The setting is a "showcase" tournament featuring some of the top youth clubs in Region 1. College scouts are dotted around the field sitting in fold-up chairs, their clipboards on their knees, with pens poised to note the number of any outstanding players. The goalkeeper of a boys U19 team has the ball in his hands. I am standing in the middle of the field as the referee, and I know exactly where that ball is going. High in the air. Over my head.

While they were preparing for this summer's World Cup we asked the USA's Brazil-bound players to recall their earliest memories of the world's greatest sporting event. It was no surprise the 1994 World Cup hosted by the USA inspired many American stars of this generation.

Having started playing youth soccer in the 1970s, then taking up the whistle in 1978, I have seen many changes on the youth soccer landscape:

The opening whistle blows. The ball gets dropped back to you. Your first touch isn't so good and the ball slips away. You scramble to it just before a defender gets there, but you hit it awkwardly and it bends out of bounds. Uh oh.

In soccer, most people are actually very logical and realize that referees cannot get all their decisions correct. Yet it's very important that the officials get the great majority of the calls correct, particularly with the situations in the hot areas.

Preventing goals may be a goalkeeper's foremost duty, but it's only part of the job. Once the ball is in the goalkeeper's hands or at his feet, the keeper becomes an orchestrator. That's why coaches should stress that goalkeepers are soccer players who happen to have the privilege of using their hands.

When he's not coaching the Revolution Empire's U18 boys, Ben Cross is a Science teacher in Rochester, N.Y. There, he teaches his students to be problem-solvers, to observe carefully and use their knowledge and experience to propose solutions.

In the mid-1990s, the U.S. Soccer Federation began offering its coaching license courses in Spanish. Carlos Menjivar certified some 3,000 Latino coaches with E, D and C licenses while serving, from 1997 to 2002, as a U.S. Soccer National Staff Coach, Multicultural Outreach and Development.