How do small clubs survive?

Jamisfoes said:
You have hit the nail in the head. I think the key to keeping the team together is to form friendships among the core players. Small clubs/parents need to facilitate team building by having activities outside soccer. One advantage of small club is the family feel you get when you interact with coaches and DOC. You feel like you know everyone.
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Yes the friendships and relationships you can cultivate in a small club is great. I’ve met and gotten to know great people from being a part of a small club. The downside is that it can become more about keeping things the way they have always been and making progress. Players stay on the team and start even though they don’t make much effort. Competitiveness and friendliness is hard to combine.
 
Jar!23 said:
Yes the friendships and relationships you can cultivate in a small club is great. I’ve met and gotten to know great people from being a part of a small club. The downside is that it can become more about keeping things the way they have always been and making progress. Players stay on the team and start even though they don’t make much effort. Competitiveness and friendliness is hard to combine.
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This is a very good point. That being said, it can be an issue at any club, small or large.

The key is to maintain the right balance between competitiveness and interaction/friendliness; this is largely driven by coaches but parents also have a role to play. The teams at any club need to be progressing in terms of both the quality of their play and the level they play at (promotion or moving up is almost essential to maintain the competitive side of things).

Ultimately, if a team is well organized from an administrational perspective and the coaching is very good, the size of the club is almost immaterial. As the DOC of a small club, I'm biased of course but it doesn't make it any less true.
 
Grace T. said:
The best coach my kid ever had was with a small local club. The problem, as you note, is that unless you get a group of really good players that become friends and are capable of lifting the team to a new level (and there are plenty of examples where this does happen, but it has to happen early on in the process), you'll have the promotion/relegation issue. The team won't advance. After a season or two the best players become frustrated (particularly with the weaker or less dedicated players that aren't putting in the time)...will be ready for more challenges....will leave....you'll have to recruit new players. What's worse, in the younger ages they are probably playing in the key positions down the center line of striker/CM/CB/GK. so their departure is a particular blow. The middle tier has now been playing for 2 years and is ready to move on, but you have to bring in new players up from AYSO to fill in the gaps of the players that left and it takes them a season or two to get up to speed so that middle tier now wants to move on....rinse and repeat and you find yourself perpetually stuck in bronze. Works the same even without pro/rel since if you move too fast your team will be kicked 12-0 and the parents will complain and go elsewhere. If you are lucky enough to actually achieve promotion, that first year in the new tier is a bear because all your players are adjusting to the new level of play and you are playing teams that survived that level of play last year...you not only have to avoid relegation, but you got to be good enough to hit the middle of the table. That's why many coaches will upgrade using the promoted level to recruit better players instead of developing the ones that brought you to promotion.

It's a perpetual cycle for the smaller clubs. The only thing that really holds some of them in place is the field space access, particularly in the suburb towns, since school districts and parks and recs tend to give preference to the smaller local orgs. My son played for a heavily latino team that practiced in the public park....bear of a time recruiting any nonLatino players....every single anglo player that showed up looked at the park situation and said no thanks.

The other big factor is Coast v. SoCal League. Not a whole lot of local clubs in SoCal League, unless they've somehow affiliated themselves with some other club as a franchise. In Coast, if you get promotion early enough, you can get teams from small clubs that thrive. A lot of those Coast teams are heavily ethnic too from local barrios and not just Latino. And AYSO United has become a recruiting machine (being able to get first dibs on players coming out of Extras or Core) and plays in Coast, but increasingly, I think their membership in Coast is going to hold them back if they don't make the hop to SoCal League.
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I think you falling behind times a little......AYSO United is playing in SoCal
 
Small clubs really get hosed due to the leagues now allowing players to play multiple games in a day.
Small club has a solid flight 1 or flight 2 team. Can compete and do well against teams that are properly flighted.
But then slambluerswestsurfstrikers puts a team in that flight with their "leftovers"- and then they bring in 4 or 5 ringers each week to fill in a roster.
 
Jar!23 said:
Yes the friendships and relationships you can cultivate in a small club is great. I’ve met and gotten to know great people from being a part of a small club. The downside is that it can become more about keeping things the way they have always been and making progress. Players stay on the team and start even though they don’t make much effort. Competitiveness and friendliness is hard to combine.
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I have faith in our coach to develope our players. I have seen flight 1 players from the big clubs. Our core kids are just as good as theirs. My concern is just the club is not bringing in kids fast enough to have backups if people leave.
 
