What's next?

RSVP for the Awards dinner on Dec 17 for volunteers & families, 6pm at the Pasadena Senior Center near Old Town. RSVP here.

There will be a tournament in Pasadena on the Friday-Sunday after Thanksgiving! Please sign up to volunteer and help Region 13 raise money to pay for scholarships and equipment. Sign up for a volunteer slot on Nov 29- Dec 1

Oopsie! We forgot to bring the trophies to Victory Park last week. If you're in 4U/5U, stop by Victory Park any time this Saturday to retrieve yours. Note the parking lot has a 5-min loading zone alongside the storage cages.

Pizza fundraiser! Get a pizza delivered to, or pick it up near the Playhouse. ayso13.org/pizza

6U-8U teams, send someone to the clubhouse next week to get your trophies in time for your end-of-season party. For times, see the signup sheet.

Please let the coaches be the only adults giving the players instructions. Yes, the players need space to hear each other, and the coaches, but also, your game-time advice is often incorrect.

Winter Soccer

There is more soccer coming. Registration will hopefully start next week.

Grad Series for 8U-aged players who will be playing in 10U for the first time in 2025.

Winter Stars for anyone who wants to play Sunday afternoon pickup.

All-Stars for advanced 10U, 12U, and 14U athletes.

Reminders

Referees make mistakes. Coaches make mistakes. That's the point. If we wanted everything to be perfect, robots would play the game with each other on a plastic carpet. It's a messy society full of humans, and youth sports are one of the tools we use to learn how to look past disagreements and cooperate with each other.

Even though the soccer league ends soon, you are free to invite some friends to meet you at the park, any time throughout the year!

Teams opening at Victory Park are asked to appoint a parent to come at 7am and help set up the park. Please sign up at https://www.wejoinin.com/AYSORegion13.

After the final game on Field 5 ends, the 6U teams are responsible for packing away the admin tent. 

Upcoming

See more by subscribing to the Region 13 calendar. The board meeting is usually the first Thursday of each month.

Volunteers

Trophies will be available for pickup next for 6U, 7U, and 8U teams, after the coach has completed the player assessments.

Please make sure someone from your team has signed up to set up Victory Park on Saturday. Sign up.

The volunteer recognition & holiday dinner is the one time we all get together in the same room. You should go! RSVP here for the Awards dinner. To thank a volunteer who went above and beyond, reply and nominate them for an award

1. Volunteer of the year
2. Coach of the year
3. Referee of the year
4. Youth referee of the year

Coaches

In all age divisions, revisit your assessments in your team spreadsheets, because that's how teams are balanced next year. A new category has been added to help distribute the goal-scorers for next year. Find the guidelines on the Coach Hub.

In 6U, 7U, 8U, you must complete  assessments before trophies can be picked up.

If scores differ wildly from expectations implied by the team season record, the coach staff will ask you to revisit them.

Nominate the next Region Commissioner

Terry Takahashi's 2-year term as Commissioner of Region 13 ends on February 28, 2025, at which time the Region 13 Board of Directors will elect a new commissioner for a two-year term. If you would like to nominate someone for the position, please email Taj Chiu at taj@ayso13.org before Nov 15. She will present viable candidates for a vote at the December 2024 Region 13 Board of Directors meeting. 

For further information on the role itself, click here.

Good sportsmanship

What do we get if we win? A juice box! What do we get if we lose? Also a juice box!

Have you read the book, Moneyball, by Michael Lewis? Or maybe seen the movie? To save some time, here's a summary: baseball is a game with simple rules and complex physics. There are traditions for how to train for and play the game. But in 2002, the Oakland Athletics used Microsoft Excel to analyze the statistics of what actually happened in a baseball game, and came up with a different way to play. The discovery? The old way of playing the game was based on heuristics, while the new way of playing the game is based on a deeper understanding of the true underlying rules of physiology, psychology, and physics. Understanding the true rules was newly possible because of the improvements in computing. If your child plays softball or baseball, you've probably heard some of the traditional heuristics still in use, like "keep your eye on the ball," and "protect the plate." Nothing wrong with those, per se. They serve a purpose. They just have limitations, and athletes who understand the true rules (the ones enforced by physics) will outperform in the long run. After all, if watching the ball was the most important thing, then Albert Pujols would be able to hit a pitch by Jennie Finch.

Heuristics are useful, of course. You may have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect: that someone who is new to a skill is often more confident in their abilities than they should be, while an expert is less confident than she should be. If you accept that this is just part of how the human mind works, it can be used as a powerful tool for introspection. 

Humans are really quite good at learning new skills, especially those combining perception, decision, and motion. Reflecting on what we've accomplished makes it easy to want to learn more, often discovering a set of heuristics that scaffolds rapid learning. After a while, we reach a plateau, in which continued effort yields no real improvement. But then, our brain starts to figure out what the true rules really are, and remaps itself to develop a more sophisticated set of behaviors (combining perception, decision, action, and adjustment) that are difficult to express in plain language. That's when we reach the long, slow incline of mastery, and the new mental models reward new experience with both improvement and confidence. There are no shortcuts.

It's easy to hear this in language development! Nearly every child switches from saying "ran" to saying "runned," when they recognize that "run" and "ran" are different tenses of the same verb. The child's mind is replacing a list of special cases with rules for conjugating verbs, and then the irregular verbs need to be learned again. It's also easy to hear this at Victory Park on Saturdays, as parents ask questions like, "why can't you just dribble like you were so good at last week?" 

A hallmark of being on a plateau is relying on heuristics. When you hear yourself using words like "always" or "never," those are heuristics. Examples include, "never cross the ball in front of your own goal," or "always kick the ball out of bounds if you're outnumbered on defense." This is often the best thing to do, but there are exceptions. Only by gaining experience does an athlete develop the more complex mental models that lets her make decisions to take advantage of those exceptions.

It's difficult for a young child to explore those decisions, and move along the experience/confidence curve, when her parents are yelling at her during the game, telling her what to do. That's why AYSO asks parents to let the coaches have the only voices instructing the team during the game, and why the AYSO coaching classes stress "coaching off the ball," to avoid distracting the players at the center of action.

Michael Lewis also as a podcast about coaching and refereeing. The episode "Ref, you suck," explores how we relate to those who enforce the rules -- whether in sports, in business, or in law. We tried to get Pierluigi Collina to referee your child's game this Saturday, but he had better things to do. Instead, you get some random parents who just started refereeing soccer games 6 weeks ago. Your referee crew is on their own journey of confidence and experience, so AYSO depends on everyone respecting the referees' learning process. It's hard enough keeping track of 20 people, while running, without having to worry about insults coming from the parents on the sidelines. A simple, "Thank you, Referees!" goes a long way to encouraging volunteers to want to gain experience, develop their understanding of the game, and get better over time.

Well, there are shortcuts, sort of -- people who have done it before can guide you! Head on over to the Coach Hub to explore the resources, and ask older coaches for advice.

The best way to support your child after a game is to say, "I love watching you play!"

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