Scuffed | USMNT, World Cup, Yanks Abroad, futbol in America - #614: Grassroots Pt. 1 — Tom Byer on soccer starting at home

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

The best soccer players all have one thing in common. They learned to love the soccer ball at home. Tom Byer, a former pro in Japan whose book “Football Starts at Home,” is probably known to many of you, is a passionate advocate not just for early childhood ball mastery, but also for the critical importance of the parent-child relationship in skill development, and the knock-on benefits for kids of learning to focus on the ball.In a couple weeks we (Belz and at least a couple of the grassroots episodes guests) are going to record a 4th episode where we respond to questions and comments. You can send us a voicemail here: https://www.speakpipe.com/scuffedpod Or, if you don’t want to do that, send us a question here: https://forms.gle/YjdLExcqyyLn5KpK6 Skip the ads! Subscribe to Scuffed on Patreon and get all episodes ad-free, plus any bonus episodes. Patrons at $5 a month or more also get access to Clip Notes, a video of key moments on the field we discuss on the show, plus all patrons get access to our private Discord server, live call-in shows, and the full catalog of historic recaps we've made: https://www.patreon.com/scuffedAlso, check out Boots on the Ground, our USWNT-focused spinoff podcast headed up by Tara and Vince. They are cooking over there, you can listen here: https://boots-on-the-ground.simplecast.comAnd check out our MERCH, baby. We have better stuff than you might think: https://www.scuffedhq.com/store Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to the SCuff podcast where we talk about U.S. soccer. Today we're kicking off a series on youth soccer, how kids get good at the game and ways to help that happen in your home and even, however modestly, in your town or city. Because with the Men's World Cup coming next summer, it's a good time to get down to the root of the matter, which is little kids deciding whether they love soccer. The more American kids who grow up to love the game, the better our soccer culture will be, and the better we'll get at the sport at the matter. highest level. And so, whether kids sign up for soccer this fall and whether those kids who do sign up enjoy it and get better with the ball, those things are pretty consequential, and they're things that regular people can help with. So we've got three interviews coming with people who've given a lot of thought to how children learn, what motivates them, and how

best to unlock the joys of soccer for them. I hope it will spark ideas in the home and on the rec soccer field and that this will serve to deepen our country's love of the game. However modestly, I'm dropping all three of these interviews at one time for patrons of the podcast, and the link for that is in the show notes. For everyone else, parts two and three will come out each of the next two Thursdays. We start in the home with a man who almost needs no introduction. Hey, everybody, the first guest in this youth soccer series we're putting together is Tom Beyer, a former pro soccer player in what's now the J League in Japan, and the author of Football Starts at Home. highly readable and interesting book on where soccer development, you know, starts. He had a 13-year run on a popular children's TV show in Japan, teaching soccer technique,

and started what's now a network of more than 150 soccer schools across Japan. Now he's an evangelist for teaching kids to master the ball when they're toddlers and the perfect guy to kick off what I hope is a useful conversation for parents and coaches and anybody else who loves the game and wants to grow American soccer culture. Tom Beyer, welcome to scuffed. Well, thank you for having me, Adam. It's a pleasure of being able to address your audience. When it comes to soccer development, why is it more important to improve players from the ground up to improve the least skilled players than it is to fine tune the apparatus for elite scouting and development?

This seems like a key point of yours and one that really strikes my fancy. So let's start with that. Yeah, I think they're both important. But you have to realize that the best. way to make the best players better is by making the least developed players better. They're the ones that will push the players to become better. And what does that mean? So let's say, for example, you're a volunteer father or mom coach, which are everywhere,

not just in America, but throughout the world. And you're coaching your own kids under 10 team. And you've got 20 kids on the team, and two of them are really, really good. and the other 18 are kind of so-so. Well, it's very difficult to improve those other two players because there's very little to no pressure on them. For example, usually it's a win-at-all-cost type of mentality, whether people like to admit it or not.

So if your two best players don't make it to training that week, there's a pretty good chance they're going to play on the weekend. You're going to put them in. So that's kind of the way that I see it. And without trying to sound arrogant, I know what I know because I've seen it I've done it. So most of everything I talk about in youth development isn't kind of theory or like sitting on the on the on the on the sofa trying to think up you know what philosophies and

methodologies work. I've just been in the game for so long and I've been able to connect dots and see what works and what doesn't work. And then here in Japan where we are, we're seeing in a massive explosion of our elite player pool because of exactly what I said, the gap between the very best and the least developed is very tiny. So I'll give you a better idea. If you want to compare, and maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, but if you want to compare the J League with the NLS, our national team in Japan and our national team in the U.S., here you go. In Japan, our entire national team plays in Europe. Probably for argument's sake, although with the Gold Cup that, you know, Pochitino experimented with a lot of domestic players, but for the most part, the player product,

that we're going to see on the field next summer are going to be mostly, probably, if not all, players that are playing in Europe. But here's where I think it's different. When you see the gap between the Japanese boys that play in Europe and the Japanese boys that play in the J-League, the gap is very tiny. But I think everybody would kind of agree that when you see the gap between the players, McKinney, the Pula 6, that play in Europe and the MLS players, the GARY, the is way too big. And so there it is. So if you bring that down to the youngest ages as well, that's where it makes a difference. So here in Japan, if you were to drive around the country and on a weekend and watch training and you watch games, you're going to find that the level of

play is quite high everywhere you go. I don't think you can say that probably in America. Of course, the country is vastly bigger and larger, but I think you kind of get the point. But that's why it's important. You need to have a strong, healthy, elite player pool. And we see that. So every time I sign on to my phone, I haven't really looked at the news yet this morning, but it seems like

almost every other day, especially during the transfer window, we've got new Japanese players that are going over to play in Europe. I don't know some of them because there's just so many of them now. It's exploded. So that's kind of my kind of take on if you want to really improve the best players, then you better start

with raise the floor or raising the ceiling because that's going to push the better players to become better. And that's even, that would even be true if you were coaching like U6 or U8. if you want those, if you want your best player to improve, don't pull them aside. Correct me if I'm wrong. Don't pull them aside and have special instruction for them. Make everybody else on the team better so they're challenged in training, right? Yeah.

I mean, in the perfect world, again, probably getting ahead of myself, you know, there's football cultures, there's non-football cultures, there's in the perfect world, which we don't live in. Although when you look at the countries that develop the best players in the world, it's not necessarily because it's a result of coaching. Right. More a result of the culture. So, you know, especially in Latin countries in particular, considering, you know, whenever I try to frame things and put it into context,

I think it's important for the audience to know that FIFA, which is the governing body, is made up of 200. 11 countries throughout the world in several different regions. Okay. But out of that 200 and 11 countries, if you're talking on the men's side, which we are right now, at least I am, over the span of nearly 100 years or at least 96 years with 22 World Cup tournaments or 23 World Cup tournament, only eight countries have won a World Cup tournament. So that's Uruguay and Brazil and Argentina, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, and England.