Jamisfoes said:
I have faith in our coach to develope our players. I have seen flight 1 players from the big clubs. Our core kids are just as good as theirs. My concern is just the club is not bringing in kids fast enough to have backups if people leave.
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Sounds like you have a good situation. I wouldn't worry too much about people leaving until they do. If people do leave and you think the team is not as competitive as you want, then look around. 1 or 2 seasons of less than ideal play isn't going to harm your kid in the long scheme of things. You never know, sometimes players leave and then 1 or 2 come in and things are good again.
 
Jar!23 said:
Sounds like you have a good situation. I wouldn't worry too much about people leaving until they do. If people do leave and you think the team is not as competitive as you want, then look around. 1 or 2 seasons of less than ideal play isn't going to harm your kid in the long scheme of things. You never know, sometimes players leave and then 1 or 2 come in and things are good again.
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Ideally I would like to see our second team beefed up. That's the strength of the big clubs, endless stream of replacement players. We are telling kids in school about our club and try to help with recruiting. We want to see our club succeed.
 
Mos
Grace T. said:
Some teams might be. Our local is playing exclusively Coast.
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7 hubs (of the 10 in socal) switched to Socal. I'm told the 3 stayed because if they switched the travel would be too onerous in the Socal flights they would have been slotted in with no noticeable change in competition level. But sure, use your local hub to generalize and be misinformed. Also, unless you believe the marketing CSL vs. Socal is largely irrelevant until you start comparing Discovery vs. Premier. It's the other leagues that lock small (and large) clubs out.
 
chipmonk said:
7 hubs (of the 10 in socal) switched to Socal. I'm told the 3 stayed because if they switched the travel would be too onerous in the Socal flights they would have been slotted in with no noticeable change in competition level. But sure, use your local hub to generalize and be misinformed. Also, unless you believe the marketing CSL vs. Socal is largely irrelevant until you start comparing Discovery vs. Premier. It's the other leagues that lock small (and large) clubs out.
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O.k. I stand corrected then on AYSO United.

Premiere on the Boys end for Coast doesn't kick in until 2007s for this last year. Looking at the Boys 2007 table you have a mix of mid to large clubs (Eagles,) and local clubs (Glendale FC). It would also be really hard for a new team to hit premiere if they have to work their way up the ranks to hit that.

I disagree that CSL v SoCal is irrelevant, largely because of the pro/rel issue for the lower levels. The biggest issue for the local clubs is that they get locked into this cycle we discuss above where they can't advance because they lose their better players to larger higher ranked clubs every year, so they get locked into this cycle of perpetual bronze or perpetual silver unless the coach can recruit a ready made squad that sticks together. If some teams do advance, they can then use the advancement to recruit better players (and drop the weaker ones rather than develop them). Removing pro/rel allows the team to do the advertising earlier ("hey we're playing silver....come look at us") and build a squad suited to the level (if the coach doesn't get that level of players, it's on the coach and he can always switch down). If a team has been stuck in bronze 3 to 4 years, then something in the system isn't working because players that have played for 4 years should have improved (a lot of times, though, it's not the same players...the better ones have moved on)

I get the objection to this: that the team hasn't earned it. But the same team that plays in silver elite may not be the same team that earned it out of bronze (due to players getting upgraded as they move up the rank). If we care about development, the only way I see to fix this is a "dance with the one that brung you" rule...you can't drop players that earned you a promotion...but that's very hard to police and given the huge jumps in skill through the levels, is a prescription for many teams that advanced getting relegated the following season.
 
Brav520 said:
Consolidation within the San Diego club scene isn’t a terrible thing , there are way too many clubs

I do wonder how much Covid accelerated this
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Covid along with the formation of the various letter leagues and the collapse of Presidio/SDDA accelerated the downfall of these clubs. I agree with consolidation, I just would have rather seen the East County clubs join forces with each other than have Liverpool go to Surf and United go to Albion. I suspect personalities prevented a merger of EC clubs.

