My DD9 has a similar profile in soccer... loves playing defense, and would prefer to play goaltender, though that job is ably taken on her team, so she's a defender. She sees the entire field, is strategizing beyond her age cohort, and runs the transition game extremely well, to the point where her teammates have started openly calling for her to take all the throw-ins. She's an ineffective midfielder or striker (ESPECIALLY striker), though for different reasons than stated here... she says she doesn't like them, and so she only tries hard at what she likes. It's not an issue, because her coach doesn't like defenders jumping in on the attack.
To watch her now, you'd never suspect that she was so tentative on defense in previous years that she might as well have been a cone to dribble around, because she was always so concerned that she might do something that could trip and hurt another player. To remedy that, we took a number of different paths:
- Openly expressed a support of rough play, and even roughhoused with her at home, which she LOVES.
- Showed her World Cup soccer, so she could see the players making contact, and the refs taking no action. This lent itself to a talk about the distinction between incidental contact and a deliberate foul.
- Bribery. I kept personal stats on DD for goals, assists, clean passes, and steals, and gave her an associated dollar value for each.
The bribery component no longer exists, as it has achieved its intended goal. I'm sure this post will be followed shortly with one about how extrinsic rewards don't achieve lasting results, and reference the studies that go with it, but in this case, DD found the pay scheme to be motivating, and once motivated, she found the results to be rewarding in their own right.
One key note about the bribery strategy, though... it was quite common for adults to be offering up bounties for their kids, but nobody else did it like we did. They all just paid for goals, which had the outcome of turning the league into a cherry-picking, ball-hogging mess. This is why we rewarded DD for playing a multi-dimensional game.
