Alex Morgan’s Advice Every Young Athlete Needs — Plus Greg OlsenL’S Preseason Recap

Since 2022, we've been on the Youth Inc. podcast journey, helping kids, parents, and coaches have the best possible experience with youth sports. Youth Inc. is growing and expanding how we're able to make a positive impact on local communities. The Youth Inc. shop, we have thousands of schools already partnered with us. The biggest part is it is a great way to give back and serve your school with every single purchase. Proceeds of that purchase are going to be kicked back to your school. It's open 365 days a year, 24-7. My community at Charlotte Christian School, they love gear like this Unreal t-shirt. Head to youthincshop.com today and get gear for your school community. Every school earns on every purchase. Youth sports in America are at a crossroads, and I'm here to help lead the conversation forward. I'm Greg Olson. Each week, we're sitting down with top athletes, coaches, and more to talk about what's working, what's broken, and what's next. Welcome to Youth Inc. Hey, what's up? It's Shelby Baumgartner, and welcome back to Youth Inc. I'm your digital host, and we have something very exciting coming up the next couple of weeks to start every single episode. We're going to ask Greg how his middle school season is going, a little recap show. It's going to be amazing. You don't want to miss it. So before we get to Alex Morgan, we're going to send it to Greg for a few questions about preseason. Greg, middle school preseason is wrapping up. What is one thing you hope your kids remember from camp? You know, I think the biggest struggle that we have, it's a pro and a con. I think the con is in football, these kids are so used to playing so many games, right? And the reality of football is you're going to practice a lot more than you play an actual live competition. So we've been out there all summer. We finally had a scrimmage where we played three other teams on Saturday. So that was a nice kind of outlet for the boys to go out and put all this work to test and see how we do and make mistakes and have success. And now we can go back and fix them. So I hope they look back on the summer as saying, I'm so glad I went through all that work because when we got to the games, we felt prepared mentally, we felt prepared physically, and we were able to go out there and have success individually and as a team. So I hope they continue to put the correlation and the connection between the hard work comes first and then we can go out and have a lot of fun playing the games. And hopefully as they get older, they start connecting those dots more and more. That goes into my next question perfectly. Preseason and summer in general, so many distractions, it's hot. How do you get 20 plus middle school boys to focus, especially when the season is a little bit away? It's hard and you have to find new ways to challenge them in practice. It's hard in June when it's 8 a.m. and it's 95 degrees and you're out there and we actually have like almost 60 kids this year. We got two big classes of 7th and 8th graders. So there's a lot of kids and you're trying to keep their attention and you're trying to keep them interested and motivated. But it's hard to tell them, hey, trust me, we're going to do this for the next nine weeks and then we'll finally play a game. It's hard. They're young, but you just have to be consistent with your messaging, consistent with your practice routine, know when to push, know when to say, you know what, we've done enough. We can cancel tomorrow's practice and let's have a long weekend. So it's not always just gas pedal down, go, go, go. We always tell the boys, when it's time to go, we'll go. We know when to pull back. We know when you guys are ready and when you've had enough and we can give you a little bit of a blow. So just trust us. When we're here, let's go full speed. Let's give it everything we have. Let's be willing to be coached and corrected so that we can go out on game day and have a lot of fun. That's ultimately what this is all about is going out on game day and letting the boys go out and just let it rip and having fun with their buddies. And in order to do that, there is a lot of groundwork that needs to be laid beforehand. And I think that's our number one job as middle school coaches is teaching them what that relationship looks like. On a more fun note, what is the goal of the clap drill? We love it here in the office. Yeah. So the clap drill is something that we used to do in college in our pregame final walkthrough before we left the hotel at Miami. So we would do clap drill and it was all the different cadences. So obviously as you get older, there's multiple cadences. It's not necessarily just one and two like we have right now. So there's variations of different cadences and no plays. So that was something that we had done when I was all the way back in college at Miami. At the end of practice, I always have this thing I say to the kids. Like I always want to end the last like 30 seconds to a minute of practice. They're tired. They know practice is over. How can we squeeze like 30 seconds to one more minute of concentration, of focus? And I always say, hey, we got to concentrate when you're tired. Concentrate when you're tired. So instead of me standing up there and clapping, we can bring up our quarterbacks young and old and let them command the group. No different than how they would command the huddle, but now you got to do it with 60 kids and you got to speak loud and you got to be confident and nobody wants to be the only kid who claps off rhythm. So it's just a final little finisher mentally after what will be the end of their physical outputs. Test them and see where they sit. And I think they like it. They get into it, but it's just a nice little way to put finishing touches after a long practice. So I took an acting class at Duke my junior year and that was our warm-up and acting class. So I brought that to Duke, to Duke Field Hockey our junior year and our senior year. Not the same as yours, but we would clap in a circle and be insane and it got us hyped up for the game every single match. It was amazing. Yes, we loved it. There's an element of yeah, there's an element of concentration, timing, rhythm, synchronization, accountability, right? Like when you go on two and the kid claps on one, the entire