The referee can overrule the assistant referee but the assistant can never overrule the ref. The assistant is to assist the referee and not insist instead.

Bayern Munich, Germany's richest and most successful club, buys international stars (eg Franck Ribery and Arjen Robben) and top domestic talent (eg Manuel Neuer and Mario Gomez) -- but its starting lineup usually includes four or five homegrown players, who are also national team regulars.

Bayern Munich stars, such as Bastian Schweinsteiger, Philipp Lahm and Thomas Mueller, often cross paths with the youngsters at the club's Sabener Strasse grounds -- though they arrive in a different manner.

You know you're a soccer player's parent when ...

The parents of the girls U16 indoor team screamed at every shot and wildly cheered at every goal. Their players and all three (yes, three) coaches did the same. The more they scored, the more excited they seemed to be at beating a clearly inferior side.

Wilmer Cabrera, who guided the USA to the second round in the 2009 and 2011 U-17 World Cups and headed the Bradenton Residency Program for more than four years, explains why he's left U.S. Soccer and looks back on his tenure.

For the young age groups, keepers should be rotated frequently. If your league uses quarters, it's easy to use four different keepers in a game. At the U10 and U12 levels, coaches shouldn't make a player stay at goalkeeper for more than a half.

With advanced brain imaging techniques and brain functional tests, researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine have presented findings from an interesting study that suggests that repeatedly heading a soccer ball increases the risk for brain injury and cognitive impairment.

A memorial service for Thomas Fleck, one of the original national staff coaches with U.S. Soccer and instructor for U.S. Soccer for 30 years, will be held in St. Petersburg, Fla., Jan. 21.

Generally a person in the southern portion of the United States can play outdoor soccer all 12 months of the year yet in most northern areas of the country, this is not an option. Where I live on Long Island, the indoor soccer season is brief -- during the two months of January and February. But as you travel further north toward the Canadian border and it snows far more frequently, indoor soccer is played from November 1 to March 31.

Perhaps no man has had as great an influence on as many American coaches as Manfred "Manny" Schellscheidt, who retired in 2011 at age 70.