Soccer

An youth athlete's natural flexibility varies by age. Those with poor muscle flexibility experience more soreness, tenderness and pain after exercise. The less flexible the muscle, the more easily it is injured.   Here are simple tests to test flexibility of major muscles and tendons prone to injury in soccer.

There are three major youth soccer organizations in the U.S., plus one coaching organization.

During a college lacrosse game, I stepped into a hole on a poorly maintained field, tearing my ACL and the menial meniscus cartilage in my right knee. My knee was so badly damaged it required two surgeries and months of casts and rehabilitation. I never played lacrosse again. If someone had taken a few moments to check the field before the game began, I probably would never have been injured.

Youth soccer has become one of the nation's most popular sports because it offers many advantages, among them being that it is relatively easy to learn and teaches teamwork and mental focus. Ironically, some of the reasons youth soccer is a good choice for your child can also be drawbacks, as its popularity often leads to cutthroat competition at the higher age levels and to politics rearing its ugly head.

Several years ago, I started a travel soccer club after our triplet sons, who had been on an undefeated U 12 (under 12) travel soccer team in the Massachusetts town where we live, were not offered the chance to continue playing travel soccer that fall when they moved up to U-14. My immediate goal was to give them, and about sixty other kids who were also cut from the existing program, a chance to keep playing travel soccer.

Believe it or not, a soccer player's shoelaces can pose a risk of injury. Patrick Kelleher, President of the Adirondack Youth Soccer Association in upstate New York, once saw a soccer shoe come off a player's foot during a scramble for the ball. Because the laces were tied around the player's ankle, when he stepped on the shoe he suffered a career ending severed Achilles tendon. "Tying laces around ankles is a very dangerous practice," Kelleher says. Long laces should instead be wrapped under the center of the shoe between the toe and heel section of rubber cleats.

Soccer shinguards that meet the NOCSAE (National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment) are essential soccer safety equipment.

There are between 450,000 and 600,000 soccer goals in the United States. Many are unsafe because they are unstable and either unanchored or not correctly anchored or counterbalanced.

Chances are, if you have watched more than a few youth soccer games, you have seen a player injured in a collision with the goalpost. In fact, goalies suffer a disproportionate number of injuries compared to those playing other positions. The American Journal of Sports Medicine reported in 1995 that, even though goalies comprise only six percent of soccer players, they suffer nineteen percent of all soccer injuries. When a player collides with the post of a heavy, stationary goal post, the player absorbs all of the impact of the collision.