A couple of notes...

In honor of the World Cup, check out this article in the NY Times which reports on the Amsterdam Ajax team camps for boys. The author, Michael Sokolove, does a good job of noticing how the overarching cultural lean toward pragmatism drives the process...

I asked Martin Jol, the coach of Ajax's first team, if it was difficult for him to nurture young players knowing he would lose them just as their talent blossomed. "I think that is the purpose of Ajax, to develop players and bring them up to the first team as young as possible," he answered. "And then we sell them, not for peanuts but for a lot of money."

The more substantial criticism is that Ajax has become too mercantile and coldblooded. "I feel like they've lost some of the spirit of the place," John Hackworth, the former U.S. youth coach, told me. "What made them so great, these heroes they create, now go on to stardom so quickly somewhere else."

It's a balancing act of measuring the kids' performance and potential, and at the end of each year there's a no-holds-barred assessment. Every spring the kids who don't make it get sent away and are not allowed to return, and when one of the teens is asked how he feels about his coach at the camp getting fired, he says, "The football world is a hard world. He has made the decision to send boys away. Now he knows how it feels." It's well worth the read, and gives insight into why Dutch ministries to youth which try to embody and teach Matthew 5 face some tough challenges...

Then click on this article on DutchNews to see the result of giving folks too much space. It'll make you rethink all those times when you said, "I just wish everybody would leave me alone!"