Soccer · Issue No. 21
One Year Later: Position Flexibility Before U14 Still Matters
Week of September 14, 2026
ONE YEAR LATER: This one's worth revisiting every fall, right as new position battles start up again at tryouts.
A professional soccer academy director with experience across multiple MLS clubs has a firm rule for evaluating players before the U14 age group: don't lock a young player into one position, no matter how well they seem to fit it right now.
The reasoning connects directly to how unpredictable physical and technical development is at this age. A player who looks like a natural center-back at eleven — tall, strong, good in the air — may end up a completely different body and player by fifteen. A technically gifted midfielder at ten might grow into a frame better suited to a different role entirely by high school. Committing a young player to one position early doesn't just risk a bad long-term fit; it actively limits the range of skills that player develops, since a kid who only ever trains as a center-back never builds the ball-handling and decision-making habits a winger or midfielder needs.
His academies handle this by deliberately rotating players through multiple positions during these years, regardless of where a player's early strengths seem to point. A player might spend a season at fullback, then center-mid, then out wide — not because the coaching staff is indecisive, but because nobody genuinely knows yet where that player's eventual best position will be, and rotating keeps every door open until the answer becomes clearer.
This creates a real tension for parents used to seeing a clear role and clear improvement in that specific role. A player bounced between positions can look, from the sideline, like a player without a defined identity — when it's often the opposite: a deliberate strategy to build the broadest possible skill set before locking in a role that a still-developing body and game haven't fully revealed yet. The players who benefit most from early specialization are usually the exception, not the rule — and the cost of guessing wrong on a locked-in position early is higher than most families realize until it's already cost a few years of the wrong kind of development.
From an interview with a professional soccer academy director.
This piece ran in PPA Pro Issue No. 21, alongside a camp spotlight and trainer pick for every sport. Subscribe free.