50 percent of visits to sports medicine clinics, and are significantly more common with early sports specialization. That can lead to pain, reduced overall playing time and burnout. Puberty is a period of increased risk of growth plate and joint injury, and a particularly inopportune time for overuse. Children’s musculoskeletal systems cannot with-stand the repetitive motion stress that adults’ can.

Young athletes are also at risk for inappropriate dietary restrictions at a time when adequate caloric intake and sufficient calcium, iron and vitamin D are essential for optimal growth and development. Female ath-letes in particular can develop the female athlete triad: low energy availability, menstrual dysfunction and low bone mineral density.

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Social isolation, burnout, anxiety, depression and attrition are increased in early specializers. In the end the odds of achieving elite athletic success are low: Less than 1 percent of high school athletes receive college athletic scholarships, and 0.03 to 0.5 percent become professional athletes. Sports participation with only those goals in mind is akin to sending your child to school with the sole pur-pose of getting into Stanford or Harvard and going on to win the Nobel Prize.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends avoiding single-sport specialization before age 15 or 16. At any age young athletes should take at least three months a year off from their sport, divided into one-month blocks. As a general rule, to avoid overuse kids should not train for more hours each week than their age in years. For example, a 5-year-old should not do more than five hours of sports practice per week.

Parents should consider the many benefits of multisport participation: diverse athletic skills, leader-ship, teamwork, self-esteem, fun and peer socialization. Let’s create a generation of kids who enjoy being physically active, take care of their bodies for a lifetime and care about protecting the places where they love to recreate.

What You Should Do for Yourself as a Sport Parent A happy sports parent usually leads to a happy and successful young athlete

By James Taylor, PhD

As you well know, what you think, feel, and do as an active participant in your children’s athletic lives can influence how much they enjoy their sports and how well they perform. Your young athletes are always watching you to see how you feel about their sports lives. How much do you care about their athletic involvement? Are you having fun? These are questions your children are constantly asking themselves to help them judge how they feel about their own sports experiences.

Here are four things you can do for yourself as a sport parent:

• Do get vicarious pleasure from your children’s sports experience. One of the great joys of being a sports parent is sharing in their athletic lives including both the thrills of victory and the agonies of defeat. But, you shouldn’t live through your children’s sports participation.

• Do enjoy yourself at competitions. Let’s be realistic, for most youth sports traveling to and attending games, meets, races, or tournaments isn’t always fun. There’s a lot of driving, sitting around, and waiting. So, you should look for ways to make these experiences enjoy-able for you, for example, make friends with other parents, volunteer to help, and bring some activities along that you can do during down times.

• Be positive and calm at competitions. Your emotions and behavior matter. When you’re always smiling and relaxed, you send a powerful message to your young athletes that you enjoy watching them compete and, at a deeper level, that how they feel and perform is what matters most.

• Have a life of your own outside of your children’s athletic lives. You want to have a life that provides you with meaning, satisfaction, and joy so that you place those burdens on your children’s shoulders.

Your goal is to present yourself as an absolutely positive and supportive parent for your young athletes that frees them to perform in their sport with confidence, commitment, and courage.

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To Excel In Youth Sports, Kids Need Couch Time by Adam Naylor, Boston University

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…

Charles Dickens could easily have been writing about the present state of sports. The speed, strength, and explosive-ness of the modern athlete are mind-blowing.

Accordingly, there’s a growing enthusiasm (and a huge market) for training, teaching and supporting young athletes. Elite sports performance and medicine services are available to all with a credit card, and if a family desires, a pas-sionate and competent coach and advisor can be hired.

Surprisingly, research has shown that encouraging youth to achieve athletic excellence can also lead to young ath-letes not fulfilling their athletic potential.

Out-of-balance bodies and minds Many are now familiar with Anders Ericsson’s findings that ten years or 10,000 hours of deliberate practice are key to achieving mastery. Likewise, Angela Duckworth’s concept of “grit” as a predictor of success in classroom settings has begun to seep into discussions outside of the walls of academia.

In both cases, the message is loud and clear: train relentlessly and regularly and greatness is within grasp.

Unfortunately, this is an example of society and sports being deaf to nuance.

Failure to understand Ericsson’s entire conception of deliberate practice can make much athletic striving time ill-spent. Even if one is fortunate enough to have found excellent coaches and a sufficient number of competitive op-portunities, striving toward excellence requires regular rest.

Physical and mental breaks during practice sessions, throughout seasons, and over the course of the year are neces-sary for an athlete to rebuild and return to play stronger and stronger. In the realm of physical conditioning, the sci-ence of recovery is well documented and continues to be studied; in many regards, it’s seen as something that can be managed and monitored by teams of sport scientists.

