Change of season, Winter & Growth!
Happy November!
We are thrilled to announce our newest location! Vale West which will be playing out of the Cheshire/Wallingford area will have HS-aged teams playing under our banner this Winter and Spring! We are ecstatic to add this new location and the fantastic coaching staff that comes with them! Director DJ Pereira has been in the industry for a long time and we are thrilled he is a part of our team. Please feel free to welcome them when you see them. If you know anyone that wants the Vale experience in that area please have them reach out.
We are getting ready for our winter season. The coaches and directors have been talking about planning and what it looks like for player growth. There are many conversations on how we best use the winter to continue improving and growing. With controlling a facility we have a lot of options for our membership that help us get a ton more usage than other clubs through the winter. We will be playing other Vale teams a fair amount during this time, that happens a lot with us but is a very good opportunity to get touches and grow as players. I want to push each player to step out of their comfort zone this winter, work on being creative on the ball, and use the dribble to continue to solve and create problems. Have some fun and be willing to learn through failure.
Our facility is moving along nicely and we are hoping to have a warm winter that lets us continue to move forward. We should be doing some blasting work in the next 2 or 3 weeks and then leveling the sub-surface for the turf contractor to take over. All very exciting things. I find myself walking the job site 3-5 times per day, I guess it is a distraction, but a fun one as I feel like a kid with all the equipment on site. Please feel free to drive by when you are in the area if you want to see the progress.
Talking about growth, I want to reiterate that both players and parents do the standards courses - https://valesc.thinkific.com it may seem small but I assure you it is big. A good friend of mine and author John O'Sullivan recently posted this:
“Youth sports has become less a tool to educate children about sport and life, and more often a place where parents go to be entertained by their kids.”
This year for the first time I am coaching HS soccer, and specifically 2 of my children. What I have found is that I am so emotionally attached to the outcomes of the games. I get nervous for them, I get nervous for me, and most of the time it is about my ego. When we see the game as a tool to teach them about life that starts to go away. We don’t want to manufacture success for them and we don’t want to solve their problems. Sports have a great place in our lives and rightfully so. They can help teach us so much that will use the rest of our lives. Let’s let the sports hold that place.
If you want to read the rest of the blog or other great blogs from John, go here - https://changingthegameproject.com/the-adultification-of-youth-sports/
We continue to work to make Vale a special place to help the children that we work with grow and improve. They are going to endure setbacks and failures, that is okay. If we can help educate them on how to get good at hard moments and move through them they will be better because of that for the rest of their lives.
Yours in Soccer,
Zach Eddinger