Now, most of those are Latin countries, right? I mean, almost all of them except for Germany and the UK. So six of them are Latin countries. Well, the reality is that in Latin countries, it's more likely that a Latin father will use football as a tool to bond with his kids. So they're getting a tremendous head start. And so there's lots of different things we can talk about today that show that for me, the biggest driver in the day,

development and what's the difference between one country and another country, it's not necessarily so much the coaching as much as it is the culture. So that's the kind of the grounding and the way that I start to see things. And we can talk about why as we progress in the conversation. But yeah, culture is the big major driver. And we're seeing that here in Japan as well. Yeah, let me read a quote from your book that really resonated with me. And it has to do with what you just said, this is what you wrote. What does a child respond to? A child wants parental approval, parental love, parental appreciation. A child's reward is making mom or dad happy. The parent's reward is making the child happy. Of course, discipline is part of a child's upbringing and it's also

part of learning a sport or a musical instrument. But that bond between, you just mentioned between the Latin father and the child, talk a little bit more about that and how important that is. Yeah. Yeah, well, again, putting it into the context of very small children, right? And when I say small children, the book, Football or Soccer Starts at Home, was written talking about children before joining organized play. So when I started to understand that when I wrote that book in 2015, which is literally 10 years ago, I caught the attention of a fellow by the name of Dr. John Rady, who's one of the foremost neurosychiatrist from Harvard Medical School, renowned guy. I had read a few of his books myself before he even contacted me. And he became interested in the program, not for the soccer component, but more on the parent-child attachment that was going on. So he was very interested in studying and learning more about that. So

he asked to read the manuscript of the book. I hadn't published it yet. And by the grace of God, I always say, he wound up writing the forward and the afterward for the book, like 13. 14 pages. So that started to really kind of start to put things together because now you're marrying together, you know, soccer development together with this cutting edge neuropsychiatry and child parent attachment. He was interested because he saw the ability to improve children's cognitive, emotional, social, and physical skills. So getting, looping back to what the quote that you wrote is that I started to understand that, yeah, a little child at these youngest ages, and the other kind of perfect storm was, I was always working with other people's kids, but it wasn't

until I had my own kids that you start to really see things through a different set of lenses, right? So when you start considering a little child is constantly seeking their parents' attention, approval, and praise. And that's actually the motivator that gets kids interested. interested. So that's kind of a methodology as well of understanding it. So I know now through all the work that we do that in order to motivate or inspire a parent to put this kind of program into practice, they need to understand that. They need to understand that the child is seeking the attention, the approval, the praise. And that's what really kind of gets them. A little two, three, four, five, six year old doesn't go waltzing around.

in their living room in an empty living room with nobody watching. Very rarely they'll do that. So, you know, football starts at home or soccer starts at home is really based upon a very simple premise of getting a child comfortable with a ball before he or she enters into organized play. And what I mean by comfortable is using the method or the philosophy of focusing on ball mastery, getting a little child to fall in love with the ball instead of pushing them to fall in love with the game

when the ball gets in the way. So that's kind of in a nutshell of what it is we're trying to partake to parents and get them to have this knowledge so that they understand like, okay, well, why is ball mastery important? How do I do it? What are the benefits for it?

And also, we can talk about it later on too, is that it's much, much bigger than just a soccer development program. It's really early child development. It's brain science. It's brain development. It's parent-child attachment. It's got many, many different things. And we realize that now that when we frame it in that context,

parents are much more likely to follow the program. We get, you know, I would almost say zero resistance from parents once they see it. So even the most skeptical of parents are one over once they see what all of the other byproducts are of trying to implement this kind of program with their child. I have a story from my own life that I want, I want you to help me make sense of. It has to do with this. So I have three kids, nine, eight, and five. And back with the nine, when the nine and now eight year old were little, I would set up two goals in the yard. and I'd be like, let's go play soccer.

And they, I mean, we could, best we ever did was maybe 15 minutes. You know, they didn't, they didn't want to do it. Something about that didn't appeal to them. However, just this past winter, you'll be proud of me, Tom. I would stand on the ball in the kitchen and I'd say, I bet you can't take this for me. And the two younger ones, I mean, to this day, I can do that. And we can, we'll play soccer, you know, soccer. We're just, we're just, they're just trying to keep the ball for me.

I'm trying to, maybe try to score under the coffee table for, you know, they'll do it for 20 minutes without even, and it's all they want to do. And they both, the younger ones have gotten, their ball mastery has really exploded from that, you know, going around corners, going from the kitchen into the living room. And why, what, why is that? What is that? Why didn't they want to go outside? Why do they like it inside? Well, because the home serves more as kind of a safe. protective area where kids can fail but in a fun way. So there's less distractions. They've got

your attention more because, again, of those principles of always seeking the attention, the approval, and the praise. Kids are always going to gravitate towards that. That's why the whole soccer starts at home doesn't really fit in the context of a team. If it's in the context of family. So we know that the parent is just the most important person for a child at those youngest stages. Not to say that coaches aren't important, but when you put them in a collective environment and they're just one of 20 or 15 or 30 other kids, it's not as impactful. And that's why the guys at Harvard, and I've also done research with Stanford University as well in China, that they were interested because they know that and they wanted to study that and they wanted to see and

understand what's possible with that child, parent interaction. One of the other interesting things you need to understand is that is that ball mastery being at the center of it. For a small child, ball mastery is a very, very difficult exercise, especially the younger you get because you've got a child who is trying to control an object with his or her feet, which is the ball. which is a mental exercise. But the movement makes it physical. So you've got the mind and the body working as one. You've got thinking and feeling working as one.

And why that's important and why we teach this to the parents is is because when you've got the mind and the body working as ones and you've got a child trying to control an object more than kicking it, that's a mental exercise that's nourishment for the brain. And so what's happening is, is that when you combine the two thinking and feeling mind, body together, that allows the part of the brain that's responsible for ball mastery, which is called the cerebellum. That allows the brain to basically, think of it almost as installing software into a hard drive. Okay. But more importantly, what happens is this becomes an emotional connection.

So when a child is basically every time when a child is playing with a ball, what's happening is they're creating a chemical signature of that experience and that shared experience with the mom and dad that makes it a very emotionally controlled environment. And again, why it's important is because emotions are the on-off switch for learning. So a chemical signature of an experience is actually the definition of emotions. And why that's important is because when you can create that emotionally charged environment, that's where deep learning and long-term memory takes place. So that movement is being stored in what's called the non-declared memory in the brain. You've got declared memory, non-declared memory. Non-declared memory means that it becomes implicit.