In terms of mental rest in sport, the science is less robust, but its importance has been noted in examination of elite athletes for quite some time. Neuroscientist Vincent Walsh has been outspoken about the growing body of evidence showing mental breaks in our days are key to performance and creativity.

Failure to sufficiently recover from bouts of training can turn into overtraining syndrome, a state of physical and mental exhaustion that persists even after periods of rest. Poor performance and depressed mood states can be ex-hibited because the entire body has been jarred so significantly out of homeostasis.

Yet despite a wealth of evidence showing the consequences of overtraining, warning signs go relatively unheeded. It’s quite rare for an athlete to hear, “Great job sitting on the couch today, getting away from the playing field, and thinking about something other than sports.”

In competitive sports, rest doesn’t seem gritty and it’s rarely praised, making the wisdom behind it slow to gain trac-tion.

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Apparel Orders

The new Joma apparel is shown on the web site, with a link for placing an order. Orders will be placed on the 1st and 15th of each month and parents will be

invoiced through the web site.

……..continued from page 7 Messages sent versus messages received

Only a small part of communication is what’s actually said out loud; nonverbal messages carry huge weight.

Parents regularly say, “I want the best for my child” and can be heard musing, “I will give my kid every opportunity possible.” These are loving parental desires, but what are the costs if one is not careful?

Kids are exceptionally adept at reading into the actions of their parents and coaches, who send power-ful messages in the decisions they make and the opportunities they offer.

For young athletes, are “opportunities” supportive? Or can they cause undue stress?

The parent regularly says, “Just try your best and I’ll be proud.” But how are kids supposed to react when they notice the multiple team registrations, the checks written to private coaches, the off-field conditioning work, the visits to the sports medicine clinic and the hiring of the sport psychology consult-ant?

Most likely, they think: “This is a really big deal. I better not blow it.”

“Support,” then, can inadvertently turn into stress, which can stunt the growth of a young athlete on – and sometimes off – the playing field.

There’s another potential pitfall when providing a range of opportunities and support systems: it can actually mitigate challenges.

A young athlete who has the “best” equipment and is always is on the “best” team with the “best” coach fails to develop perhaps the most important athletic skill: the ability to thrive when challenged. Providing everything for a young athlete does not allow the softer skills of perseverance and resilience to thrive. Just as psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found in the early 1990s, individuals who are both challenged and supported thrive at the highest levels. Too often in our bountiful sporting society, smothering support does not allow the young athlete to fully experience healthy challenges.

The children of parents who pursue every avenue of athletic training and development are not always primed to reach their athletic potential, nor is likelihood of lifelong physical activity improved.

Hours of practice and participation in hyper-focused sports environments can saddle athletes with un-necessary expectations, where mistakes on the playing field are failures and stumbles feel like letting coaches and families down. At the end of the day, sports is “play.” When adults enthusiastically provide these opportunities, but remove “play” from the equation, something is amiss.

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Registration Open for 2017-2018 Season

Registration for the 2017-2018 season remains open on-line through our web site at www.kenmoresoccer.com. As with past years, we guaranteed placement on the Kenmore Soccer travel team for all returning players who registered by July 15th. Many teams are full at this point, but we will try to accommodate as many players as possible. This season sees a continuation of our Academy programs, and an ex-pansion of Futsal. In conjunction with our affiliate club in Canada, the Elite Development Academy, we will be offering expanded indoor futsal programs with international competition. We will also be expanding coaching education. The 2017-2018 season is also seeing a change in our uniform kit, as our former Inaria kits are being phased out and replaced by new Joma kits. We have a significant number of new players who have already joined Kenmore Soccer for 2017-2018, and we hope to have as many of our current players back as possible, as we continue to grow the communi-ty’s soccer program.

Important Reminder

You must accept your roster offer in order to be placed on a Kenmore Soccer team for the 2017-2018 season.

Roster offers have been e-mailed, and contained instructions on

Accepting/Declining the offer.

Trivia Question

(answer on page 10)

What is the record for the most goals scored by a player in one calendar year in league play?

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serving the area's best pizza, and supporting our youth soccer teams

2375 Elmwood Avenue

in Kenmore

Trivia Answer - from page 9

Lionel Messi scored 56 goals for Barcelona in the 2012 calendar year. He scored an additional 18 goals in Cup play that year, plus 12 more playing for the Argentinian

national team, for a total of 86.

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 jpg or gif format.

Congratulations to Coach Shaun Applegate and his wife on the birth of Vera Lee Applegate on December 16th.

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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 e-mail us at voght@msn.com 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 — www.kenmoresoccer.com E-Mail — voght@msn.com

Telephone — 716-837-1627

Mail — 57 Greenleaf Avenue, Tonawanda, New York 14150

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 con-tributions 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.