group looks at them. So like that's real. Like that self-accountability to your teammates is more important than it is to your coaches. So those are all just like little tiny lessons that we're trying to just piece in and steal a minute here, a minute there. And you put that over the course of a season and every little thing adds up. Amazing. Last question here. Looking ahead, going into game one, that's this week. What are you guys focusing on and how do you as a coach prepare this team for the first game of the season? Yeah, I think, you know, anytime the opener's coming up, the kids are excited, right? Like we said, everybody wants to play the games, which we get. I think our biggest focus these next couple days in practice coming off the jamboree is we need to be cleaner, right? It's not like, hey, we got to learn to, you know, run faster or hit harder. Like our kids are physical. Our kids, for the most part, you know, from a physical component are pretty good and strong and stout. So we got a lot of kids that are good players. I want to see us be cleaner. I want to see our operation in and out of the huddle be better. I want to see our alignment on defense be more consistent. We weren't real clean as far as our stances, our alignments, our assignments of who we're blocking, staying on our blocks longer. So not a lot of like physical things. It was a lot more just like small details that when you go live in a scrimmage for the first time, kind of get exposed. Well, now we get to come back to practice, really hammer those the next two days and hopefully see a very polished, clean, organized product on Wednesday. That's whether you're in seventh grade or you're a 10-year vet in the NFL. You always want week one to look organized, clean, and looks like everybody's on the same page. As the year goes on, you can evolve and do some different things, but that's always the goal for week one. What's up, everybody? Really cool episode of YouThink coming at you today. We are joined by one of the most recognizable athletes in the entire world, one of the best U.S. soccer players, male or female, in history, Alex Morgan. She's been an actress. She's been obviously an Olympian, World Cup, you name it, she's done it. She's been able to cross into so many other brands and so many other pop culture experiences. She comes to us today with CVS Health as part of their Hometown Heroes contest. Just a really cool story, someone late to the game of soccer in relative terms. She tells that whole backstory, her high school days, balancing being a professional, a mom, just a really cool, very relevant conversation here on YouThink. So hope you guys enjoy it. Alex, really appreciate you joining us here on YouThink. Yeah, happy to be on. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so all right, so if you don't know a lot about us, we really dive into what is the youth sports experience like today? What was it like for so many of our favorite athletes back when they were kids? So I want to start with you. Just from a broad perspective, you are one of the most recognizable athletes in the world, the influence that you've had on American soccer, global soccer, especially among young girls. When you think back to the soccer you grew up with, maybe as compared to the soccer now that we're living and experiencing, particularly here in America, how would you compare and contrast the two? Well, I think the opportunity now and the opportunity to play at a high level at a young age is endless for girls, which is awesome. Growing up for me, there wasn't as many teams around, but also I would say I didn't make the jump from rec soccer to youth club soccer until I was 13 years old. People are flabbergasted by that because they're starting their kids at like seven years old now. I will not be having my daughter in youth club soccer at seven years old. I just don't think that you need to really suck the fun out of it and be training multiple times a week with games on the weekend every weekend and traveling both in and out of the state at that age. So I think that there's definitely pros and cons to it, but my experience was a little bit different because I chose to play on my city rec AYSO soccer team for many years. My parents were like, when you are ready to make the jump, you're ready to make the jump. I did and propelled after that, getting on the youth national team and getting scouted for college. But I was definitely late to the game back then and now it would be unheard of. So stay there because as you said, like today people would look at you both as an athlete or as a mother, like you were insane. You know, you're a seven year old. People would honestly think and say that your seven year old would never be able to catch up. They would be so far behind and it's a conversation we have with people and we bash our heads against the wall. But even back then, were you, was there a ton of pressure? Was the pressure coming from coaches? Was the pressure coming from like your friends, family? Like what were you feeling when you were one of the few, maybe holdouts for as good as you were one of the few holdouts that wasn't going the real competitive club route at that young age? You know, I don't think that there was pressure. Like my parents just didn't put that pressure on me. My dad coached me up until I made the jump to club soccer. And I loved having like a four minute drive or a walk across the street to the school to have soccer practice. Like the jump was then a 45 minute drive to training, you know, doing homework on the way, homework on the way home, you know, getting home late. And it was a bigger commitment and I needed to be ready for that. And I wasn't until the age of 13. But at the same time, when I came on to the scene, yes, I was late to the game a little bit. I had to find the team where the coaches accept me, dug in, want like in the team and the coaches want it, like saw the growth potential rather than being like, oh, like this is a waste of my time now. So I did have to go through a couple of teams before I found my team. And going on the youth national team, I was definitely one of the more raw players. My technique was not necessarily up to speed with some of those players that have been playing for many years before me at a higher level. But also some of those players ended up just having burnout in college or, you