Not entirely.
Let me ask you this. If you were a college soccer coach, how would you go about finding your next group of recruits? Sit in your office and read hundreds of emails every week, and diligently watch all the insufferable soccer videos set to the awful background music? Maybe blindly show up at showcases and troll games between lower tier clubs because that’s where hidden gems like Halie Mace are just waiting to be found? No!!!!
You know there will always be a lot of players on every Blues and Slammers A team who are good enough for your team, so you call those coaches in advance because you know based on years you’ve spent “recruiting” them that they’ll steer you right. They’ll tell you who’s out of your league, who’s not good enough, who doesn’t have the grades or is too smart for your state school, and who may be in your wheelhouse. Then you watch those teams at a showcase. But if you didn’t build that relationship, you get run over rough shod by the coaches who did. And maybe after you’ve watched the heavy hitter clubs where you get the most value for your time, you stick around for a lesser game to watch a kid who kept blowing up your inbox with sweet requests to watch her game and remotely tolerable videos. But you probably say screw it and hit the hotel bar, and Hailie Mace ends up at juco.
If your kid can play but stays at a lesser club, you leave a lot to chance. And that assumes she gets the same level of training, which she almost certainly won’t, because the best competition is at the big clubs, and those coaches didn’t get Cromwell’s cell number because they hit on her at a bar; they got it because they’re really good coaches who consistently churn out talent.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
