http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU4oA3kkAWU&feature=player_embedded

I love this video. It’s about a group of Thai kids who wanted to play soccer, but who didn’t have space in their coastal village — so they built a small, floating soccer field.

It’s a parable about an increasingly rare quality in our world: ownership. These kids succeeded not because they were provided with facilities, but because they seized the opportunity to build one. In doing so, they created their own micro-culture, their own rules, their own space.

It’s a recurring pattern. This summer, a Little League baseball team in San Clemente, CA had a problem when no adults volunteered to coach. So they found two kids (14 and 15 years old) to coach them —  and won the league championship.

Or there’s Vermont’s Burke Mountain Academy, which started in 1970 when a teenage skier named Martha Coughlin wanted to train and study on the slopes. She found other kids who were interested, and, with guidance from a far-seeing educator named Warren Witherell, turned a farmhouse into a small school. When they needed a dormitory a few years later, students pounded the nails and put up the walls. Burke has gone on to produce more than 50 Olympians.

As coaches and parents, we instinctively think we need to provide great facilities, and to direct the action like an orchestra conductor. But often it’s exactly the opposite: the smartest thing we can do is to step back, in order to allow the learners the freedom and pleasure of solving problems and building something they truly own.

(Big thanks to Casey Wheel for sending this video.)