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Kenmore Soccer News Volume 11, Number 5 Kenmore/Tonawanda, New York May 2018

17 and Under Kenmore Elite Girls Capture Nike Cup

Fortunately the delayed start of spring weather did not affect the Columbus, Ohio area, and 398 girls teams were able to compete in the 20th annual Nike Challenge Cup event on April 21st-22nd. Kenmore Soccer was represented by the 15 and Under Elite Girls, and the 17 and Under Elite Girls. The 17 and Under Girls played in the Premier Division, which had two 4 team brackets for their age group. Facing the Akron-Canton Premier GPS team in their initial match, the girls dominated possession but struggled to score, with the first half ending 0-0. Early in the 2nd half, a driven cross was deflected into the Canton-Akron net by a defender for an own goal, which was quickly followed by a one touch finish by Alyssa Arcand from a corner kick. The 2-0 final was a good start in advance of an afternoon match versus Southern Indiana United. Kenmore dominated that match and finished with a 7-1 victory, led by a hat trick by Erin Stockman. Sunday morning opened with a match versus Pride Soccer Club of Ohio, with the winner guaranteed a spot in the championship, and the loser destined to go home. Kenmore domi-nated play en route to a 3-0 win, where Pride SC did not even have a shot on goal. The back line of Maddie Roberts, Tara Perreault, Ava Asklar, Francesca Kobee, and Lexi Cummings kept play in the offensive end of the field throughout the match. The championship pitted Kenmore against GPS-Buffalo, who had won the other bracket. GPS came out hard and pinned Kenmore in their defensive end for the first 10 minutes of the match, but could not register a shot on goal. The final 60 minutes were controlled by Kenmore, with GPS rarely able to keep possession of the ball for more than one pass. The final score was 3-0, making the 6 hour ride home much more enjoyable. Congratulations girls!

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Outdoor Schedule Being Uploaded

The Buffalo/WNY Soccer League was delayed in releasing game schedules, as they transitioned to new software, and experienced a number of bugs in the process. We have now uploaded all of the Team Training schedules, as well as Academy schedules. The game schedules for ages 10-14 have been merged into the upload, but we have identified a few problems for several 10 and Under teams that are miss-ing games at the end of the season. The game schedules for ages 15-19 should be released next week, and we will merge them into the on-line team schedules at that time. For the first time, the league scheduled a limited number of games on Memorial Day evening. The affected teams will have an opportunity to reschedule those games if they wish, as long as it is done before May 15th, We will do our best to keep the on-line schedules up-to-date. However, you should rely on your coach for the latest information. The league game schedules have a linkage in the field name that are linked to google maps, which should assist with directions. A direct link is at http://www.bwnyjsl.org/fields.htm. As always, please remember that we are guests at the fields we utilize, whether at home or away. We need to exhibit good behavior, and ensure we clean the field and bench areas after every game or training session.

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Fear, Greed, Broken Dreams - How Early Sports

Specialization is Eroding Youth Sports By J.J Adams

Kyle Turris is an NHLer because of his dog. Well, maybe not exactly, but while growing up his golden retriever deserves at least some of the credit for turning Turris into a 12-year NHL veteran. His ball-obsessed dog would chase a young Turris around their Burnaby backyard, the future hockey pro carry-ing a ball in his lacrosse stick as his hyperactive blur of fur tried to snag the hard rubber prize.

Call it skills training. “It helped in ways, like rolling off checks, and just being smart with how you pro-tect the ball,” Turris said to Postmedia last week. “Just the athleticism that you can grow up with from the fun stuff like that from being outside. Playing games makes things a lot more fun.” Turris played all the sports growing up: Lacrosse, hockey, tennis and golf, to name a few. It helped him establish a solid athletic foundation, amplifying the genetics given to him by his lacrosse legend father Bruce and, most important, giving him enough enjoyment to stick with sports. These days, alas, the fun in youth sports is rapidly fading, the dreams of children replaced by the ambitions of adults. As the system has become increasingly more “adultified,” there has been an atrophy of equal value in the numbers of children playing sports. A U.S. poll showed a 70 per cent attrition rate of children who quit sports for life by the age of 13, most of whom cited a lack of fun as their reason. Associations in different sports across the country are bleeding participation numbers, like B.C. Soccer, which said its enrolment fell seven per cent from last year. That mirrored a recent study by the Aspen Institute, which recorded a 23.5-per-cent drop in U.S. players ages 6-12 over a five-year period. The trend towards early single-sports specialization — defined as nine months or more of a single sport, to the exclusion of others — has been fingered as the main cause. While other activities, like video games or the rise of alternative, non-traditional sports, have contributed to the bleeding, specialization is the cause of most of it, from overuse injuries, emotional and psychological damage, to straight burn-out.

“The adultification of sports has left out who it’s supposed to serve — those young men and women,” said North Vancouver’s Matt Young, a fitness company innovator recently tapped by the U.S. Olympic Committee to produce its athlete development model. “Sports is supposed to be a dress rehearsal for life: winning, losing, feedback, roles, responsibility, victory, defeat. It’s supposed to be about that ath-lete’s journey. But it’s turned into being about the parent, about how many wins the coach has. The focus is off the kids.”

Early starts, early f inishes

Ottawa Senators strength and conditioning coach Chris Schwarz calls it an “epidemic.” The man respon-sible for training elite players like Turris says athleticism is declining among today’s NHL players. And he says it’s starting early. “Ask your kid if he or she can somersault. See if they can play catch with both hands. Can they run backwards? Do those three things. I think most parents would be astonished that their kids can’t do it,” he told Postmedia’s Wayne Scanlan last week. Children’s physical literacy begins at an early, discovery stage: moving, falling, jumping. Then it’s fundamental movement skills in the ele-mentary school years: hitting, catching, agility, striking, before learning skills and drills in the 10-12 age range. It’s in the third stage where the erosion of enrolment numbers begins. The data is readily availa-ble, and damning. Early specialization has negative impacts on the physical, mental and emotional well-being of athletes, both in the short and long term. Implanted into the public’s psyche as ostensibly the only path to get to the professional or post-secondary ranks, the driving force behind it isn’t the children who dream of being the next Connor McDavid — it’s the parents who dream of being the next Earl Woods. But the data shows this path does more harm than good.

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“Six per cent of high school athletes go on to play in college. Maybe two per cent of those go on to a professional career. If you ask any parent, I’d say 99 per cent think they’re the two per cent,” said Young. “The evidence is there … (and) tragic. On the quantifiable side of things, from a physiological level and psychological level, we’re damaging kids. The evidence is there that overuse injuries — that’s the physiological level — are rampant.” Take young female soccer players, who are tearing their anteri-or cruciate ligaments as early as 10 years old. Since 2002, there has been a 400-per-cent increase in those injuries in girls aged 10-17 in North America.

In youth baseball across North America, 57 per cent of Tommy John surgery — once nearly exclusive to the ranks of professional pitchers — is being performed on players aged 15-19. Tommy John surgery is named after the MLB pitcher of the same name, who was the first to undergo an experimental treatment where the ligament in the elbow of the affected arm is replaced with a tendon from the forearm. The Oakland Children’s Hospital surveyed 200 NBA players, and found that those who were single-sport athletes starting in Grade 8 were injured at a rate 10 times higher than those who were multi-sport ath-letes, and had shorter playing careers. “(Parents) are aspiring for their kids to reach that really, really high plateau, when what they should be doing is just loving watching them play, and encouraging them to try as many sports as they can,” said Delta’s Glen Mulcahy, who started Paradigm Sports, a resource for coaches and parents, about five years ago. Playing multiple sports provides a physical literacy, a base of fundamental movement that crosses sports and prevents overuse injuries when the body is still too young to handle those repetitive motions. “There’s a massive physical toll that is being taken on young bodies, and one of the biggest things is because kids don’t go play in the park anymore, they don’t fall out of trees, they don’t have this multi-movement childhood,” said John O’Sullivan, founder of the Changing the Game Project. “All the experts will tell you if you teach people to move correctly first — you make them athletes first — then later on the sports-specific skills, that’s the best way to prevent injuries and give people the best chance to be successful.” That means that Under-6 travel soccer isn’t the ideal place to start. Numerous athletes, parents and health-care professionals were contacted for this article. All were more than willing to discuss their experiences, but the stigma attached to the meat grinder they had endured made them hesitant to be identified publicly, expressing the sentiment that it was akin to voting for a politician who turned his back on the platform that had got him elected. It was, in short, embarrassing to be confronted with their own mistakes — especially if they were still stuck in the system. One local physiotherapist at a large athlete development center has a 14-year-old in elite sports, who trains nearly the entire year round, obsessing over the data and information that comes with wearable technology. “These kids aren’t taking time off. It’s recommended that they take a big chunk of time off from their primary sport every year. I have one child in a high-level sport, and they take one week in the fall, and two weeks in August. And that’s it. They’re not encouraged to take the time off,” said the doctor. “It’s great to see (her) learn through the experience, but I wish (she’d) done something different. She’s quite isolated, especially when she’s injured, because she’s not going to her social things. I’m lucky I have two kids. I get to do it differently the second time.”

The athletes most prized by the NCAA are ones who have the complete package. Take UCLA baseball coach John Savage, who said: “We like ’em cross-trained. Stick with multiple sports as long as you possi-bly can, and people are going to see your tools. Stick with one sport long enough, and people are going to see your scars.”

Scars of al l k inds

Emotional burnout is another byproduct of an intensely competitive environment for a group whose big-gest wants and needs are being ignored. A study by Amanda Visek at George Washington Universi-ty showed that the focus for children is the fun and social aspect of sports, and they rank winning and competition near the bottom. Adults flipped those values when polled.

“That’s the customer. That’s the avatar. That’s the kid, who’s saying this is what’s fun about sports, and this is what’s not fun,” said Mulcahy. “We’re not focusing on the top six. Right now, we’re focusing on

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the bottom 10 of these characteristics. It’s no wonder why these kids are quitting. We’re not cluing into why they play.”

And those who aren’t left with chronic injuries are left with emotional ones. Kelowna’s Kiana Lalonde nearly lost herself when her basketball career was taken from her. A broken leg, three blown knees and four surgeries over a four-year span ended her elite athletic career. The former Kelowna Owls player, who began focusing solely on basketball around Grade 9, was recruited by UBC despite missing her senior season recovering from her first catastrophic knee injury.

The summer after the Team B.C. player spent a month in an air cast, and a summer before she was to attend the Point Grey campus, Lalonde blew out the same knee — her ACL, MCL and meniscus, for the second time — and spent her first two weeks at UBC rolling around campus in a wheelchair. She spent the year as team manager and in rehab, and just about 12 months later, her knee went out again in practice. “I went down, and I felt my knee pop, and just kind of release again. I knew. I just knew,” said Lalonde, a 5-foot-11 guard in her playing days. “All I wanted to do at that point was call my mom. I went down to the team room (to call). She picked up the phone, and I literally couldn’t breathe. It was suddenly real. I think the first thing I said to my mom was ‘my basketball career is over.’ ” It was a crushing end to a lifestyle she’d been around her entire life.

Her mom, Jacquie, had been a standout at the University of Oregon. Father Al had been an all-star at UBC. Grandmother Heather Semeniuk had coached the Okanagan College basketball team through its transition into UBC-Okanagan, retiring after 21 years in 2015. Uncle Darren Semeniuk joined the coach-ing ranks after his CIS career with the University of Alberta, coaching OC and UBC-O’s men’s teams, and just guided the Owls to their first 3A provincial high school title. Kiana loved the sport, but the sport didn’t love her. And when it was over, she had to find a way to cope. She stepped away from the game, studying at the University of Sussex in Brighton, U.K., for a semester. She returned, on a path towards healing, and still helps manage the women’s basketball team, even though the act of stepping into the gym still stings. “When it was made apparent to me that my basketball career, at least my elite one, was ending, it was an identity crisis. It really was. I did not know what to do. It was some of my dark-est times, for sure,” she said. “(It was) knowing that some things are just out of our control, and some-times things just happen, and there’s not a reason for it. “Since I got out of the bubble that I was in, it really opened my eyes as to what was out there. It was a huge, huge part of coping with my basketball identity crisis, and realizing that I am not basketball. Basketball never defined me, even though I may have felt that way.” Having a sense of humor helped, too. “I’m a single-sport athlete now,” she laughed. “I play rec dodgeball.” There are those who quit sports for good early, sabotaged by “psychological daggers” inflicted by coaches or teachers, said the University of Manitoba’s Dr. Dean Kreillaars. And there are those on the elite path who are emotionally stunted, unable to deal with life outside of their sport. Kreillaars, one of the world’s leading experts on physical literacy and health, related a conversation he had with Lanny McDonald, the NHL Hall of Famer. “If you ask him how many outstanding citizens … there are out of all the teammates that you had, after they had a good career in the NHL, … his answer to you will be only about one in 23 players,” said Kreillaars. “(Many of them) after they leave hockey will have lost their identity because they are over-specialized, and their identity is 100 per cent tied to a single sport. They have no versatility, and no longevity, and no durability.”

Shouting in the wind

None of what has been written here is new information. It’s been around for decades. The IOC released a statement in 2005 damning the emergence of early specialization exactly because of the physical, psychological and social ailments associated with it. Same for all the rising injury rates and diminishing sports participation numbers. So why do parents bury their heads in the sand?

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……..continued from page 5 Marketing, say the experts. Youth sports was a $7-billion industry in 2014. Last year, it cracked the $15-billion mark. As illustrated in January’s Vancouver Province feature “The Money Pit: Why Professionali-zation of Youth Sports is Worrisome,” the skyrocketing costs of youth sports are largely due to the cot-tage industries that have sprung up around it, from pricey sports academies to year-round leagues or specialized training and coaches. “The business of sport has become big, and it feeds off the primary human motivators: fear and greed,” said Young. “Every parent has a fear of missing out.” Dr. Tommy John, son of the former Major League pitcher who made history by being the first to under-go the experimental tendon surgery, has written a book called Minimize Injury, Maximize Performance: A Sports Parent’s Survival Guide. He also blamed the industries that are pushing the professionalization of youth sports to their own financial benefit. “The elephant in the room is the $15-billion-a-year indus-try that is youth sports. It’s billions of dollars that people are gaining putting out a message that states, ‘Your son or daughter must compete year-round … compete early on, specialize early on,’ ” he said. “It’s a fear campaign coming at the parent who only wants the best for their kid. Their biggest fault is they’re willing to do whatever it takes to get the best for their kid. Unfortunately, they don’t understand it’s not the appropriate way a human develops, nor is it the healthiest manner of going about creating the best athlete possible. But we’re dealing with a billion-dollar industry. “So not only are we having to rehab them orthopedically, they’re also seeking psychiatric care for anxiety, attention deficit and de-pression that stems from them trying to overachieve early on, before they’re even able to.” There is progress being made. Nova Scotia’s provincial body started an awareness campaign “Get More From Sport” directly aimed at combating this issue. Sports organizations, long just as culpable as par-ents in making this problem prevalent, are working together now. Kreillaars cited the co-operation be-tween White Rock soccer club Coastal FC and Semiahmoo Minor Hockey which, of their own accord, harmonized their schedules last season so their common athletes could play both sports. The idea of late-age stage specialization, usually around the age of 16, when athletes have matured physically enough to handle the rigors of intense training and are emotionally advanced enough to understand the mental demands, is gaining traction in sporting communities. Kreillaars was a speaker at a World Health Organization conference in Geneva recently, where they have added physical literacy — the ear-ly-learned foundation of movement and athleticism — to a global action plan on physical activity. “We need to devote an intense amount of resources to remedy this problem,” he said. “The revolution that we need to have is: ‘We all believe in physical literacy.’ ”

And it doesn’t have to lie with traditional sports, either. Caitlin Pentifallo Gadd, the director of Innova-tion and Impact for Vancouver-based sport-inclusion organization viaSport, pointed to the rise of non-traditional sports like sport climbing, just added as an event in the 2020 Summer Olympic Games. Its numbers grew by 130 per cent last year, an increase of more than 1,000 members. “We were really proud to support new and emerging sports like sport climbing and Ultimate, both of which we funded for the first time in 2016-2017,” said Gadd. “While the participation drops that have been observed in some sports are alarming, there is definitely growth happening in others. “It could very well be that the landscape is shifting in sport, and with that we also need to think about how we conceptualize, ac-count for, and recognize ‘sport’ as well as participation.”

Parents need to encourage their children to try multiple sports — and activities — to become well-rounded people instead of narrowly focused athletes, says Mulcahy. “It’s really simple, and it will sound like an oxymoron, but kids play sport for one reason: to have fun. They’re quitting because it no longer is,” he said. “If we can reintroduce free play, even if it’s unstructured, in our youth sports, where they play for the sake of playing and not for the sake of competing, that itself will make it fun again for kids.

“We’re not only depriving them of an opportunity to play other sports and activities, but what about things like band, art, drama, music, computer science, reading — all of that stuff that should help them become well-rounded people? If they specialize, they don’t have the time for any of it. We’re making them little robots, really early, and it’s no wonder they burn out really fast.”

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The snow has melted (at least for now), and it has motivated us to announce our plans for our 2018 Summer Soccer Camp. Although we have not changed the outstanding staff that we will have, consisting of area college coaches and players, we have made three major changes for this year: First, we have a new venue. The 2018 Kenmore Soccer Summer Camp will be held at Kenmore East High School. This will provide larger space, with 4 grass fields available for camp. Second, although we will still offer two camps—Beginner and Advanced, they will be held concurrently. Both camps will operate from June 25th-29th between 9:00am and Noon at Kenmore East. With the additional field space, we will be able to accommodate more campers and sessions at the same time. Finally, we have been able to reduce the camp price to $65. In an era when every-thing seems to cost more, we have worked hard to bring this cost down. Registration for the Summer Soccer Camp can be done on-line. Just log into your ac-count and you should see that there is a “new program” available. When you click on that button, Summer Soccer Camp should be a new option for you. We look forward to this season’s camp. Beginner's camp is for those born between 2006 and 2011, while our Advanced Camp is for players born between 1999 and 2005. Any questions can be directed to Operations Manager Ken Voght at voght@msn.com, or at 837-1627.

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Kenmore Express Boys Dominate Sportsplex Session

The Kenmore Express 19 and Under boys recently captured the Winter B session in the Sportsplex Indoor Soccer League. The boys rolled through the opposition and finished with an 11-1-0 record. The championship match went to a shootout versus Niagara Wheatfield. Congratulations boys!

Apparel Orders

Our Joma apparel is shown on the web site, with a link for placing an order. Orders are placed on the 1st and 15th of each month and parents are

invoiced through the web site.

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Registration Open for 2018 Season

Registration for the 2018 season remains open on-line through our web site at www.kenmoresoccer.com. As with past years, we guaranteed placement on the Kenmore Soccer travel team for all returning players who registered by July 15th. Many teams are full at this point, but we will try to accommodate as many players as possible. This season sees a continuation of our Academy programs, and an ex-pansion of Futsal. In conjunction with our affiliate club in Canada, the Elite Development Academy, we will be offering expanded indoor futsal programs with international competition. We will also be expanding coaching education. The 2017-2018 season is also saw a change in our uniform kit, as our former Inaria kits were being phased out and replaced by new Joma kits. We have a significant number of new players who have already joined Kenmore Soccer for 2018, and we hope to have as many of our current players back as possible, as we continue to grow the community’s soccer program.

Important Reminder

If you have an unpaid balance, a player pass will not be generated for your son/daughter, and they will be ineli-

gible for league or tournament play until the balance due is remedied.

Trivia Question

(answer on page 10)

What team holds the English record for the longest period

without an away win at the same opponent?

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Trivia Answer - from page 9

Stoke City last defeated Liverpool in a road game in 1894.

Submissions Anyone ????????????

We want this to be your newsletter. We also want you to be a part of the Club web site. So, we are looking for your ongoing input—articles, pictures, match highlights, team and player

recognition, etc. Each team should consider having a designee that can channel information to the Club for inclusion in the newsletter or web site.

Send your submissions to us at voght@msn.com. Pictures are welcome, but should be in a jpg or gif format.

Support our Sponsors

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Tonawanda, NY 14150

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Fund Raising

The Kenmore Soccer Club is able to conduct fund-raising, but each activity needs to be approved by our Board of Directors.

If your team wants to conduct any fund-raising, just e-mail us at voght@msn.com with the details of what you propose, and the eventual use of the funds raised. We will get

back to you promptly.

Contacting Us

Web Site — www.kenmoresoccer.com E-Mail — voght@msn.com

Telephone — 716-837-1627

Mail — 57 Greenleaf Avenue, Tonawanda, New York 14150

Kenmore Soccer Club Goals

➢ To be the best club in our community ➢ To recruit and retain the finest youth soccer coaches in Western New York ➢ To continually evaluate and revise our coaching curriculum to insure that all of our players are participating in practice sessions that are challenging, interesting, and fun ➢ To encourage our players to develop healthy and responsible goals of their own

The Kenmore Soccer Club belongs to all of us, and we encourage you to bring your con-tributions and expertise to the club. If you have any suggestions or concerns, please speak to your child's coach or contact us directly at your convenience.