Development needs to replace winning

May 11, 2011

We’ve talked about it before. Development needs to trump winning in our youth system. Still, coaches, looking to impress the bill-paying parents, engineer their setups to focus mainly on winning matches, even if that means taking tactical shortcuts that are never going to work on a higher level of play.

U.S. Soccer Technical Director Claudio Reyna has seen from his overseas travel as a player and now in this role, that the top player development operations in South America and Europe do no such thing. The results in terms of respective player quality speak for themselves.

So Reyna is continuing to call on American youth coaches to quit sacrificing the developing careers of top youth players for the sake of the almighty win.

Here’s what he had to say to us on the subject last month at the U.S. Soccer Summit at the Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon.

Tomorrow: The need to train more and play fewer matches.