Implicit means you can do something so many times you can't explain or declare why you can't do it. And that's riding a bicycle, that's driving a car. that's singing the verses to a song that you learned when you were just a little baby. So that's the part where kind of soccer hasn't caught up to what science knows already. And that is how these technical skills are stored. How are they recalled? When you see kids that are practicing technical skill development,

I know there's a big argument about unopposed, isolated training. Yeah, I want to get into that. I'd like to get into that with you. Yeah. So here it is. So many coaches believe that it's useless. And they're kind of half right or half wrong, but they don't know why. So when you get especially older children, let's say under 10, under 12, and they come along, like, for example, I'm a disciple of what's called the wheel curver method, which is a Dutchman that pioneered this whole concept of focusing on technical skill development.

Primarily unopposed, right? I mean, well, that's where it kind of goes wrong. Not really, but in the beginning, most of the videos that were like spectacular, unbelievable videos of kids performing, almost like ballroom dancing, okay? That's where people kind of misunderstood because the videos showed that it was all unopposed. But that was because basically if you ever make videos, which I've produced and produced. peered in and sold five videos, DVDs, videos that have become bestsellers, you would understand a little bit more of the time constraints and setting up practices and just everything.

So aesthetically, it looked much better. But when you understand the curver methodology, it's not about only unaposed isolated. That's just the basic kind of repetition of practicing. But any, if you understand and you watch any of the training, you're going to go quickly into a limited pressure, full pressure. But for some unknown reason when Will Kerver made these videos, he only stuck with the unopposed and the isolated training.

But here's where it's important. A lot of coaches see that work, and they will take it out to their older kids, they're under tens or under 12s or under 8s. So typically what they'll do is, let's say they set up the classic drill or exercise of four cones in a square. So you've got four lines of kids, maybe six kids on each cone, 24 kids.

And the coach is going to demonstrate, okay, we're going to do the scissors move. We're going to go around, step around with our right, and we're going to exit on the left. So what's happening is that the coach is watching these players, it's almost like an orchestra, right? They're going in, they're going out. It's looking lovely. And he's saying, wow. And these kids are getting really better too, and they're really, really good doing it. but he's not seeing it in the game.

And so I think that what's happened is that they're taking kids that are older. And basically when you're in a line and you're doing an exercise and like Adam is in front of me or Tom Beyer's in front of Adam, and I'm going and you're standing behind me and you're saying, wow, I'm stepping right, I'm going left, I'm accelerating out. And you say, wow, that works really good. That's stored in your conscious awareness. you're bringing that into your conscious awareness. You know that you're going to do that because you're seeing me do it.

But that doesn't necessarily happen in a game. So it's not stored in the non-declared memory. Stored in the declared memory. Yeah. So I think, and I've only really kind of started thinking about this deeply within the last year. And I've bounced it off of a lot of my friends who are some of the best coaches in the world as well. And most people are tending to agree with me. So the difference between doing it a younger age and hardwiring it,

the feet of the furthest distance from the brain. So we rarely have any opportunities to build those neural pathways. But through ball mastery, that allows it. So I think that that's kind of what's happening with this kind of unopposed, isolated training. Because to say that unopposed isolated training is useless, people don't know what they're talking about. I've seen, I've trained with players here that are playing on national teams and the best play best teams in the world that do that to whether it's endo watato who's the captain of Liverpool or it's minamino or dits dawn or ayase weda or hatate itself or any of these

players who came to our schools so i've seen firsthand what kind of training they did what kind of practice do they do isolated unopposed limited pressure and now i see them playing at the you know the highest level in the world so again i'm talking from practical experience not from theory because I think that this might work. I know it works. Jim Hart, a mutual friend of ours, I've asked him this question. I asked him, like, so how do you keep it fun, you know,

for, I'm talking about the little kids, you know. And one of his ideas was he played music. He would play music, and everybody would be kind of something about that cast a spell in the room. What's your, how did you do it when Minamino was in a soccer school? How did you keep it fun? Because I coach you six. right now. And I can tell you if I tried to do something like that with my group, where we're all

going to, you know, everybody's going to stand in a line and we're going to do this and we're going to, you know, it'd be chaos immediately. So how do you do that? How do you keep them engaged? Well, a kid like Takumi Minamino, he was already good before he came to our schools. Yeah. And I hadn't, I hadn't realized until I started studying some of the players. And when I say study. What I do is I research players. And so I look at a lot of interviews by the players, the players, families, parents, coaches. And I want to, I want to understand when was the first time they got exposed to a ball and by who. So Takumi Minamino is a classic, classic starts at home family where he started playing with his dad in around the home at the age of two. And so he's a bit of an

outlier. But I believe that there's, you know, lots of different methods you can do to keep it fun for the kids, but nothing is better than success. Nothing is better than being prepared. Nothing is better than before you join organized play, being comfortable with a ball at your feet, being competent with the ball at your feet, having mastered just the basic building blocks to be able to manipulate a ball. And then if you do, and when you cross over the line into organized play, two biases will manifest in a very positive way. Those kids, first of all, people will think that lightning struck in a bottle because, wow, look at how good he is, must have born with some DNA or maybe his father or mother

was a player because they never saw the silent training or the practice. But the two biases that manifest are those players become extremely popular. Because think about it, when a coach says in a training session with six, seven, eight, nine year olds. Okay, three to a ball, four to a ball, where would you go? I gravitate to the best kid. I'm looking at the same. Where's Takumi? I'm going to his group. Okay. So that kid becomes popular. Okay. Number two, when the coach wants someone to demonstrate who they're going to ask, they're going to ask the good kid that they know that's going to go do a good demo. So now a little six or seven year old is getting the opportunity at leadership of leading a pack of other little six-year-olds, maybe 15 or 20.

And I don't think that it's a coincidence that myself, my own family's experience, my two boys, who were technically already, you know, very, very developed before I ever dropped them off at their first training session. And they're four years apart in ages. And both of them become their number tens and both of them become the captains of the team. So again, I'm seeing this play out in my own family of what's working, what's not working, the benefits of getting a head start. So coming back to the fun factor, you're always going to have fun when you're basically able to achieve something

and you have that sense of self-fulfillment, that sense of confidence, that ability to self-regulate, and just all of those. And again, just making more and more arguments of why a strategy of early child development between a parent and a child is so important. Yeah, you can do things maybe with music as well.

But the important thing is, is that we have a huge dropout rate in America and in other countries as well of kids that drop out. And I kind of with a nod and a wink and say, well, I have a feeling it's not the best kids that are dropping out. And it usually isn't. Now you'll get the outlier coach. No, my. Yeah, that happens. But not a majority of the kids. The majority of the kids that drop out never learned the basic building blocks.

