Team America Football Club

History of the Fun Touch

The inspiration for the Fun Touch came from my experiences with my children starting soccer at a young age in this area. Since all of my younger children have tagged along with me and my eldest to practices and games since they were very small, they decided they wanted to play at a very young age.

At four, my daughters signed up to play with another local club in their preschool program. It was a 5v5 league with the same setup as the older leagues in the club, one weekday practice and match on weekend. There were parents and coaches screaming, players crying, half the kids were lucky to touch the ball once in the entire match. My wife and I decided the environment was not age-appropriate.

So when my youngest son wanted to follow their footsteps we didn't know what to do. We found a preschool soccer program at the rec center, and signed him up for that. The balls were at the side of for over half the session while they stretched and played nursery games without a ball. When they finally got to the fifteen minutes of ball time, the players were all herded into a line so they could go one at a time. We stopped going half way through as it was not fun for him and we were afraid he might never play soccer again if we stuck through to the end.

So I knew we needed something different. My wife and I were both teachers, so we sat down and designed a program that we thought was age appropriate. We focused on simple goals, the first being to help inspire a lifelong love of football. I took the program we mapped out and presented it to the TAFC board, and that is how The Fun Touch was born. The name was developed from two of our goals, that the players have lots of fun and get lots of touches on the ball.

If you are looking for an opportunity to cheer little junior on to victory in the U4 state cup, this is not your program. If you are looking to cheer little junior on to victory in the U14 state cup ten years from now, we would like to try to help you get started with that by building the love of the game it takes to acheive those kinds of goals.

So the program we outlined is:

Goals:
1 - Inspire a lifelong love of soccer.
2 - Have lots of fun.
3 - Give every player lots of touches on the ball.

Strategies:
1 - Time allocation:
  - over 1/3 1 ball per child
  - almost 1/3 1 ball per two children (competitive or cooperative)
  - about 1/3 small-sided games 1v1, 2v2 up to 3v3
2 - Young enthusiastic coaches supported by parent managers
3 - No lines--every player participates the whole time.
4 - Every player experiences successes regularly.
5 - Lots of fun games with a soccer ball.
6 - Learning through play.