Not really, that is just your guess. What I know as fact is that Beach teams where my girls have played did win Surf Cup and CRL, competing against the best teams of ECNL clubs. Furthermore one simply needs to see where Legends and Beach teams are in the DA standings now. It is very simple, as recent as a few years ago the ECNL clubs of SoCal did not accept these clubs because they wanted to keep their monopoly, forcing parents like me to drive at least 2 hours every day to go practice. Thank god that is not the case anymore.
Sorry, but that is not entirely true. Carlsbad Elite's 99's beat Surf's 99's every time they played, including at Surf Cup. In the Surf Cup finals, Carlsbad lost to West Coast in PK's. Are you going to try to say those ECNL teams weren't really trying at Surf Cup?
Very true.
I am sure that the players that needed minutes got lots of play leading up to the semi-finals. But are you trying to tell me that Surf did not play their starters in a semi-final game at their own "Best of the Best" tournament or that West Coast did not play their starters in the Finals? That just is not believable. Besides, I was there and am familiar with Surf's players. They were playing the starters including BC on offense, CW on defense. The board member's daughter was probably also in goal. Thank you however for reminding me that Carlsbad Elite 99's beat the ECNL National Champs in their own semi-final in 2014 by 2-0.
My player played at Surf for about 1 1/2 years, so perhaps I was more familiar with the club than you? As I said before, you know your DD's age group, I know my DD's age group. I know who was on the field. What happened in 2009 has no bearing on this particular game other than the fact that is when the ECNL split happened. Not all the best 99 players in the county played at Surf, and some left (do we need to bring up all the coaching issues the 99 Surf team had?). For the 2014 Surf Cup, most of the '99 players were between 8th and 9th grade. There were very few if any college coaches at that game and probably no committed players on either team. The '99 Surf team was a great team, but they were not the best '99 team in San Diego county.
It would have been difficult to win those at that time (or 200 years earlier for that matter) because Beach probably did not exist, or was a couple of years old. But clubs were later added all over the country, so one has to wonder why Beach, Legends, Carlsbad etc. were not included. It is a 3-4 drive between Real So Cal and Irvine in the afternoon, and an area with several million people. Obviously the existing ECNL clubs in SoCal wanted to keep their monopoly.
It's a game. Colleges recruit players not teams.
Fair enough, I am not and was not familiar with West Coast players. I did know the Surf roster. They played their starters in the semi-final. One thing you may not know. On the Friday evening before Surf Cup, Carlsbad had a college ID camp and ran the girls for more than 2 hours. It was stupid and all the parents disagreed with it, but non-ECNL clubs had to be creative back then to get exposure for the players. By the final, Carlsbad was pretty wobbly on their pins. The mere fact that a local, non-ECNL team made it to the finals of Surf Cup proves that the Surf/ECNL monopoly of San Diego County was not working out. The same thing will happen (and probably is happening) with non-GDA, non-ECNL teams somewhere in the country. There will be or already are teams that can compete at the highest level that are not included. There are enough high quality teams in SoCal that the need to travel out of SoCal should be minimized (not eliminated, just minimized).
Yes, I get it. But after the split, Surf still did not have all the best players in the county. That is the problem with monopolies. Get it? Things change and ECNL was blind to the changes (or more likely bought and payed for by the SoCal clubs that were ECNL). Since club soccer is so expensive, we still do not have all the best players at the elite level. That is why it is a shame that high school is becoming meaningless for elite players, and college soccer will be within 20 years simply because a bunch of old guys want to protect their fiefdom.
