Mad River Valley Soccer
For the first time ever, Highland Soccer Systems has agreed to host the registration process (and provide all training) for the Mad River Valley Soccer U6 (pre-K & Kindergarten) and U8 (birth years of 2015 & 2016) Spring Soccer programs!
If you have heard enough and are ready to register, go ahead and click here:
If you want to know more, also great! See below…
For both groups, the amount of commitment required to take part in the programming has been greatly minimized to encourage kids to take part in as many things as they are interested in. Whether that is soccer, baseball, lacrosse, softball, tennis, track, mountain biking, piano, violin, monster trucks, or even more soccer (ask me – I have it available!!), your commitment to community youth soccer should not disallow that from happening (nor should your commitment to anything else, as far as I am concerned). So please – join us when you can!!
For the U6 program: Sessions will be on Saturdays at 9:00 AM, starting Saturday April 29 and going for 6 weeks of sessions through Saturday, June 10, with the exclusion of Memorial Day Weekend (5/27/23). Each session will be approximately 45-50 minutes long and focused very heavily on playing the game. We will spend the first 15 minutes of every Saturday in a large group ((i.e. all the players in one location) learning a handful of individual skills with a ball – one player, one ball. After that warm-up period, allowing players to arrive and/or actually make it onto the field in their own time, we will break into as many fields as are necessary to play 2 vs 2 or 3 vs 3 mini-games. The first few weeks of this may “look rough”, but this is where the magic happens – kids learn: “I go that way, kick the ball in the process and then celebrate like crazy”. There isn’t a whole lot more to the game – no focus on passing certainly! During the “game phase, I will beg, borrow, and steal any parent with a heartbeat to help corral little players into the right directions. You need zero playing ability or soccer knowledge at all, but the ability to “be a child” is certainly helpful 🙂
The U8 Program will function very similarly, but with slightly different expectations and results. Starting on Friday, April 28th and continuing through Saturday June 10th (no programming on the Fri/Sat of Memorial Day Weekend) players born in the years of 2015 & 2016 will play 6 weeks of soccer, based heavily on playing the game and experimenting within the game itself. Similar to the U6 program, Fridays will be largely, but not exclusively, spent in mini-games of 2v2 or 3v3, independent of the “teams” that kids are placed on. This allows kids that have developed a little quicker to continue to be challenged, while kids new to the program can learn for the first time in a less intimidating environment. The fluidity of this system will allow not only for creativity to flourish, but for me to constantly reevaluate players and setups for maximum soccer development. Please do not think that laps, lines and lectures are the only way for kids to learn a skill – players the world over learn this game in exactly this way – I want them to love it long before I care if they are ‘good” at it.
Saturdays will be “match days” for the U8 group, complete with goals and goalkeepers. Kids love to play and the more ways we can expose them to it, the more they have a ball that they are running around with, the more likely they are to continue to want to come play. These teams will be randomized and assigned after all registrations have been received.
If you have any questions about either program, please email me at: highlandsoccersystems@gmail.com If you are ready to register, great, click here: