Seriously, can US Soccer do anything right? I can guarantee that any systematic implementation will make the girls side worse.
Why? Because adversity makes players better. If you couldn’t cut it with your own age group peers, the simple fact of the matter is that you were never going to be a great soccer player. And who is to say that the embarrassment of being a mediocre 9th grade soccer player playing with middle schoolers, instead of your friends and emotional peers, is a better life experience than giving up soccer and filling that extra time with piano?
Do you remember when the age cut off was July 31? It is no accident that most of the best players were born in the last four months of the age range. Perhaps the 3 best players the US currently has to offer (Rapinoe, Lloyd and Morgan) were all born in July. So were Dunn and McCaskill. At least 8 more were born in April-June (Dahlkemper, Horan, Pugh, Sauerbrawn, Ertz, Williams, and Heath). The list of players born in the first 4 months (Aug-Nov) is sparse, however (Klingenberg, Davidson, O’Hara, Short, Long). Shoot, even Wambach, Chastain, Solo and Lilly were born in June or July.
Our best players obviously didn’t need bio banding. To the contrary, those kids who faced the most physical adversity have systematically become the best players overall, with very few exceptions. Removing that challenge is counter productive unless the goal is to try to make everyone happy. And we know that is not US Soccer’s goal. US Soccer’s goal is to destroy soccer in the US with one stupid idea after the next.