Okay. When you take a little six, seven, eight year old, put them out on a number. a field on a weekend. They run around, you know, in a group. Maybe they don't even touch the ball. Their team maybe loses 5-0 or 5-1. They'll still come off the field. They'll give you the high-fives. They'll have fun. Mom and dad have, hey, do you have fun? Yeah. But then when they get a little bit older, self-awareness kicks in. Okay? And they start realizing, wow, I'm getting a little bit older. I'm sitting on the bench. I'm not really playing a lot. Every time I get the ball, someone takes it away from me. We're losing. And now the coach is, the older I get. The older I

get, they want me to practice more. So, you know, these are things that people think of. And instead, the reflexes is to point the rifles at the coaches. The coaching isn't good enough. Or the parents are too pushy. Yeah, there's a little bit of that. But the reality is the kids didn't develop. So who wants to play a sport where, especially played with the feet, where you can't

manipulate or control a ball, you can't, like, you know, do a... It's not very fun. It's not very fun if you can't control the ball. And so we come right back to the word. We started. So unfortunately, I give very long-winded answers, but I try to come back to it. Yeah, that's the fun. So we're driving the fun out of it.

And then you've got over top of it, this obsession with coaching, where coaches seem to think that in a 90-minute session, they need to be talking, you know, an hour of that 90 minutes or maybe 30 minutes of that 90 minutes. And then the wheels start to fall off. And then people trying to scratch your heads and think, well, what's wrong when we're going to? American soccer. How come we're not developing top players? So we're setting them up for failure.

You know, another thing, I don't know if I've heard you talk about this, but another byproduct of ball mastery, at least in my experience, is kids who can control the ball are better at winning the ball because they know if I can go get that ball, then I can do something with it. And then they play better defense too. It's like, it's crazy how much of a silver bullet it is. The byproducts of ball mastery are so numerous. Okay. First of all, you're teaching a child how to focus. You're teaching them how to pay attention.

It's got everything. And what happens is the brain is learning how to learn. The brain loves to learn while it's moving. So again, one of the reasons that the guys from Harvard, Stanford, We set up a research laboratory at the University of Houston for a couple of years and studied kids. Right. The impact and the effect on ballmastery. In reading scores and math scores.

Yeah, because it's the same part of the brain that's responsible for those. The neuroscience world believed that the cerebellum was mainly responsible for balance, rhythm, motor skills. But the new neuroscience through functional MRIs where what that means is where you can do a task. And if you're hooked up, they can actually see what part of the brain works depending upon what you're doing. So now the neuroscience world, and they're still exploring it, has found out that the cerebellum is also responsible for thinking, for remembering, which is memory, controlling emotions, decision making. And here we go. I say drum roll. literacy and numeracy. So what do I mean? Reading and what they call number configuration,

simple mathematics, single digit, one plus one equals two. So the University of Houston set up a research laboratory to study if indeed that was true. And we've got the receipts. We studied and we've raised the test scores in mathematics by five percentage points. We also lessened the sedentary activity of the kid. And then also when we were in China with Stanford University, working out of Peking University, which is like the MIT of Asia, we found that kids became more confident. We found that the kids wanted to play with the balls more. We found that parents, after the study, were 98.77 percent likely to actually purchase a soccer ball just from that study. And we selected children who had never played soccer, didn't belong on a team, didn't even own a ball.

So the study group, the group of kids that was studied was kids who had not played soccer before. Never played before. Never played before. Didn't own a ball, didn't have anything. And then we also asked the parents if they would want the schools to continue the study. And a resounding over 80 some 7% said yes. and another like 18% of the school wants to. But 98.77% of the parents said that they would go and buy a ball now.

So what that told us was or showed was is that if you want to grow the game, and that's a buzzword, grow the game, you know, of the sport in a community or a town, a city, a state, or a country. I like the buzzword, yeah. You might want to pay attention to parents. Parents are the most overlooked component. of development. If you study any national curriculum, which I've seen them all, there's never the word parent or family in there. So they discount it. In fact, they kind of push them away. They don't

want them because they see them as the kind of, you know, antagonists. They don't want a parent to be involved in development. And that's because they don't understand development. Because also the stereotype of the kind of ugly parent on the sidelines, the soccer mom or dad, just like yelling and screaming at their kid, at their coach, at their team. Of course they are. They're paying thousands of dollars and their kid hasn't developed and they're watching it play out. And so there's a frustration. They don't understand it's a very technical game. They don't understand that in order to really become proficient in it, you've got to get an early start. You have to practice the right things. You have to make the right decisions. You have to pay attention and there's a lot

that a parent can do even if they never played the sport. There's much that they can do. I can show you in my presentation examples of children that are like just wizards on the ball whose parents have never played soccer ever before. But they were in the room nurturing and helping them. I've got example after example after example. So again, we're talking from a point of experience and outcomes and proof of concepts and having the receipts and seeing it and doing it and being in the trenches every day. to come to these conclusions.

Let me throw you a softball. It's from a listener, but it has to do with the importance of being technical. So Brian and Richmond, Virginia asked, what exactly is it about U.S. soccer culture and youth development that makes it such that pretty much every Mexican national team player is more comfortable holding the ball under pressure

than all but maybe the one or two most press-resistant U.S. men's national team players? Yeah. I teed it up for you there, Tom. Yeah, that is a softball. I just can see it just going right over the center field, not even right through. 300 feet, yeah. So it's exactly what we talked about before.

They're more likely the parents and the fathers in particular to use the ball as a tool to bond with their kids. And they get the head start. And never say never. All kids can improve. But the reality is, is that the kids that didn't get the head start, they rarely will catch up to the kids. that did. So I don't think it's an unusual kind of outlier coincidence that most of the top players on the U.S. national team are coming from those Latin communities. They're coming from perhaps even a European background. I follow a guy and he's a friend of mine. I don't know if you ever

heard of him, tactical manager, Felipe O Silva. Oh, I know him. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bit controversy because his job is to focus and analyze and scrutinize the U.S. national team. But I think this lat, when you look at the makeup of the national team, more than 50% of them weren't really developed even here. I say here because I'm in Tokyo. But in the United States, they were developed overseas. Or they were the son of a pro, you know, which is a little different. Exactly, exactly.

So there is that strong link, you know. So that's to me why you get, of course, you're more likely. Here's another exercise you could do, right? So if you were to go to a Latin country, let's say Mexico, right? And you're with a bunch of kids and you roll a ball out and you isolate it just me and one of the little kids. And you put the ball down, maybe between the two of us, maybe favor it a little bit closer to him. Okay. And someone says, okay, blow the whistle and then see who's going to get the ball.

What's normally going to happen with maybe the Latin kid, the Mexican kid, is that when you blow the whistle, he or she's going to pull it back and they're going to turn their body and they're going to try to protect it or they're going to get to it first and get a good first touch and they're going to dribble away. Now, if you do the same thing with an American kid or a kid who's not coming from a immersed, marinated football culture, you blow the whistle, they'll do one or two or three things. They might bend over to pick it up or they might kick it and freeze or they'll kick it. it and they'll chase it. So I think that's right.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's in the context. So those are, those are, you know, reflexes. Those are, you know, culture things. Those are many different things. But that to me can kind of highlight in a way what the difference between cultures is. Your mind changed about all this, you know, like as an adult.

Because the 06, the 0 to 6 age group, or let's say, you know, three to six, whatever, wasn't always your focus, right? Can you tell us about, tell us a little bit about the schools for six to 12-year-olds and then like how you shifted your focus to? Sure. Well, I fell into the same, you know, kind of category as most people, most coaches involved in the game, believing that the sport doesn't start until you join organized play, which is, you know, globally the standard is six years.

of age first grade. So when we set up, you know, when I do all of my work here in Japan, which is in the beginning, after I stopped playing, I pitched the idea to a company Nestle, Nestle, they have a drink here called Milo, M-I-L-O, and it's pronounced Milo. And that's kind of the equivalent of Nesquick chocolate drink in America. And so I got together with a group of former players, friends of mine, Japanese players, a couple of them pretty famous, national team players. And we kind of, I came up with this idea of doing these like soccer events. So you realize that when you're going to do anything to do with an event or some training, you've got to go to teams. You've got to find, you've got to find an audience, right? Well, the audience doesn't start

until you join a team. So that's first grade, that's six years of, six years of age. So in Japan, there's three segments of junior soccer here. You've got first grade to sixth grade, which is six years old to 12. Then you have junior high, which is only three years here in Japan. That's 13, 14, 14, 15. Then you have high school, which is only three years, 16, 17, 18. So that's the way it's organized. They're silos.

They're groups. Same in America too, right? So you're not going around. Traditionally, there aren't teams for two, three-year-olds or four-year-olds or five-year-olds. So the whole mindset is nobody. Everybody's really given a lot of thought into kids that haven't taken a sport up yet. Kids haven't crossed over the line into organized play. They're not paying to come to play on a team.

They don't have competition and games and things like that. So I always were thinking in the context of a six-year-old and above. So it wasn't until I had my own kids. And I was always working with other people's kids. Right. So it wasn't until we had our own kids that I started to have a, a different rethink. And that rethink was,

first of all, when you have children, between the ages of zero and let's say five years old, four years old, their whole life is indoors. Their whole life is, you can't let them out of the site

of the primary caretaker, parent or whoever it is, whoever that might be. So when I introduced these small balls into my home, what possessed you to do that? Great. So I was,

doing it. I traditionally I'm well known here in Japan because of I've done over 2,000 events throughout the country. I go all over the country in my old, my before life. And I would do these, I would do up to 80 events a year.

And these were large events with several hundred kids would come and I would basically lead this kind of event and it was focused on skill development. So one year, and I work with Adidas, if you can't tell, right?

So I was Adidas football ambassador for two decades here in Japan. And so they sponsored my TV show, my events, our schools, just everything. And so one year, it was a World Cup year, and I was doing an event for several hundred kids for Adidas, excuse me, and they were giving me these tiny little balls

to sign and give away to a group of kids, the kids that raised their hand or whatever it was. And so the proverbial apple fell right at my lap because my first son had just started walking. So literally, I remember exactly the day. I remember exactly where I was. And I remember the exact person I talked to. I was sitting there signing a ball. And one of the Adidas guys was off to my right.

And I held the ball. I cocked my head and I yelled to him, got his attention. I said, hey, in Japanese, I said, send me a few of these balls to my house. That was it. And so the guy, this is the funny part, he didn't send a couple balls to my house. He sent a case. He sent a huge box of like 20 balls to my house. And so I thought, wow, I've got so many of these balls, you know, rather than just like giving them away to friends.

So I put two or three balls in every home in every room of my house. And I discouraged kicking because I'm a technical coach. I knew the importance of ballmaster. And that literally is the genesis of how it started. But even then, I didn't go at it with the concept idea of starting a new, you know, philosophy, methodology, revolution, so to speak. I was just doing it. But then, because the smartphones had come out with cameras, I started videoing my son when he would play with the ball. And I was pleasantly surprised at what I was seeing.

you know, unfold in front of my eyes in front of my living, in my side of my living room. So that's when I started to have the rethink. And that's when I became obsessed with football development. And then I started studying other countries, you know, trying to figure out, like, why out like these 211? There's only like a handful of countries that like dominate. So I wanted to figure out, do they have better coaches, more coaches, better coaching, educated, better curriculum, better elite player development, or do they have better facilities. And then I came up with this resounding, not really.

They just have a culture development that starts earlier than everybody else's does and starts as soon as a kid starts walking. And then that coupled with seeing the progress of my kids on the video. And I just came up with this idea that no, kicking shouldn't be the first technique that you teach a kid. And then I went out studying and going to. going around and noticing, you notice more, you know, when people bring things into your conscious awareness, then you start to pay attention more, right? I mean, someone could drive to work for 25 years, the same route, the same car, and not really pay attention. And then someone says,

hey, by the way, how many pink houses were there? But unless it's in your conscious awareness, you're not going to really think of because you're running off of your subconscious awareness. It's not in your kind. So there's a bit, and then that's the other thing, too. I started studying neuroscience as well. And because the reason why is because of the 13 pages that Dr. Rady wrote in my book. And again, this was just from experience. I was going around doing events.

And it wasn't until my business partner who functions also as my agent, my lawyer, he said to me, he said, hey, dude, literally, you're doing all these presentations, but you never talk about the neuroscience. I think that would be really interested because as a parent, and he was looking at putting a parent class. He said, I think that'd be really interesting. But I didn't feel comfortable talking about it because I don't come from academia, science, or the medical community. But then you know what I did? I went back and I reread my own book with a magic marker.

And I just became obsessed with the 13 pages that Dr. Rady wrote. And I thought, okay, two things I wanted to stick to, two rules. if I'm going to use any of this, any of this content from my book, I have to clearly make sure that everybody knows that it's coming from Dr. Rady, not from Tom Byer. I'm not authority in it. So anything you see in my presentations, you'll see quotes and you'll see different kind of content, and it will always say Dr. Rady, Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School of Science, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the second was is that I wanted to make sure that I knew what I was talking about.

Because I get in the room with a lot of smart people. And if I get in the room and I start talking about neuroscience and I don't understand it, I'm going to look like an idiot. So I immersed myself in neuroscience. I started studying it. And I'm not an expert by any means, but I can talk about it, especially at least when it comes to, you know, developing technical skills and ball mastery and, you know, the non-declared, declared memory, the cerebellum, all these different things. So I just, I, I, I self taught myself about it.

So, yeah. Well, it's all, it's all intuitive. I mean, I mean, it's sort of like, when you hear it, it makes sense, you know, that stuff like the ball is far away from the brain. It's going to be more difficult to, to control, require a lot of focus from a kid. And requiring focus from little kids is, is a gift to them, you know? There you go, man. That's absolutely, man.

