It has not stopped raining here for what seems like the past 48 hours!

Unfortunately, because of the persistent rain and poor field conditions, Academy training needs to be suspended here until Wednesday afternoon.

Today I did get to have a staff meeting with the Academy coaches, and it was great to see how experienced, hard-working, and dedicated they are, despite somewhat difficult working conditions.

In Canada, most youth clubs and academies (especially professional academies) have unlimited access to indoor facilities and/or turf fields, where inclement weather is hardly ever an issue.  Failing that, there is usually a patch of grass behind one of the training fields that can be used as a last resort.

In Uruguay, what few quality fields exist are strictly reserved for adult professional matches, leaving youth academies to train on poorly maintained grass that does not hold up well following heavy rainfall – hence the cancellations today.

It struck me that we Canadians should be a bit more thankful for what we have – that we can almost always find a place to have a soccer practice if and when we need to.  And that, for the most part, we get to train and play on good quality turf or grass fields, basically year-round.

Soccer survives in Uruguay and in many other countries whose players and coaches can only dream of training and playing on the kinds of fields that we have in abundance in Canada.  We all should think about that the next time we have to train on turf instead of grass, a school gym instead of an indoor field, or a different, lesser-quality field because the one we regularly train on needs maintenance.  Perhaps, changing our perception of our training environment can lead to an actual change not only in our attitude, but also in our performance.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this topic.  Drop me a line here to get the conversation started.