Don’t Make Soccer Girls Hate Exercise

Don’t make soccer girls hate exercise.

This is the #1 job of a coach and/or parent to young girls.

When it comes to instilling healthy habits for a lifetime,  it is important to make exercise, training, and movement FUN during childhood.

When I was eight years old, I exercised for the sake of joy. There was exploration, creativity, playfulness, and yes, still competition within the fun. I wrestled with my brother, played flag football with friends, threw baseballs over trees, raced against my dad, jumped on trampolines, jumped rope, and did cartwheels in the front yard.

Early on, exercise was fun. It set me up for my older years of LOVING it.

Isn’t that the point of sports?

Young girls’ soccer players should want to be active, train, compete, and get better. Don’t let their childhood go to waste with five different private trainers who run them through predictable drills, make them run miles on end, or sign them up for speed sessions that a pro athlete is doing.

Girls have their ENTIRE sports careers to get serious about training, and when it starts with the priority of fun, they are more likely to build that passion for training hard when they’re older.

The fastest way to make a girl have a bad taste in her mouth about training when she is older is to push her into serious training too young.

With that said, I’m so grateful my mom and dad never forced me to train seriously when I was young. They gave me opportunities to explore, dabble in many activities and sports, and discover my passion on my own. Thankfully, I picked the correct sport, and that was soccer.

I was good at lacrosse and track sprinting, but soccer took me far. I went on to play at Johns Hopkins University, become a three-time college all-American, and was then inducted into the Hall of Fame. Beyond college, I kept wanting more and entered the WPSL to play semi-pro.

 

Try Multiple Sports

I LOVED soccer, but all sports were critical to finding my strong suits. They enhanced my soccer skills by teaching me agility, spatial awareness, and building other muscle groups to avoid overuse. Mentally, other sports gave me a break from soccer, to miss it and not burn out.

When I finished my growth spurt and became a teenager, I was so passionate about training and soccer that I wanted to do MORE. It was time to get serious and do more specialized work.

My athletic career took a beautiful, organic trajectory: I enjoyed exercise and moving a lot when I was young, enjoyed all sports for fun, made the decision MYSELF to become serious about one sport later, and still LOVE training more than ever now that I am in my 30s.

Now, I’m blessed to be able to coach and share with young girls that exercise must be fun, and they will naturally build that passion to want to train.

Make Sure Exercise is Fun

I still want to bang my head against a wall when I see under 12-year-olds doing box jumps, resisted sprints, and drills older, mature athletes should be doing.

Many trainers succumb to their parents’ dictatorship. They make the sessions look advanced so the parents can post an Instagram photo with a caption about the grind.

“My kid on their grind!”

It’s gross.

What’s worse, I see the kid going at sub-max speed through ladder drills, which aren’t even a grind at all. It’s not hard. They’re not getting faster. They’re only making their feet sore.

What actually is a grind is doing high-quality work, prioritizing recovery, and ensuring it’s fun so they keep coming back.

That’s the true grind.

Not a quick Instagram post that gives off the illusion of “hard work.”

 

A Word for Trainers Who Nonsense with Young Ones

First and foremost, trainers need to maintain their integrity and deliver what kids need, not what parents want.

I get the urge to make money and keep clients happy. Still, I’d rather risk losing thousands of dollars than caving on my long-term development pathway coaching philosophy and doing training that doesn’t align with an athlete’s age and maturation.

And true story: I lost thousands when I told parents I wouldn’t run their 11-year-olds in the ground, and we would work on speed with fun games, races, and tag.

I know the mental and physical consequences of making training too intense and advanced too young, so I was okay with losing a handful of clients that summer.

As a coach, my top priority for young ones is to ensure they LOVE training. My other priority is to ensure they are exposed to a variety of movements, environments, and games that build all muscles groups for long, healthy sports careers.

I can’t repeat enough that kids are not elite pros.

Every coach should want young ones to have fun. Why the two-mile runs at practice or the suicides?

Why?

And every parent should want the same for their child.

There’s a toxic rush in society now to grow girls up way too fast.

For what?

Seriously, ask that question. Ask yourselves if you want them to develop a bitter taste in their mouths toward exercise because you pushed serious training on them too young.

Because if they do, they’ll one day become the woman who struggles to lose weight, stay healthy, and make time for training out of joy when she’s older.

She will become sedentary.

She’ll be so burned out from working out she loses herself.

She will hate exercise so much that she will never be motivated to do it when she’s older.

Don’t make soccer girls hate exercise.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Erica Suter is a former college All-American soccer player from Johns Hopkins University. She also was inducted into the Johns Hopkins Athletic Hall of Fame in April of 2024 for being an impact player who forever changed the women’s soccer program.

Suter is giving back to the game and to female soccer players. She is a full-time performance coach with a Master of Science in Performance Enhancement. She helps girls with speed, agility, strength, and conditioning development and has been training girls for over 12 years in the ECNL, GA, and NPL.

Her players have gone on to play college soccer at UNC, University of MD, Pittsburgh, Towson University, University of Charleston, MIT, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon, Rutgers, and more.

Follow Erica on Twitter: @fitsoccerqueen

Check out her podcast: The Soccer Queens Podcast

WORK WITH ERICA:

Book a remote training consult HERE

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To book, email me at: fitsoccerqueen@gmail.com

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