3 Ways for You to Get the Most From This Program

The stuff that really matters is a National discussion. Here's how to get started:

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Get back in the game with our previous episodes. These were all recorded to keep youth sports intact as a safe and solid foundation for forging good citizen adults.

Listen to the Podcast

The most fun way to learn about everything from healthy eating, sleep habits, and self-confidence. If you care about your athlete's success as much as we do, tune in and let us show you the ropes - or maybe even help them out!

We talk with experts on subjects like healthy eating habits and sleep schedules for athletes so that parents can get informed advice while their kids are doing all they can just to get better at their sport. Tune in so that we can take some of the guesswork out of developing a youth athlete.

Join and Promote the Conversation

It's not hard to find a place where you can talk about anything. But it is difficult to find one that's worth talking about. That's why we're here.

About the Soccer Sidelines And Your Host

David started his coaching adventure as a soccer dad who volunteered literally from a lawn chair on the sidelines of his kid's game. In more than a decade, he earned many licenses and served in a lot of roles - all while searching for the common thread that binds these 15 years together: strengthening family and giving kids the tools to become their best selves.

A former multi-sport athlete himself, David swam, ran track, participated in gymnastics, played soccer, hockey, little league baseball, wrestled, and played lacrosse. As a Navy veteran, he swam with Navy SEALs (his training was in medicine, not being a SEAL), and managed many types of injuries and patient care situations. As a professional, he gave 20 years to DoD and left service as a GS-343-15 with three divisions of employees. He's served as program manager, the Navy Medical Logistics CIO, the Military Healthcare System Chief for Defense Business Transformation, and is currently an investment banker/consultant who serves to help business owners, operators and capital providers with capital placement, capital structuring, and consulting services.

Some of the positions he's held in the soccer community: father of two great multi-sport kids, coach, director for recreation, director for academy, director of coaching, registrar, uniform coordinator, SSL coordinator, field and equipment manager, marketing and communications director, treasurer, partnerships manager, and host of this show.

David's passion is for learning, for serving, and for elevating the human experience through sharing knowledge and mutual alignment of interests. He studied English writing as an undergrad and Knowledge Management in Grad school through the GWU school of engineering.

The Soccer Sidelines was born from a realization that the best conversations and the biggest value add to families happens on the sidelines of practices and games with parents.

Join us each week as we release a new episode every Monday at 6AM. Listen on your morning commute, at the gym, or while walking around your neighborhood.

"As a coach, I rarely have the time to have more than a short conversation or two before or after games. As a Club President, I try to attend as many practices and games as I can. The conversations I've had with parents, players and coaches on the sidelines have created some of the most valuable Ah-Ha! moments!

Club officials like me invest a lot of time in the culture of our clubs. When this doesn't happen, everyone on the sidelines defaults to focusing on the one thing everyone can see - the scoreboard. Games become a contest of gladiators with the sole purpose of winning. This "default" focus on winning waters down the true purpose of youth sports. It limits the value we get out of the experience, and can bring out some of the worst behaviors in everyone.

Our job is to give kids a safe environment to make mistakes and to learn from experiences - winning and losing and everything in between. We want kids to learn the values of teamwork, respect, and good sportsmanship. We want the 98.6% of all youth sports participants who don't go on to become professional or collegiate athletes to become good citizen adults in whatever their chosen fields: teachers, retail workers, salespeople, doctors, public safety providers, scientists, engineers, etc.

Youth sports provides a safe platform for kids to learn critical life skills, and if done right, it gives families the ability to share in the experience of growing up and having great conversations at home.

This podcast program is a tool for extending sideline conversations from my own fields to the sidelines of soccer programs across the country and around the world."

Help Promote Healthy Youth Sports. Join the Discussion.

Listener Maps:

While the majority of our listeners are from the United States, shout out to The Soccer Sidelines listeners from all over the world! New countries are joining all the time.

Listeners in the United States:

Almost every state in the US (only 2 left!!) has at least a handful of TSS listeners. We hope to continue to grow our community, so please share episodes you like! The more who join our community, the easier time we will have in optimizing the youth development window for families everywhere!

The Soccer Sidelines Podcast by David Dejewski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://thesoccersidelines.com.