And that is probably the biggest thing that's come out of this whole kind of work that I've done over the last decade is really kind of dumbing it down to exactly what you said. Okay, so for example, I go around the world and I fill up a ballroom of several hundred families sitting in front of me. And I've got an hour to convince them. Okay, football starts at home, which is basically promoting football, but kind of promoting football, but kind of promoting football, more focusing on promoting early child development. And I'm more likely to win over a majority of those parents if they believe that they're going to help to improve their child's cognitive skills, their focus, their attention, just paying attention.

Ball Mastery, at the very least, is teaching a child how to focus and pay attention. And everybody knows that when you can get a three, four, five-year-old to sit down, upright, eyes open, ears listening, and focused, man, that's a super skill. That's a superpower. And again, that's why Dr. Rady became interested because he saw the benefits aside from the whole soccer part. He didn't really ever ask me any questions or really amped by, but he added to it. And that was a big breakthrough, I think, in the whole soccer starts at home philosophy

of why it's important and how to win over the most skeptical. of skeptics as well. When you rolled those balls out in the house and started showing your older son different techniques, how did you make that fun? Did you ever get impatient with him and have to like check yourself? Well, first of all, again, as I said, the kid, the child wants the attention, the approval, and the praise. So the child is going to be sitting down just waiting because they want to interact.

They want eye contact. Okay. And so understanding that was very key part of the method of how you can you roll this out. The little balls are kind of cute little toys anyway. It's almost tantamount to making the little ball a favorite toy. You know, you're interacting. And then the other awakening was is that you know that when you have a newborn or when you have little children, you're buying them toys, the grandparents are buying them toys, the aunt and uncle are buying them toys, your friends that come over to see the newborn or born. bringing over toys. So we collected this mountain of toys that were sitting in the corner

that the kid becomes bored with. But then I saw that with the little balls, it's moving, it's rolling, it's interactive, it's, you know, you can get in and you can run around. But, you know, usually the reflex is when you roll the ball out to a little child, their natural reflexes, they're going to go out and they're going to start kicking it and chasing it. And they're going to lose control of their body and they're going to fall over. But that's the brilliance of the ball mastery because it goes in the opposite direction. It does everything else. It gets the child to actually pay attention, listen and be ready to what the parents is going to say.

It's not this running around out of control. You're in control of your body functions and faculties of movement as well. You're working on balance and agility. You've got one leg up in the air. One leg is stable. So it's got everything. in it. And so, and that would demonstrate it too. I would, I would, of course, they would try to kick it at first always. That's the natural reflex because that's the reflex of a child. They're

kicking inside the mother's stomach even, right? Yeah. So, so the reality is, is it's from modeling. And again, it's just simple stuff, you know, like the first basic movement, I always suggest is placed a little ball down. I explained to kids when I work even in a collective, I worked in China for several years with thousands of kids and we give them the little balls. The first thing I tell the kids is, okay, we're going to give you the ball, but you have to promise you're not going to kick it and you're going to protect it. Those two, just two little simple things. No kicking and you're going to protect it. Okay. And so the first thing is really just becoming familiar with the ball and that is just, you know, one foot is standing to support and the support leg and the other foot

it's got the foot on the top of the ball. Right. And it's balancing. We call circles. So they're moving around like this with their foot while they're trying to balance and then you switch to the other foot. And then you're push pulling. And then you've got the right foot push pulling. But now you've got the left foot.

You're passing the ball off to the left foot. And then vice versa to the right foot. And then the combination comes. And then before you know it, it's like ice skating. It's like now they're going out and wow. Oh, my goodness. then they're doing little turns and things as well. So it kind of goes on autopilot. When I watch my kids play and the movements, it was really only kind of foundational movements that I encourage.

Didn't really even encourage like scissors movements or step-ons or things like that, which is kind of ironic because I had best-selling DVDs that had hundreds of movements, but I never forced those onto my kids. Then I found out that once kids have that, once they've mastered the basic building blocks, that's when they're in a position to start experimenting with more complex, difficult movements that they want to do. Yeah. They might see some moves and things like that, but I never did the repetition training that I was teaching other kids for many years or even on my TV show.

So that was also another kind of insight, so to speak. You just kind of got them going. You got him going a little bit. And then I don't know if you know Todd Bean. Yes. Yeah, so Todd's a dear friend. And it was kind of funny because at first when Todd being with Tovo and Tom Beyer with football starts at home kind of collided, it didn't really mesh because there was a lack of understanding of what the program was, what he was doing. But then through mutual dialogue and understanding.

And what I did was I just thought, I'm going to mail the book to Todd. So I mailed the two of them, I believe, and he read it. And then he started getting the deal. And he's one of my biggest cheerleaders now. He's one of my biggest supporters. So, you know, it's... I see the synergy. I took one of his...

I took his 7V7 class, and I can see the... I can see how it fits together. But as you know, too, he is a opponent of isolated training and unopposed and this and that. And again, because of some of the reasons I told you, I think there's a little bit of a lack of understanding of you can't throw the baby out with all the bathwater. Not all of it's bad. I think he gets it too. I think his was more motivated by the fact that a lot of coaches were doing too much isolated unopposed. They didn't understand the ratio of limited pressure, full pressure, making it game related, and all that. So I understand

that and I agree with it. But it needed to be explained a little bit better to coaches so that they understand the actual benefits because a kid who's already hardwired those neural pathways. And there's a saying in neuroscience. It's called Hebs Law. There's a law that states that nerve cells that fire together, they wire together to make a strong neural network. So that's why repetition is so important because you're constantly firing and wiring that neural pathway between the feet and the brain. So repetition will continue that. When you break the repetition, it'll break down. that the nerve cells aren't as strong. It's not that connection as strong.

So when it's presented like that, and you understand a little bit more of the neuroscience, it's easier to accept and to, like I say, went over the most skeptic of skeptics, because now you've got knowledge and you're understanding, okay, well, this is how it fits. So it does seem pretty clear. It seems pretty clear you're saying a seven-year-old

who starts playing soccer at seven, is not going to catch up with a three-year-old who's been mastering the ball. Same thing. A bicycle, right? Right. But what's the best way to catch up? What's, I mean, or to try to catch up or to remedial? By doing the same thing.

I mean, it's not to say that they're not going to improve. I believe that all players will improve. There's no doubt about it. Yeah. But you're still going to struggle to make up for that lost time. Never say never. But I think that that's where the elite side of the game, they think mistakenly that they're going to catch up for that lost development. And it's difficult to do.

There is a gate that closes a ceiling that you do hit. Again, neuroscience says 90% of a child's brain is developed by the age of six. So that's why language in riding a bicycle, you can do it from an early age and stays with you for the rest of your life. and so, you know, try to teach an 18-year-old how to speak a different language or ride a bicycle or a 13-year-old or whatever. Obviously, at the youngest ages, it's going to be more adaptable. Yeah. Well, Alex from Philadelphia asks this.

