Sometime previously on this board someone mentioned “herd ball”, a term used when young children (adolescents) attempt to play soccer/football.
The kids apparently just crowd around the ball, making no real teamwork.
This disturbs me and makes me think of the recent years articles and references in the papers to the herd mentality that caused the financial trouble and mortgage crisis of 2007/08. That humans are really just herd animals at heart, since what children do seems to indicate the real instincts of man.
Not wanting to get out into debate territory, the question is why do young children do that? Is herd ball for real? Genetic or cultural? When do they grow out of it? I don’t see how a five year old can’t comprehend playing away from the ball but a seven year old can.
Really? So you think human beings are born with the mental capacities and propensities that they will have as adults, and do not develop psychologically at all over the course of childhood? That is interesting.
Show the three-year-old two glasses with an equal amount of water in each. Ask which has more water, or if they both have the same amount.
In full view of the three-year-old, pour one of the glasses of water into the bowl. Ask whether the bowl or the remaining glass has more water, or if they both have the same amount.
Report your findings.
[sub]This is actually a famous experiment which demonstrates that young children not only don’t know many seemingly obvious things intuitively, they actually can’t learn it until they get older and their brain develops structures for more abstract thought.) [/sub]
If you think that’s bad, you should see my 5yo try to play Mario. Kid’s awful. I can only assume this means humanity is doomed if mushrooms ever come to life.
Serious note, I think the kids have a concept of a team, but they have no concept of strategy, no patience, and no physical ability to kick a ball further than 10 feet. So you get a bunch of kids standing pretty close to the ball due to their physical limitations. But then it’s no fun standing 10 feet away from the action, so they all run in to try and get a foot on it. You can’t explain to them that what they’re doing is an ineffective strategy because the concept of an effective strategy is lost on them.
You’re talking about soccer…all they know is that in soccer you’re supposed to go and kick the ball, they might even know that you’re supposed to kick it towards the goal. Too add to that, it’s kind of fun to kick it. They don’t know anything of passing or dribbling or teamwork or plays or formation so of course when the gym teacher sends them out there they all head for the ball.
Calling that herd mentality would be like calling humans stupid because if you pick a random human out of a group and put him in a fighter jet he probably won’t be able to get it off the ground.
Come to think of it, it seems like the opposite of herd mentality, it seems like they’re all thinking pretty independently, they all want to be the one to kick the ball and to hell with what happens to anyone else.
This. If you’re just starting to play soccer you don’t know what’s an effective strategy and what isn’t. Maybe everyone rushing the ball will work! You won’t know unless you try.
Exactly. My GF’s father coaches little league soccer and refers to this phenomenon as “bunch ball.” It makes coaching both totally impossible and, ironically, incredibly easy.
It was Piaget’s experiment, I believe. I did this with my own kids when I was studying child psychology. It’s the difference between a child with concrete thinking ability and not. At a young age, children are very literal. “More” is an abstract term that encompasses any number of concepts like “taller”, “longer”, etc. Until a child is able to understand the concept of 3-dimensional volume vs 2-dimensional height, it’s likely that the answer you will get will be:
whichever container has the highest level of water in it.
Young children playing a game like soccer are likely to have little ability to understand strategy, position and teamwork. Those are learned concepts that usually don’t appear until about age 8 or so. Five year olds playing soccer are very funny to watch, but trying to teach them team play is like herding cats.
It’s an American thing and it’s the fault entirely of adults. British kids don’t crowd around a ‘soccer’ ball and kick each other’s shins - they know that’s not how the game is played.
When I were a lad everyone cocentrating in the relativively small aprt of the playing area that contained the ball was known as ‘bunching’. ‘Bunching’ and ‘ball-chasing’ do occur in professional games in far midler forms, but they’re still regarded as cardinal sins and are probably a sign that one team has lost its cohesion. That said Wayne Rooney, one of the best players in the World, is actually one of the worst offenders when it comes to ball chasing (one of hisstrengths is that for a forward he’s also a great long passer and a passable defender, but his flaw is that he can’t seem to control the instinct to try and do everything).
Uncoached kids do it simply because they don’t know any better.
As an aside: Is there an untapped market for tall, skinny drinking vessels, for drinks that kids want but shouldn’t have very much of? Like, you could pour yourself and your kid servings of pop, and the kind has “just as much” as you, since they’re filled to the same level?
I think it’s almost the opposite of herd behavior - the kids aren’t following the herd - they’re following the ball; each kid is doing what would make perfect sense if none of the others were there - running to the ball to kick it. It’s only the fact that all those other kids are in the way that makes that behavior a problem. It takes a while before the kids learn to respond to the other kids’ actions - by, say, anticipating that the ball is going to eventually end up over that away and heading thataway, even though there’s no ball there right now - it’s like learning that if you don’t grab a candy immediately upon entering the room, the nice lady might give you two candies: sophisticated thinking for a 5-year-old becomes common sense for a 10 year old.
Having coached little kids’ soccer, I can confidently say it’s a coaching issue. A lot of the coaches at the youngest levels haven’t played the game, don’t know the game, and have no real notion of how to coach it. Their only qualifications are parental. Anyway, the emphasis isn’t really on playing soccer in any meaningful way. It’s about participating, having fun, and learning the absolute rudiments of the game – no hands, try to stop if the ball goes out of bounds, no pushing. And typically what happens is there’s one kid who’s an unstoppable force. He or she will just dominate, making tactics sort of irrelevant.
Unfortunately, for a lot of kids, this little-kids coaching approach lasts much longer than it should. And of course because the kids aren’t watching soccer on TV, they never develop any notion of strategy and tactics.
If I found myself coaching five-year-olds again, I would definitely introduce the idea of formations and tactics – in the simplest of all possible ways – from the get-go. The bad habits kids develop as five-year-olds can be surprisingly stubborn.
This thread reminded me of watching the neighbor kids on the sidewalk out front a couple years ago. They had this Power Wheels type, battery powered riding toy thing, like a four wheeler ATV. Rather than take turns riding it they would all (4-5 of them, around age 3-6) climb on at once. It wouldn’t even move. The older ones were all “Let’s take turns, I’ll go first” and the others would back away and as soon as that thing moved they all start climbing back on until it ground to a halt. None of them were actually getting any enjoyment out of it but were unwilling to take the chance that someone else might. Then the battery died.
It was pretty funny.
As has been mentioned the kids all just run towards the most interesting thing on the field, the ball. To make matters worse, if a kid hangs off to the side to wait for a pass he never gets to touch the ball at all.
I have also seen this behavior at T-ball games, after the ball is hit every kid in the field charges towards it.
The above is why I always played goalie. I could never catch the ball, but I could deflect it away, which meant everyone would go chasing after it, even though only one guy actually understood how to play soccer. Eventually, I just always played on his team, which basically meant the ball never came towards me.
But I was an odd kid. I thought not actually trying to get to the ball was more fun. I’d just watch.
