ECNL Expansion In NorCal

Tyler Durden said:
There is no reason for any California team to really play outside of the State. The exception would only be for a national championship scenario, otherwise there is enough quality competition to meet development needs.
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Wrong. Events like ECNL showcases present the best possible opportunity for over a hundred college coaches to evaluate the best talent throughout the country. Most colleges do not have the time or the budgets to repeatedly travel all over the country evaluating potential recruits, and there is no way they're coming to CA over and over again to watch two teams play each other when they can instead watch 20 top teams in the country one place over a single weekend, which is hugely helpful to everyone in the college recruiting process. In addition, traveling out of state occasionally can be fun for kids since there is a lot more to youth soccer than becoming a soccer drone practicing 4x a week and playing the same teams over and over again.

In reality, there is no need for any California team to play outside the state except for important reasons. Honestly, playing for a national championship is probably the stupidest reason of all. The concept of a kiddie national championship is a fake thing concocted to make daddies with low self esteem feel better about themselves.
 
Tyler Durden said:
There is no reason for any California team to really play outside of the State. The exception would only be for a national championship scenario, otherwise there is enough quality competition to meet development needs.
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Maybe for your team, it's enough competition, definitely not for the top flight teams.
for Girl soccer, if you look at U17 and U16 age group (the 2 age groups actually matter), there are only 6 or 7 teams in the national top 30 are from California (all ECNL BTW). of course these teams will need to go out of state for competition. Also, at the U16/U17 age group, team travel far so college coaches from different area will come watch them.
 
SIP said:
??? Central Valley’s clubs need to try first, I don’t see any of those clubs trying… why would ECNL includes a club that’s not even trying to develop their coaches and players? Opportunity is for someone that’s ready.
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I don’t know of many ECNL clubs that “develop” talent. They just poach the top talent from local NPL teams and voilà, they have developed a great team. Let keep
it real, that’s all that happens.
Coaches have to get them to play their system, but it’s 90% talent, 10% coaching, in my opinion.
 
Blank95661 said:
I don’t know of many ECNL clubs that “develop” talent. They just poach the top talent from local NPL teams and voilà, they have developed a great team. Let keep
it real, that’s all that happens.
Coaches have to get them to play their system, but it’s 90% talent, 10% coaching, in my opinion.
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It's not quite that easy. However I do agree that top clubs tend to "poach" more than they develop from scratch.

After you've been around top level winning soccer for a while you can just tell the type of player thats needed to field a winning team. What you're looking for is consistantly, soccer iq, aggressiveness, natural ability (usually size for girls), skill/ability. Once you have the basics you build on it getting the players to function as a group playing posession. Once you have the team consistently playing posession you start working on different plays. The ultimate goal is to provide consistent offensive pressure the entire game + not lose posession + be forced into playing defense.

Everything above takes time to "develop" in a team. This is what top clubs develop not individual skills. Individual skills are table stakes.
 
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Blank95661 said:
I don’t know of many ECNL clubs that “develop” talent. They just poach the top talent from local NPL teams and voilà, they have developed a great team. Let keep it real, that’s all that happens.
Coaches have to get them to play their system, but it’s 90% talent, 10% coaching, in my opinion.
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Top talent is going to want to play with each other, and that means some consolidation as kids get older.

It's not so much poaching as just finding your tribe.
 
dad4 said:
I’m not from socal.

Put it this way, even if you got all the coaches to stop poaching, the top kids would still cluster together somewhere.
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To some extent, I agree. However that geography of those clusters would be much closer to their home then it is when players are poached.
 
dad4 said:
I’m not from socal.

Put it this way, even if you got all the coaches to stop poaching, the top kids would still cluster together somewhere.
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Here we go with "poaching" again, as if children are the personal property of shit soccer clubs. "Poaching" is just a code word that dads use when they're upset that the girl who was propping up their daughter's team left because her family couldn't stand them any longer. These are the dads whose self-esteem depends on their daughter's U13 soccer team winning games. They are the dads who are too cheap to pay what it actually takes for their daughter to develop into a college recruit, but were hoping to get away with it if only they could prevent the kids on their daughter's team who could actually play from leaving for better opportunity.

Elite youth girls soccer is a business. Like every business, they have every right to sell potential customers on the benefits of paying for their services. If you want your kid's shit club to retain kids, they need to be a better club.
 
By that way, can anyone point to a girl in the last 20 years who played for a central valley club beyond U13 and went on to play at a Power 5 or good (not UOP) WCC school? I asked this before and was told instead that my wife cheated on me with someone from the central valley.
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A girl playing U14 for SUSC just got called up to a u15 national team camp. Soooooo….what’s your point again?
GoldenGate said:
You love shit clubs so much because they're the only places that don't run background checks and where you get away molesting little kids.

I love this kind of stuff. This all started because I posted something that you and your friends didn't want to hear. It wasn't negative or derogatory or even patronizing. It just explained something hasn't happen and won't in the future. That's it. In response, I get hit with personal attacks about being a latte sipping, electric car driving elitist. Obviously, I'm perfectly happy joining the race to the bottom, so now here we are. These threads usually end when they get the the child molester allegations, but let's see if you have it in you to keep ruining this. I've got more insults but, honestly, making fun of central valley clubs seems to be more than sufficient. Shoot, even pointing out facts - like Stanislaus is such a shitty club it can't even field a single team beyond U14 - is enough to get under all of your skin. One of my favorites so far, though, is pointing out how idiotic it is to think that Lionel Messi's youth experience in Argentina's youth pro/rel system is proof that Modesto Ajax should be in ECNL, although Messi grew up on a different continent, there is no pro/rel youth system in Argentina, pro/rel also wasn't a thing when he was training full time at Barcelona's youth academy and, uh, he's a man while the country's system that he is criticizing happens to have won the last two World Cups and was unlucky not to win the one before that.

By that way, can anyone point to a girl in the last 20 years who played for a central valley club beyond U13 and went on to play at a Power
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dad4 said:
[
Top talent is going to want to play with each other, and that means some consolidation as kids get older.

It's not so much poaching as just finding your tribe.
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I agree with that. Finding your tribe is a good way to put it, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
 
Carlsbad7 said:
It's not quite that easy. However I do agree that top clubs tend to "poach" more than they develop from scratch.

After you've been around top level winning soccer for a while you can just tell the type of player thats needed to field a winning team. What you're looking for is consistantly, soccer iq, aggressiveness, natural ability (usually size for girls), skill/ability. Once you have the basics you build on it getting the players to function as a group playing posession. Once you have the team consistently playing posession you start working on different plays. The ultimate goal is to provide consistent offensive pressure the entire game + not lose posession + be forced into playing defense.

Everything above takes time to "develop" in a team. This is what top clubs develop not individual skills. Individual skills are table stakes.
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You are so right about size for girls...I'm a big Cal Fan and watch their women's soccer team. They play the ugliest style of soccer...just a bunch of big and fast straight line runners. Zero creativity. I feel that the smaller gifted soccer IQ types get the shaft on the girls side. I will say USC plays a fun brand of soccer and has a smaller midfielder (forget her name) who is amazing. Wish there was more of this. