WE DON'T NEED SOCCER MOMSOR DADS, OR COACHES.

• Author: Skenazy, Lenore
• Position: LIFESTYLE - Interview

BETWEEN THE TWO of them, Carlo Celli and Nathan Richardson--both language professors at Bowling Green State University in Ohio--have coached youth soccer for about 30 years.

Sweet, right? Actually, they say they were doing it all wrong. The problem isn't that they were coaching improperly. It's that they were coaching, period.

All kids really need to learn the game, Richardson says now, is "a ball, a place to play and some older kids to play with them." Instead, we have delivered them into the soccer-industrial complex--a top-down, adult-run, structured, supervised system that drains all the joy out of the game and, not coincidentally, all the creative genius. Celli and Richardson submit that the reason the U.S. men's professional team was knocked out of World Cup contention so early is that we're raising "soccer robots."

They didn't always feel that way. For a long time, the two men happily put local kids through their drills, starting as young as age 3. Then one morning, two of their 9-year-old players showed up to practice with their younger sisters, and one brought along another kid who hadn't played soccer before. The day was shot--they'd just have to let everyone goof off.

The kids proceeded to do just that, running around like puppies and making up moves. They laughed and yelped, and when the hour was up, they didn't want to go home. Celli and Richardson saw something they hadn't witnessed since their own childhoods: kids who weren't practicing the game. They were playing it.

And that, they realized, is the key. To get good at a game, kids need to play it, and adults need to get out of the way. So they stopped interfering and saw their players improve week by week. Their new book, Shoeless Soccer: Fixing the System and Winning the World Cup (Carlo Celli), is inspired by that experience, and by Pele, the greatest soccer player of all time, who was known as "The Shoeless One." He grew up so poor in Brazil that he played in the street without footwear or even a ball--he used a sock filled with rags.

The solution is not to take away our children's shoes. But when kids play on streets rather than grass, the game is faster. Their reflexes get quicker. Same thing when they play with a bunch of...