Coach Cameron Soccer Podcast · David Cameron

Darren Toohey | E737 | Coaching Youth Soccer as a Parent

·50 min

The Coach Cameron Podcast opens in a loose, off-the-cuff way. It is a one-take show, recorded on Mother's Day, so the host begins with housekeeping, corrects himself along the way, and moves from sponsor talk to the futsal league promo before settling into Darren Toohey's story. Darren is from Australia. He says he came to the United States in 1995 with two suitcases, expected to play college soccer for a year or two, and then never left. The conversation turns to coaching. The host and Darren work through how a parent can talk to a child after a game without turning the postgame moment into a lecture, starting with a simple question about the two or three things that went really well before moving to one or two things to work on. The idea stays calm. That approach keeps the pressure from stacking on top of the pressure kids already feel, and Darren is careful to say that postgame conversations should stay positive. He talks about catching himself. As a former coach, he had to learn the rules of being a parent first, then figure out how to back off, keep things positive, and make backyard work feel like something a kid wants to do rather than something handed down from above. The host also mentions Jack, saying that when he plays, the conversation can get negative, and that sometimes he does not want to talk about soccer at all after games because he is around it so much already. The episode keeps circling the awkward truth that coaching is easier to preach than to live, especially when the game itself has already stressed everyone out. Darren also goes back to his first coaching work in the United States at Hope College in Michigan. He remembers being asked to coach a summer team at Notre Dame and joking that it might as well have been the University of Baked Beans, which fits the show's habit of letting the story wander until the point lands. Indoor changes everything. He says he was never a technical player, that he was fast and worked hard, and that indoor soccer and futsal forced him to learn how to think, create, and survive when space disappeared. He names the coaches and players who shaped that learning. By the end, the talk lands on a simple lesson: he wishes he had grown up in that pressure-cooker environment, because it would have changed his development and later improved his foot skills.

As heard by us

A parent-coach episode about keeping youth soccer positive and lowering the pressure.

Darren Toohey's move from Australia to the United States gives the episode its center, but the stronger thread is the parenting one: how a former coach tries to keep a kid's game from turning into aftergame tension.

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Why you'd press play

You want a calmer way to talk with your kid after the final whistle.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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