How do you feel, and this has to do with, I think, the Todd being discussion a little bit. How do you feel about critiques of the youth sports industrial complex, not just some of, soccer, this would be in the U.S., pushing specialization and costly skill development training versus a more holistic emphasis on multi-sport and general athletic development. Where do you stand on that? Well, it depends, you know. I mean, some sports, yeah, the skill transfers to other sports. Obviously, a kid playing volleyball or basketball or, you know, American football or catching.

ball or whatever ball sport you want to do. It's all played with the hand. So of course, that skill set is going to transfer. It's going to enhance gross motor skills, movement, coordination, balance, timing, speed, all of that. But the reality is, is that again, we have very rare opportunities to build neural pathways from the feet from the brain. So whether you like it or not, soccer is a sport that unless you do get the early head start, It's difficult, never say never, but it's difficult to become a top player in it and surely a professional. So one of the reasons that I think that these Latin countries and a lot of other countries, Japan included, develop such top players and are doing so well is because they do actually specialize.

There's nothing wrong with specialization. If it's self-chosen, that's the key. Yeah. If it's self-chosen by a child. So why does nobody criticize a little Brazilian kid? it wants to play outside the favela for eight hours a day. Because it's self-chosen. Where it becomes a problem is, is when it's not self-chosen,

and it's too organized. The pressures to win are too much. Kids get burnt out, and they don't have the technical skills or the skill sets to actually perform to the expectations, key word, that the parent or the coach wants. And that's why you get into it. It's so funny because these people,

who are screaming specialization, a lot of them are doing it because the main reason that they want them to play multi-sports is because when they come back to their preferred sport, they think they're going to be better. Do you understand what I'm saying? Yeah.

A lot of groups went the other way. You can go to some professional teams in Europe and they've got basketball courts, they've got this, they've got everything. But the fact is they want them to become better because they're selfish, they want better soccer players. That's why. So there's a lot.

And there's a lot. I've read a lot of researcher. It's inconclusive about specialization or non-specialization, the benefits, the minuses. It's a hotly debated topic. They find out that there's lots of things that where kids play multi-sports, they don't really master any of them. They've got some good skill sets. And that's fine, too.

But when it comes to soccer, the argument. you're not my kids so for example and you have to kind of define well what specialization does that mean they can't play well in certain cultures in the world you can't play other sports here in japan you got a choice put your kid in the soccer or baseball those are the two major sports you can't play both because there's no on off season here america has on off seasons okay traditionally fall in america when i grew up in high school you play different sports baseball it's a false oh no i'm sorry it wasn't actually It was track and field, American football and soccer. Winter, volleyball, basketball, wrestling.

Spring, track and field, I believe it was, and also baseball in the spring, at least in my high school. And in the summertime, you do what you want to do. Now, here in Japan, I'm not saying, forced the kid to do it, let them do what they want. They want to go play basketball and play basketball. My kids, I saw. So here when you join a team here, you train from elementary age, first grade to sixth grade, usually training four times a week.

Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday. Okay, so you've got Monday, Wednesday, Friday, open, three days a week. You can do what you want. You want to play soccer? Play soccer. My kids can go down to the basketball court and play basketball. My kids can go down to the street and to the library. We have a lot.

I'm pointing out here because literally Tokyo set up like so unbelievably. I don't know if you're ever in here, but everything is here within arms distance. My kids can walk out to the public library and in the basement, they've got a couple of ping-pom tables and you can play free. So they can play ping-pong. They can ride their bicycles down the street to the public park and there's a swimming pool there and they can swim for free. So those are sports, right? So my kids are playing ping pong. My kids are going down to the pool and they're swimming.

They go over to Nolgate Park, which is where the swimming pool is too, and there's a basketball court. And then they've got, you know, they've done judo as well. So that's enough. And but their main sport is soccer. So, you know, it's different cultures. It's different lifestyles. It's different accessibility. The barrier for playing sports here is limited.

It's zero, man. You just got to buy the uniform and show up. That's it. Yeah, that's cool. It doesn't cost like thousands of dollars to join a team. And most of the coaches are volunteer parents that, coach. You know, you get some kids that are, you know, the kids that, younger kids that are like college age, it'll chip and, you know, help out for coaching things like that. But for the

most part, the ecosystem for Japan here for soccer is volunteer and community based. There's a feeling of responsibility. They don't pay to use the grounds. I'm pointing out here because my son's elementary school is literally out this window. If I were to lift the computer up and look out the one, you can see it. The junior high is right over here. They both have fields, big fields, no grass, no turf. It's dirt. And that's where they play. And they share that space with, they can share that space with other sports. But the point is, is that it's local, it's community. They just walk out the door. Yeah. And so. And Tokyo is really nice that way. Like kids can travel across the city on the train, like little kids, right? And they do.

Train, bicycles, walking, safe. You know, it's just knock on wood. I mean, as we say that, yeah, it's, it's a special place. That's what's kept me here. for 40 years. Yeah. Well, okay. I got a few more questions for you. I know we're on an hour here, but a guy who comes up in your book a few times is Michael Bruninks.

I don't know if that's the correct pronunciation. He has two concepts in your book that I'd like you to sort of expound on. One, changing up exercises quickly when you're working on, I think he was talking about when you're working on ball mastery with players. and two, the importance of self-confidence for kids. Can you expound on those a little bit in the way you do in the book? First of all, Michelle is a really brilliant cognitive coach, just one of the most brilliant minds when it comes to neuroscience as well and cognition.

And he's Belgium. He's worked with even some of the great players of Belgium football as well. And so he had invited me to Europe on a project in Lugano, Switzerland that we collaborated on. So, yeah, he's different. And he had written a couple of blurbs for the second edition of our book. He didn't appear in the first one, but he did the second. I asked him to write some stuff. So, yeah, I think he's talking about the variety of, you know, obviously being more dynamic and having, you know,

obviously the more things that a child can do with a ball, the more fun they're going to have, the more it's going to benefit them, the more they're going to be more interested in it. And then I forget, what was the second one again that you asked me? Sorry. It was about self-confidence. Yeah, but of course. I mean, that's self-confidence. That's controlling.

When you get to what we call the high performance professionals, okay, if you don't have confidence, what are you going to do when you get the ball? You're going to play sideways. You're going to play backwards. You're going to get rid of it. So, you know, controlling the fear, modulating the fear factor of having courage. There's another guy that I follow. His name is Drew Broughton.

