Since my son was old enough to play recreational sports, I have either coached or helped coach some of his teams. Those sports have included soccer, t-ball, and flag football. Due to a number of circumstances, including soccer being year round in my town, I have had the most experience coaching soccer.

There are many challenges to coaching youth sports, but personally, I have found the biggest challenge to be just how to handle children of vary skills and interest. That applies not just to games but also to practice.

When it comes to my town, there were services available where they had some coaches from organizations attend your practice to show useful coaching strategies. I had adapted some of those drills while ignoring those I felt were not useful. Overall, I had initially followed the strategy of one game plan for everyone.

I’ve come to realize that doesn’t work.

Like many coaches, I had tried to balance the lineups to ensure as good a game as possible. There was one game where I realized this was a big mistake. My son had stolen a ball, and he went up field to score what was his 12th goal of the game.

12th.

By around his fourth goal, I had called him over to say to him he needs to be passing the ball more and incorporating his teammates. The problem was there were really no teammates for him to pass the ball.

While he was charging up the field with the ball, there was one kid who decided on his own he needed a break, so he walked off the field to sit down. Two of his other teammates were engaged in an epic leaf throwing fight. Finally, the last teammate was honestly just afraid of the ball.

This isn’t good for anyone. The kid afraid of the ball doesn’t have to engage because he knows there is going to be another player to take care of it. The kids having the leaf fight don’t need to pay attention because there is a savior. While that is happening, my son is basically playing by himself learning little to nothing about teamwork.

After that game, I developed A and B squads for the team. Essentially, I’ve split up players based on ability.

Admittedly, this was at first a disaster. In the first game, the “A” squad ran up the score on the opponent, while the “B” squad completely squandered away the lead and then some. This led to frustrated parents for both teams. That’s the worst possible scenario.

To mitigate against that, I have taken the time to reach out to the coach my team is going to face prior to the scheduled game. I inform him or her of the strategy I will be implementing. While some do not at all agree, they eventually acquiesce because they want to see a good game and not a completely one-sided affair.

That’s what happens. A good game. In fact, it is a much better game.

With the better players on the field, there is a higher level of play. At the Kindergarten level, I’ve since seen more team oriented play both in terms of defense and offense. There is passing, and partially because these kids play with each other more, there is actually communication on the field.

As for the B squad, something exciting began to happen. With them only playing against players with a similar skill set, they have had more of an opportunity to play competitively. With that, the leaf fights have drastically reduced, and the players who walked off the field out of boredom are now more engaged. They actually have a chance to touch the ball. In fact, players who would not have previously touched a ball would actually score a goal.

That has brought about a greater sense of both interest and pride in these children. With that has come some real improvement.

The splitting up of these players is something I have carried into practice. Now, the key there is to not necessarily let the children know they are being split up based upon ability.

For example, during passing drills, children of similar abilities are paired together. During those drills, the very basics are instilled on the players with a lower skill set. With the players who are better, I have them focus on using their not dominant foot. As a result, while everyone is doing everything as a team, they are still getting the more focused attention to help them improve as soccer players.

This can be carried out in all aspects of the practice.

Instead of scrimmages, smaller team games are preferable. Have 1-on-1 and 2-on-2 games. You can also have scrimmages happening simultaneously. Split your A squad in half and have them play against one another while having your B squad playing against each other.

In the end, it is important to remember part of coaching is helping everyone on your team improve. For your best players, dominating bad players isn’t helping them at all. For your worst players, never getting to touch the ball not only doesn’t help them, but it also serves to help them lose interest in the sport.

In the end, this is not a cure-all, and it is not perfect. Some children are never going to have interest in a particular sport, and there are some who have attention issues. You’re not going to resolve that over a two month season. There are also going to be times where you only have so many players show up to a game thereby blowing up your plan completely.

However, what this will do is permit you to foster an environment where everyone can improve on their game while also giving everyone an opportunity to play in a competitive game where they have a chance to make a real impact on a game. This will leave them feeling good about themselves and wanting to play more, which at the end of the day, is the primary objective for anyone coaching children.

Everywhere you look, there are guides to how parents can best prepare their children to attend Kindergarten. Like most of those things, most of them are grossly incomplete, and they lack the nuance of how children are individuals with different needs. What is interesting about each of these reads is they focus on what parents need to do for their children, but very few of them focus on what parents need to do for themselves.

The long story short is you should do what you think is best as a parent.

Honestly, the best thing you can do is to do all the things you think is best to prepare your child. The more you feel you prepared your child for Kindergarten, it is very likely the better you will feel. From my family’s perspective, that meant a year (plus) of planning.

