Here is a great caption from an article written about Naomi Girma at Soccer America.
For those of you who don't know Naomi Girma, she is a currently a soccer player on the United States Women's National Team and has gained a lot of respect as the best defender / center back in the world. You can read numerous articles about her play on the internet.
Here
is one of them. But let's not talk about how she defends, and the #
of good touches, or good tackles on the ball. I'd like to point out
what her "core" experience was like when growing up and 1st loving the
game.
The “Maleda Soccer” that Girma, who was born in San Jose to immigrants from Ethiopia, started attending at age 4 was Saturday soccer in the park, organized by her father and friends to get the Bay Area Ethiopian community together. (Maleda is an Ethiopian term for morning or dawn). She attended with her brother, who’s two years older.
“It was just a free-for-all, splitting up the little, medium and big kids — and scrimmaging,” she said. “We’d go after it in many games until we eventually decided it was time to play on the playground.
“It was really informal. There was no pressure. It was for fun. It was the start of me loving soccer and I think that was because of that free environment. It was an environment where I could do what I wanted.”
That description sounds different to the common soccer introduction for American children, who arrive at a field with cones for drills, and on game day get sideline instructions on when to pass, when to shoot.
