Every kid's athletic abilities change after they go through puberty. I remember that I was a pretty good soccer player when I was 7-11 years old. But then I went through a growth spurt and lost my sense of balance, sort of. After that I couldn't have the same sense of control over the ball, and moved over to playing basketball. So nothing is settled about a 9 year old.
Agreed. I used to play football (soccer) when I was younger and had a few trials for a professional team in Holland also. I was later told we once played a friendly against van der Vaart but I can't remember at all... I also have the memories of scoring loads of goals every game. Everyone has their own "I could have been a star!!!" memory/story, haha... The problem in this illusion is also that a lot of people that are younger play sports... including the absolute sh*te ones. It's not hard to score if so many of the players are awful. Even when I was playing at a so-called higher level football for my age, it was still comparably easy to stand out... and this is in Holland, where the youth standard is meant to be quite high. The level evens out a lot more later on. For example, this guy called Samba was meant to be the next big thing and scored 132 goals in 32 games at a high level at age 14. Now he sucks. Even the big stars in the modern game don't score like that at the comparable senior level. I then moved to Houston and got fat for a few years while there and no one was really into football so I stopped playing... picked it up again later and now I'm absolute rubbish.