We found a pre-school which prepared our child very well academically. In our case, I can saw he was a little too prepared academically leaving us scrambling at the last minute to see if there was a school better suited to his academic needs. At least in our area, there really wasn’t, especially when we balanced the other non-academic needs of our child.

I can say that experience did give us the benefit of being more secure in our original decision. The moral of the story here is do whatever you can to make yourself as secure as you possibly can in your decisions. At least personally, when I know I have made the best possible and informed decisions, I feel more comfortable.

The next thing we did is we looked at our town, and we found as many recreational sports as we could find. In the Spring, we signed our son up for t-ball and soccer. This put him in a position to have to meet new children in an unfamiliar situation to make new friends.

As an aside, our hope was he would be in a class with some of those kids and friends. Unfortunately, my son would not be in a class with any of those children. That said, he is on the playground with those children at recess, so he does have the opportunity to play with them. Knowing he has that level of comfort did help prepare us emotionally.

Beyond that, we did a lot to try to prepare our child and ourselves. This involved going well beyond simple triple checking. Each one of these things helped us feel more comfortable and ready. All of that helped us until Labor Day. There is nothing that can prepare you for the next day . . . the day you put your child on the bus to go to their first day.

To put it in perspective, my son had been in day care when he was nine months old. I was more than accustomed to dropping him off. However, with day care and pre-school, you have apps and updates with fun pictures and the like. You could call at a moment’s notice to find out how he’s doing. If you child was having a bad day, you could pick him up early without explanation, or when needed, you could keep him home on those days he needs it. If needed, you could just switch your child to another location without a moment’s notice.

While many of these things remain true (except the app updates with photos), Kindergarten is just different, and you know it as a parent. It kept me up all night. I remember getting out of bed at 1:30 to make waffles to make sure my son had one of his favorite breakfasts ready for his first day. It was either doing that or sheer exhaustion which helped me fall asleep.

In any event, my son hopped on the bus without incident. He flashed us a smile, and he waved to us as the bus pulled away. Being the completely sane individual I am, I rushed back to my car, and I followed the school bus to the school and made sure he got off the bus and into the school all right.

After that, it was time to go stir crazy not knowing how he was doing or what they were doing. It doesn’t matter where you will be. You will feel that as well. Just find the best way to distract yourself. That could be work, or doing something else. For my family, that meant taking our youngest to the zoo and having a fun day with him as we counted the minutes until the school day ended.

The long and short of it is we survived the day. Our son handled the day well, certainly much better than we did. I can also say the ensuing days were increasingly better. As we put him on the school bus this morning, it already felt like routine.

Ultimately, that’s the best thing to tell parents. Wait it out until it becomes routine because it will. When you look back, you will laugh at yourself for how much wasted energy you had over the ordeal, especially when you see how much better your child responds to it all than you did.

Yesterday, I went back home to celebrate my dad’s birthday. On the long drive, my oldest was just whining about how hungry he was.

When I got into town, we passed by the old pizza place we practically lived in growing up. This was always the stop for the kids in the neighborhood.

We’d ride our bikes there after school. After Little League games, we’d stop there for Italian Ice’s. I swear people in the neighborhood went there at least three or four days a week. It was more when it had Street Fighter and NBA Jam video games.

For about the first time in 15 years, i walked into that pizza place. With a beard and five year old by my side, I was a completely different person than the one who used to frequent that place.

As soon as I walk in, the owner exclaimed, “Holy sh–! How ya doin’?”

I honestly couldn’t believe he remembered me after all these years. I really couldn’t believe him when he told me I hadn’t changed a bit. We then walked down memory lane talking about our shared memories of the place.

My son watched with amazement taking in and enjoying everything. That’s when the owner noticed him.

He laughed when my son told him his name saying, “Of course, he’s the fourth.” He then laughed harder when my son told his favorite team was the Mets. It was met with, “Let me tell you, kid. No one loved the Mets as much as your dad. Stick with them.”

Then he offered my kid a rainbow Italian Ice.

He told my son about how my friends and I would get one after every game. In disbelief, my son said, “Really? My Daddy never eats ice.” This caused the owner to laugh and say that maybe I have changed.

On the way out, he shook my hand telling me not to be a stranger while telling me to say hi to my parents and to wish them well.

As I left with, pizzas in hand, I looked down at my son eating the rainbow ice, and it brought me back to those times I walked out of that pizza place with my own father. My son was bemused with stories of my childhood.

It was as good and nice a moment as you can experience. It’s only one you can experience if you not only go home but go around your hometown.