Small clubs are going to continue to struggle to survive as the big clubs hold out the carrot of "pathway" leagues and parents continue to fall for it.
 
The bottom line is winning keeps the team together and attracts players. Can't wait to start next season and go kick some big club butts.
 
Jamisfoes said:
The bottom line is winning keeps the team together and attracts players.
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Yeah, but that's one of the big problems with soccer in the US, particularly at the younger ages. Soccer is a game about mistakes. If neither team makes any the ideal score should be zero to zero. But mistakes are how kids learn....they don't learn by getting yelled at, or by lecture, or by running around during practice in lap circles, or even with rondos rondos and more rondos....they learn by making mistakes during the game and small sided scrimmages, yet by the kids taking chances and making the mistakes that they need to learn, they lose the actual game. That leads a lot of coaches (because they want to keep the team together) to take short cuts instead of taking the years it might happen to develop a player (so they can earn that win, that promotion and keep the team together). We've all seen them: recruit the super tall kid and teach him how to outrun the defenders back line, have the big kid goalkick the the ball long and have everyone lock into a 50/50 scrum, teach the strikers to kick the ball over the goalkeeper's head (which won't work in years to come as they fill out the goal), have the goalkeeper punt the ball into a 50/50 scrum, kick the ball over the back line and have everyone run it down, get the big legged kid to power it into the goal on a DFK (instead of learning the finesse shot they'll need later), push the other players off the ball instead of true comprehensive defense, and never kick it backwards only forward. I'm frankly surprised we haven't seen more coaches adopt the Ted Lasso: kicking it football style into the scrum on kickoffs and having all the players run over the line of scrimmage.
 
Grace T. said:
Yeah, but that's one of the big problems with soccer in the US, particularly at the younger ages. Soccer is a game about mistakes. If neither team makes any the ideal score should be zero to zero. But mistakes are how kids learn....they don't learn by getting yelled at, or by lecture, or by running around during practice in lap circles, or even with rondos rondos and more rondos....they learn by making mistakes during the game and small sided scrimmages, yet by the kids taking chances and making the mistakes that they need to learn, they lose the actual game. That leads a lot of coaches (because they want to keep the team together) to take short cuts instead of taking the years it might happen to develop a player (so they can earn that win, that promotion and keep the team together). We've all seen them: recruit the super tall kid and teach him how to outrun the defenders back line, have the big kid goalkick the the ball long and have everyone lock into a 50/50 scrum, teach the strikers to kick the ball over the goalkeeper's head (which won't work in years to come as they fill out the goal), have the goalkeeper punt the ball into a 50/50 scrum, kick the ball over the back line and have everyone run it down, get the big legged kid to power it into the goal on a DFK (instead of learning the finesse shot they'll need later), push the other players off the ball instead of true comprehensive defense, and never kick it backwards only forward. I'm frankly surprised we haven't seen more coaches adopt the Ted Lasso: kicking it football style into the scrum on kickoffs and having all the players run over the line of scrimmage.
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This is exactly why I like my club. The coach is not taking any short cuts.
 
I also think it depends on your definition of "survive" is.
Big clubs "survive" by making big dollars. Coaches at big clubs survive by coaching 3-4 teams, running camps and doing privates.
They then get top players because they play in the top league.
Some small clubs are happy to provide "good" soccer to players in their community at a fair price. They usually have a DOC or similar title who loves the game and does it "part time" to make a little money and give back to the game. Same with their coaches- Good people that arent trying to climb the ladder to whatever they think their top is (ECNL, College, etc).
You "usually" find less of the psycho-asshole-win at all costs coaches at these clubs.
Or a small club exists because a few of the coaches had a bad experience with a mega-club and they are trying to make a difference with "their" way.
 
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With small clubs it's the whole do you want to be...

- A big fish in a small bowl. Lots of love an encouragement. Because they need your kid to keep the lights on

or

- A fish (big or small) in a big bowl. Kid can be replaced on a whim but club cycles the best players to the best teams. They don't need your kid to keep the lights on.

What I've learned over 6+ years of competitive soccer is to choose less travel over more (we're in Socal), look for the best coaches, and parents on the team make the biggest difference. Bad parents will have bad kids regardless of the club size. Believe it or not some of the craziest parents I've seen have kids on AYSO teams.
 
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