What is street soccer and how this training benefits player development

Darren Laver, Director of Coaching for the International Street Soccer Association (ISSA)

“England are a fantastic team and every country are frightened to play them, they have power, dedication, commitment, and fire in their bellies, what’s missing? What’s missing is in the traditional way we educate children and ourselves, we believe that you can move from certainty to certainty and as a result we never devote the possibility system, never devote a hypothesis of creation or imagination, and struggle to move forward and as a result we may find creative skill and self expression in the game come to a dead end”

I will describe Street Soccer not for what people see it as, but for what the ISSA see it as and believe passionately in. For us street soccer is:

• Giving back the game
• Children having fun
• The opportunity to experiment and discover
• Creativity, imagination and innovation

The ISSA coaching methodology has been produced to:

• Allow players to know themselves (self-knowledge)
• To form the skills for soccer but more importantly life
• Skills that will defend them against challenging situations
• Show it’s not about teaching to become better, but better understanding of self, that results in becoming a better player.
• Demonstrate how players find themselves in the flow state
• Encourage creativity through questioning – results in having the ability to problem solve and become better decision makers.

ISSA creative skill camp coaches:

• Require passion, intrinsic motivation and the love for what they are doing. They will love doing it, and will coach it despite the many knock backs they will inevitably experience.
• Don’t care about being famous – just love doing it
• They are the unacknowledged legislators of the game

Some of the questions I have encountered, is does Street Soccer help players for the game? To be honest, that is not my mission. I want to use the beautiful game as a vehicle to make better people to be better learners, so they are equipped with the tools to accomplish whatever they want. BUT my personal opinion is that it does help the game – it helps players to think differently, the opportunity to find who they uniquely are.

A lot of coaches do suffer from calling things they have never seen before a trick just because it is different. We teach Creative Skills - Creative skills needs to have value, has to have a function or it will become a trick. We teach players to lose themselves in the task and not to think too much. It’s a process of getting rid of interference and distraction so players can play naturally free.

Street Soccer allows children to take a chance, even if they don’t know something or struggle to do something. We help them to feel happy being wrong, to give things a go, to not be frightened of being wrong. I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative, but what I do know is if we are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. By the time children get to adults most kids have lost that capacity, they have become frightened of being wrong and traditionally we tend to run our coaching like this, we stigmatise mistakes, where mistakes are the worst thing you can make and the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.

Picasso said “All children are born artists; the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up”.

I believe this passionately that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it or rather we get coached out of it.

ISSA creative skill camp street soccer sessions operate in a very simple way:

• Create an environment that players want to be in where we make the programme more interesting.
• We warm player up in mental, physical, emotional and social way – with the use of brain gym exercises, rhythm, setting goals and sharing expectations and the focus on them to have learning ownership.
• Begin with games – the freedom to play. The games are based around very simple way you encourage skill with few players and smaller pitches – more opportunity to experiment.
• Whatever the focus is we question players to find the answer – encouraging deeper learning, to always challenge opinions.
• Back to the games - then end with a view
• Most importantly we teach players about the bigger picture - skills for life like - Dreams and goals, taking responsibility, positive attitude etc

If this does not produce great players – I do know children love it and for a moment in their lives they feel the freedom to be themselves to not have the fear to make mistakes, to separate themselves from the fast moving pass of life, where they can enjoy and begin to prepare themselves with the tools to achieve their dreams.

Kids are living in the most intensely stimulating environment in the history of earth; they deal with more information in a day than we did in a year. Their minds are moving a thousand miles an hour and we are penalising children if they become disruptive, and for getting distracted. We need to make education and soccer coaching more interesting, to keep up with modern times...

We are living in the most dated driven, most stimulating time on earth, and we need to help them engage that fully, and except the challenge that presents to us as educators and also the implications it has for ourselves given that we may have lost touch with our deepest capacities. The world and the game has changed, and the ones who are creating change are the kids themselves – we tend to interfere and teach the past – slowing learning.

I think the challenge that I face in Soccer is one that faces the world of education, which is how do I compose a coaching system to prepare players for a future that we don’t understand and cannot predict? The only way we can do it, I think, is to have children arrive to training sessions firing on all cylinders – confident, creative, in their element, full of possibilities and full of hope. I cannot predict the future, but if I allow players to reconnect, to see patterns, if I open their eyes, maybe they’ll see the possibilities and create this future in the world and game and they will flourish in it. And if I do that, I think, I have fulfilled my obligations as a current owner of Sports Coaching.

The thing is, I believe it’s more than just football,

Street Soccer is a way of life it is a culture (like Parcour). Whether it makes great players or not – I know children love playing it, and learn to become themselves along the way. My concern is that I have met people who love what they do and couldn’t imagine doing anything else, who are transported by the things they do and would probably do it for free if that was the only option. Yet I have met some people that have no idea what their true talents are, that’s been my experience, that most people don’t know what they are capable of achieving. They float along doing things they have wondered into and not really feeling very fulfilled by it.

Finding what you are good at is essential to personal fulfilment for a life that has purpose and meaning, and many don’t find this. If you don’t find the things you are uniquely good at there is a sense you don’t know who you really are.

Talent is often buried deep, not obvious on the surface; we have to go looking for it. One of the systems that is meant to help us discover it is education, so one of the things that the ISSA is doing is trying to transform the way we educate players, because so many brilliant people never discover what they can really do well. Often there experience is the things they can’t do well.

We take into account all of these considerations when designing and developing our creative skill camp program and selecting our coaches for camps.