Today’s podcast guest is Ted Kroeten. Ted is a soccer coach, player-development specialist, founder of Joy of the People, and author of The Talent Thief. His work centers on free play, creativity, self-organized learning, and how overly structured coaching can interfere with natural talent development.
On today’s episode, Ted Kroeten joins me to explore free play, underloading, and the idea of movement as a language. We discuss why great athletes often emerge from less-structured environments, how excessive coaching can interfere with creativity and fluency, and why doing less can sometimes produce better performance. Ted also shares lessons from Joy of the People, Brazilian soccer culture, ecological dynamics, late development, and the ideas behind his book, The Talent Thief.
Today’s episode is brought to you by Hammer Strength and Lila Exogen.
Use the code “LILAJUSTFLY10” for 10% off any Lila Exogen wearable resistance training, including the popular Exogen Calf Sleeves. For this offer, head to Lilateam.com
Use code “justfly10” for 10% off the Vert Trainer
The Just Fly Performance Podcast is dedicated to all aspects of athletic performance training, with an emphasis on speed and power development. Featured on the show are coaches and experts in the spectrum of sport performance, ranging from strength and conditioning, to track and field, to sport psychology. Hosted by Joel Smith, the Just Fly Performance Podcast brings you some of the best information on modern athletic performance available.
In this episode, Ted Kroeten joins me to explore free play, underloading, and the idea of movement as a language. We discuss why great athletes often emerge from less-structured environments, how excessive coaching can interfere with creativity and fluency, and why doing less can sometimes produce better performance. Ted also shares lessons from Joy of the People, Brazilian soccer culture, ecological dynamics, late development, and the ideas behind his book, The Talent Thief.
Today’s episode is brought to you by Hammer Strength and Lila Exogen.
View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. (https://www.just-fly-sports.com/podcast-home/)
Topics
0:00 – High Jump and Play
3:31 – Differential Learning
5:04 – Coaching Play Environments
10:41 – Play-Based Athletes
16:59 – Innovation Through Play
20:58 – Why Play Disappears
23:21 – Free Play and Development
27:51 – Sport as a Language
29:16 – Play vs. Practice
35:47 – Movement Fluency
40:11 – Calmness in the Game
47:28 – Fitness Through Play
49:36 – Underloading
1:00:21 – The Fitness Landscape
1:05:25 – Reading the Game
1:13:32 – Forgetting About Improvement
1:24:29 – The Talent Thief
Ted Kroeten Quotes
“You’re never jumping the same way twice, ever. Different ground, different wind, different bar, different height, different whatever. It’s always different. Same as soccer. You’re never shooting the same way twice.”
“When you are having fun and playing, usually they go… often they go together. You are developing in a better way, than we can do explicitly. That we can coach you to do.”
“The coach becomes kind of the environmental control expert to create fun environments.”
“You got to be goofing around to find something like that. That’s kind of what play does; it allows you the space to goof around and make mistakes, and well, not mistakes, but just do other things and eventually find an interesting way of doing things.”
“You have to teach them the fundamentals, teach them how to pass, play rondos, passing patterns so that they can fall in love with the game. Okay, that is backward. Yeah, it’s like an arranged marriage.”
“The best players have always come from free play environments. Nobody really knows why.”
“We can’t replicate this unless kids put in these extremely varied, low-level, low-stakes play at a young age with friends, then we have something.”
“I believed in sport practice. I believed in playing. And I also saw that they were different and perhaps intuitive. It seemed like, okay, play when you’re young. Work hard when you’re older, and maybe that fits together.”
“If a coach is there, that’s what will happen. Now remove the coach and don’t put a time limit on the game, and tell every kid that’s there, “Hey, you are free to quit, or you are free to stay.” Now play the game, and what you’ll see is that the kids who were dominating the game before now are kind of responsible for keeping all the other kids in play.”
“The highest level you want to play, you don’t want to be treading water. And that play takes a lot of practice.”
“Speed power is overcompensation for lack of ability. You know where you’re supposed to be. You don’t need to sprint to get there.”
“There’s not enough play in soccer that we can put it together. And then coaches who take on little kids see so many are trying to get there too. I mean, all coaches in this country have the world’s best intentions, right? They just want to help kids. Yeah. But by piecemealing it together, we perhaps don’t give them that play opportunity learning that needs to happen.”
“Speed has a physical limit. Underloading is the way to get others.”
“The very first thing you have to do is forget about getting better, which is hard for people, right? Hard for parents. Everybody wants KPIs.”
“Fun is how the stimulus works. It’s got to be fun.”
About Ted Kroeten
Ted Kroeten is a longtime soccer coach, player-development specialist, and founder of Joy of the People, a nonprofit soccer and futsal program in St. Paul, Minnesota built around free play, creativity, and self-organized learning. Kroeten has nearly four decades of experience in soccer and holds a Brazilian “A” coaching license, along with advanced U.S. coaching credentials. His work challenges the increasingly structured, adult-directed model of youth sports, arguing that players develop many of their most important perceptual, technical, and creative abilities through play.
He is also the author of the 2026 book The Talent Thief: Underloading, the Language of Movement, and the Search for the Perfect Game, which explores how excessive coaching and organization can interfere with talent development, and how concepts such as “underloading,” deception, movement fluency, and problem-solving emerge through player-led environments.
Free Speed Training eBook - Velocity 101
Improving speed is one of the most popular topics in the athletic performance equation. Where there are many ideas and thoughts out there, as to particular training exercises, or setups, the more core aspects of speed training often go without mention. These include the fundamental aspects of what makes an athlete fast, specific sprint-power concepts, the relevance of "3D" motion, motor learning and more.
Velocity 101 will help you take a leap forward in understanding of what makes athletes fast, and how to train it effectively