know, didn't end up making it to the 20s or the senior national team because they didn't have like the motivation or the drive that maybe I had because I decided my path rather than anyone else. No, that's I mean, that's super. And for someone as accomplished as you to make that point where we try to have the conversation with a lot of the families, whether they're on our show or just people that are we have three teenage kids who are kind of out living this world right now. But like the idea that it's not about who you weren't the best, maybe 13 year old player on your team, but the opportunity that you knew there was so much potential for you to continue to just get better, get better. It feels nowadays like everyone's in a race to like who can be at their peak potential as early as possible. And you might be the most dominant 12 year old, the most dominant 13 year old. But the idea should be you're the most dominant high school player, college player above and beyond. There is an element that we've lost of that in the youth sports world. And for someone like you to kind of continue to share those stories and examples, I think is super, super valuable. Yeah, I mean, it really is all about fun, building community, teamwork, building confidence in oneself, like, you're gonna be able to play at a high level if you have if you put in the work, you know, eventually, both on the field and off the field and yourself, and in our good teammate and have the drive. And don't give up, you know, at the end of the day, like, none of that is me saying you have to touch a ball 500 times a day. None of that is me saying you have to go out and do the extra training. Eventually, yes, you do. But at eight or 10 years old, no, you don't. No doubt. What was high school like for you? I've actually interviewed multiple of your Olympic teammates, you know, Julie and Addy, like, and everyone has a very different experience. What was your high school experience in regards to balancing club commitments? You know, the USA team, some of the, you know, the national stuff, but also playing with your friends in high school. I loved my high school experience. I, a lot of kids now, at least for soccer, maybe a couple of other sports, don't value high school sports, because it's not at the high level of maybe their club team. I really enjoyed playing with my high school team. I felt like I had a good balance. Obviously, you're doing homework in the car, on the way to training or on the way home, or you're not able to do all the social things on the weekends because you're traveling all around for games. But at the same time, I feel like keeping me busy helped me get to where I am today and helped me have a good head on my shoulders and having something to do and a schedule was important for me. I think for all high schoolers going through, you don't want nothing on the schedule. That's where you could get into danger zone. So I feel like the sports really helped me a lot. I love that. You mentioned earlier, you're like, my daughter would not be doing the club. So just talk a little bit, like, as you guys start entering, as your kids continue to get older, you have one son, one daughter, like, if they came to you and said, mom, I love soccer, I want to give it my all at eight, nine years old, like, as you guys anticipate some of those conversations, are you dug in, under no circumstances? Or do you believe there's like, if it fits my child, if it fits their personality, maybe I would entertain it. How do you project? Do you drive them to soccer? Do you drive them to playing other sports? How do you guys have those conversations in your family? Obviously, it's a sports family, you and your husband. Yeah. I think the biggest thing is opening her mind up to all different sports, letting her decide. She's not just going to quit halfway through season. So if we're going to commit at the beginning, we're going to commit all the way through. But at the same time, like, if she wants to take on more, I'm all for that. If she's like, these other sports are great, but like soccer is the one or track and field or flag football, like, I'll be like, great, we're all in, let's go. Like, we can get you a speed coach, we can get you strength training, we can get you extra personal lessons, like, if that's what you want. But until they're 13, 14, 15, 16, there's just no need to do anything really more than the child wants, because you suck the love and the fun out of it. No doubt. All right, last couple things before I let you go. I don't know if you saw the clip on the eve of the World Cup this past summer, Landon Donovan had an interview where he talked about the challenges that his son was facing, one of the smaller, less, you know, less physically developed players in this whole pay to play, like, and it obviously created a lot of headlines, it created a lot of conversation around, are we doing American sports the right way? And they're comparing and contrasting them through how other countries and other areas of the world do it. So if I asked you, if I made you like youth sports czar of the day, from what you know, as an athlete, and now that you're going through as a parent, like, if you could change one thing, or you could implement one universal rule that would apply to all youth sports here in America, like, is there something that would pop, pop to mind? Well, just living in California, growing up in California, we have such great talent and like such a massive youth pool for kids to like play sports. And I just think it's unnecessary to be traveling outside of the state and to be like, wasting parents dollars by like, going to play other teams in other states. Until a certain age, I just there, there's, there's too much talent, and great teams and leagues and accessibility in most states, not all but California for sure is one of them where you just don't need to be wasteful with parents money by like, by traveling outside of out of their state until probably like 14 or 15 years old. So definitely, that would be one thing that I would probably implement. Thank you to Greg and Alex Morgan for that amazing interview. As a reminder, Alex Morgan is partnering with CVS Health on the CVS Home Team Heroes Contest, celebrating youth soccer players from age 7 to 15. Parents and guardians can nominate a young player at cvshometeamheroes.com now through September 25.