Shoelace issues:
Here’s a situation we see play out almost every practice or game day, sometimes multiple times per event.
- A player’s shoelace comes untied.
- The player immediate kneels down, putting her head at knee height of the other players, who may still be playing. Danger alert!
- The player starts trying to tie her lace(s), but she’s nervous due to the situation, so she struggles. She’s had practice at home, but very little practice in a hectic situation where other girls are running around her while she tries to tie her laces.
- A smart coach or referee will stop the practice or game and go into shoe-tier mode. But while this is happening, all of the other players stand and watch. (Even worse if it’s a game day: all of the players on both teams stand and watch, while their parents sit and watch. (“Are we here to play / watch soccer, or watch shoelaces?”) If the player wasn’t nervous before, she is now!
A solution: Caterpy laces!
A simple $12 solution? Caterpy laces! Funny name, funny look, available in crazy colors, but most importantly, they work! They work so well that one of our Junior Academy coaches replaced the stock laces on three pairs of coaching shoes with Caterpy laces.
The most common parent “con” comment: I want my daughter to know how to tie her shoes!
The coach’s rebuttal: We do too! But executing a fine motor skill in the middle of the chaos of a U8 soccer game — without having practiced the skill over and over in the chaos of a U8 soccer practice — isn’t exactly the easiest environment. (Analogy time: Think of a difficult skill like the “yo yo” stop and go move. You can practice at home all you want, but you won’t know if you’ve “got it” until you pull it off in games with an opponent trying to stop you.
Tangent: The soccer shoe makers don’t help matters by shipping soccer shoes with slippery laces. Laces with some friction are so much more effective. But until the shoe makers come around, Caterpy laces can prevent the problem.