Getting Cut Is Not the End. How You Handle It Might Be.
Getting cut from a team is one of the hardest moments in a young player's soccer life. What makes it harder is that parents often feel it as sharply as the child does.
The instinct is to fix it quickly. Find another tryout. Make a call. Move to a different club. And sometimes that is exactly the right move. But the conversation that happens in the days right after getting cut often matters more than any of those decisions.
One of the clearest things that came through in our conversation about elite youth academy environments is that coaches at serious clubs are watching character, not just ability. How a player responds to adversity, setbacks, and hard feedback is part of what they track. The cut itself is information. What happens next is also information.
A child who gets told they did not make a team and then disengages, or gets immediately rescued by a parent who takes all the pressure away, moves forward differently from one who is allowed to feel the disappointment and then decide what they want to do about it. The second path is harder in the short term. It tends to build the kind of player who handles demanding environments better later.
Parents do not need to manufacture difficulty. But they do need to resist the urge to make it disappear before the child has had a chance to work through it.
What parents can do
Give the child time to feel the disappointment before moving to solutions
Ask what they want to do next — do not decide for them
Let the setback be something they came through, not something that was fixed before they had a chance to respond
Adapted from Episode 18. Orlando City Academy MLS NEXT: A Dad's Sacrifice, Justin Phelps and the "13-Year-Old Roommate.”