How to Coach Your Kid
How To! with Mike Pesca
Peach Fish Projects
4.3 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 19 May 2026
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Brian stepped up to coach his 7-year-old daughter's soccer team to save their season, but there's one major catch: he's never actually played the sport. Now battling imposter syndrome and the pressure of intense parental expectations, he feels completely overwhelmed. On this episode of How To!, we bring on former Major League Soccer goalkeeper Jeff Attinella to demystify the art of youth coaching. They discuss the growing problem of early sports specialization and why keeping kids moving is far more important than mastering complex rules. Jeff walks Brian through a foolproof 45-minute practice structure, explains why faking your confidence is essential on the sidelines, and shares a genius "Simon Says" hack for regaining the attention of easily distracted seven-year-olds.
Executive Producer Corey Wara
Edited by Geoff Craig
Booking by Ben Astaire
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | On Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, the NPR News Quiz, we've had some of the biggest stars in the world come on the show, but we don't ask them the questions everybody else does, you know, the ones they can answer. We ask them questions about things they don't know anything about. Some of them seem to enjoy the novelty. Join us for the show that always zigs when they say jump. That's NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, wherever you get your podcasts. I will say that I have a harder time being hard on the girls, right? |
| 0:24.0 | But we have a mom who's also a coach of the softball team, and she'll get at them. So I'm like, it's okay, you did a great job. And my wife was like, no, that was not great. That was terrible. You need to do a better job. Hello and welcome back to how to. |
| 0:38.8 | Youth sports are, to so many American families, what the Roman Catholic Church was to Renaissance, |
| 0:45.2 | Italy, the center of life, the source of joy, the definer of priorities, the collector |
| 0:50.7 | of tithes, although 10% is getting off easy for travel teams. |
| 0:55.8 | Soccer is either the most or second most popular sport in America with 14 million kids |
| 1:01.9 | participating, according to the Sports Fitness Industry Association. |
| 1:05.6 | It's especially popular. |
| 1:07.0 | Among the very young 37% are under 10, and it has an almost even gender breakdown. |
| 1:13.2 | Now, I played soccer from 6 to 12, and I wasn't great, but I wasn't terrible. |
| 1:17.8 | I did have an excellent coach for the first few years, a guy named Joe Pesca, |
| 1:22.5 | who had probably never seen a full soccer game before he started coaching the kids. |
| 1:27.3 | This was a time of Pele and Georgia O'Kanalia and the New York Cosmos, who would face off |
| 1:32.6 | against the Tampa Bay Rowdies good times. |
| 1:35.4 | But you're not born knowing how to coach youth soccer. |
| 1:38.9 | You're probably not born wanting to coach youth soccer in a lot of cases. |
| 1:43.2 | But if you're a loving American parent, there is a |
| 1:46.3 | good chance that youth soccer you will coach, which leads me to the handoff. Sorry, that would be a |
| 1:52.3 | red card, leads me to the touch pass to this guy. Hi, my name is Brian. I live in Los Angeles, |
| 1:58.8 | and I am currently coaching my seven-year-old daughter in AYSO soccer. |
| 2:04.3 | Brian, how's it going? |
| 2:05.5 | Pretty good, up and down. |
... |
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