I don't know if you know of Drew Broughton's work. He is at the top of the pyramid when it comes to high performance coaching. And he points out what the characteristics and attributes and personalities are of the high performers, of the Michael Jordans, the Lewis Hamilton's, the Messies, the Ronaldo. the, you know, Tiger Woods. And what they're able to do is they are able to control their and modulate their fear. Their fear and also they never lose sense of self of who they are. And they're also extremely authentic. When you find the best performers in the world, they're very authentic.

They have no filter. They tell you exactly, Djokovic, a good example. And so they also have what he categorizes as a healthy level of, of disrespect. I introduced him recently to Jim. Jim Hart and Jim loved them and he introduced them and he gave a presentation recently to a lot of high school coaches. But yeah, getting back to Michelle, Michelle has always been in a different space.

He's not a typical skills development coach for little children, but when he saw the work that was doing, he could see how that complimented what he was doing as well. And hence again, that's why he put a couple of things in the book. Now, I know this isn't really your area of focus. is like coaching, you know, but we're coming to the end of the summer. It's now the time of year where kids are signing up for rec soccer. And I know I have sort of a passion for rec soccer because I see how much it could improve.

Mike from Cooper City, Florida asks, that's kind of a long question. I fully understand that for practices, it's most important for kids to have the ball at their feet as much as possible and to play and have fun. One challenge, and I think this is a challenge that a lot of coaches are going to, is going to be familiar. to a lot of people is that for many parents and to an extent kids, and I'm talking maybe seven, eight-year-olds, they want to win. They want to win the games. So some coaches feel compelled to spend a lot of time standing around teaching things like where to stand on corner kicks or, you know, think of a thing. How much weight do you give to that competitive instinct in parents and kids? It's there for kids too. Is there a way to nod to it without completely

selling out on the thing that really matters, which is even as a remedial matter, them getting better with the ball, you know? Yeah, well, first of all, I have actually quite a bit of experience, actually coaching teams as well. I know, I just know it's not the thing you want to, you like love to talk about right now.

I can kind of segue it into that. So for over 10 years, I coached what was the equivalent of the Japan under 12, a select team, a national team. and we took them overseas every year. Cool. And so I did that. So I understand the competitive spirit.

And obviously at the end of the day, it's a game that's played, and there's winners and there's losers. And there's build up, there's practices, there's trying to motivate players. But again, it also, the question, it really depends also on what the age groups are. But I believe from 6 to 12, it should always be in the spirit. of development rather than performance. There's two different types of mindsets. Are you coaching and playing to develop players

or to just win at all costs? Okay. And so there's been a whole shift in this and even at the professional level, anything under the age of 12, whether you go to an IACs or Gank in Belgium or any of these clubs, they are much more of the development mindset

than the performance mindset. And so that has to be taken into consideration as well. What is your function? What is your goal? What is your responsibility? So, of course, you want to make it fun. You want to make sure they're developing. And so it's really a case of also managing the expectations with the parents. Okay. All right. Of course, everybody wants to win, but also everybody wants to play as well. And obviously there's going to be players that develop at different speeds. That's academically. That's sports. That's just in general. kids develop in different paces. So you'll get some kids that will be early developers or adapters,

and you'll get kids that are a little bit later. So again, it's through knowledge. It's through discussion with parents. And if it was me, if I was coaching a young kid, again, it depends on the age. But like six or eight or ten, the first practice that I would have would be with the parents, without the kids. And I would be setting what the expectations are going to be. I would be setting what the goals are going to be. I would be setting and defining what the rules and boundaries and what I expect as the responsibility.

And I would tell the parents, if you think you're going to send your kids to my practice twice a week and they're going to start performing at like this very high level that you're expecting to, you're dreaming. So there's certain things that you can do to put in place at home that will help your child to develop. So it's not really just kind of one thing that triggers it all, but it's this whole kind of approach of development. But once you understand and learn about development, you're in a much better position to be able to support development. How would you explain some of these things to like a parent who doesn't really know soccer that well? Or, you know, and is concerned

with like, hey, you just listen to your coach. Your coach will tell you what to do. you'll learn you know that's that that's the that's the culture of the community i live in where it's it's not about it's it's not about feel good stuff you know it's like this is something where you you work hard and you get results you know and which is true how do you talk to the person like that well just like the kind of this whole hour that we're speaking today you know knowledge is kind of the cure so to speak you know i mean understanding parents i find again not through theory but from you know i know what i know because i've done it interactive with parents once they come away with a better understanding of what is this ballmaster

when you talk about more. Why is that important? Why is it important for my kid to just like play with the ball with no teammates around? You know, well, because soccer is a highly technical sport. And you have, when you, when you play in a game, the amount of time that you have with the ball at your feet is minimal. So you got to make the best of it. And there's decisions to be made, by the way. When a player has a ball at their feet, they have to decide one of three things. Do I dribble, do I pass, do I shoot? Who do I pass to? What direction do I dribble to? Should I shoot? There's so many different decision making. So explaining to the parents, instead of just having them drop the kids off and then they disappear and then they just come back on the weekend and watch a game,

that's the difference between football cultures and non-football cultures. So that's the whole reason why the soccer starts at home program is existing. It's there as an aide, as an assistant, to get parents to get their kids off to. The reason I brought up the Todd Bean thing was in originally, and I forgot, is because Todd was the one that coined the phrase, getting kids off to a flying head start. That's Todd's gift to soccer starts at home and Tom Byer.

He came up with that phrase. And he's right. It's simple, dumb it down everything. This is an opportunity for parents to get their kids off to a head start. Yeah. Last question. Last question. How's the program going in North Carolina where you're working with the...

Yeah, so we spent a year or two putting the program into place. It kind of went on to kind of autopilot. My work is done. I've made several trips there. The big legend UNC, Anson Dorrance, was a big supporter of it, which was a lot. And I think that they have benefited at least from Tom Beyer's visit. and having put some kind of program in place. And time, as always will tell, as the old saying.

So what is it? The families sort of agree to introduce the ball to their little kids? What I did was I went around and I built the advocacy through a tour that I did and from online presentations trying to introduce this program into clubs, into the state association, trying to see if we can create a movement. and we at least did that to a certain degree. You know, it all comes down to what implementation is. I mean, there's so many different versions of what the program can be.

I have parents who will read the book and they'll pick up some little anecdotal things. They'll go out and they'll buy a small ball. At least say, no, it's not a kicking sport. And just that alone is going to be a benefit. Sure. Some people who will sit down and they'll listen to this podcast for an hour. They'll get inspired and motivated. and they'll get a little bit of knowledge and they might be moved into action as well.

So there's no, I always say one size fits all, a panacea for, okay, here's the start button. It's a little bit of many different things. But I think that surely by these kind of exchanges and putting the information out there, getting people who are more curious, getting people talking about it, going out and actually doing in-person events, doing things online, reading articles, it can only be a benefit for the support going forward. Yeah. Okay.

Tom, thanks for the generous use of your time. Thank you very much. You're well. And thanks everybody for listening. We'll see you.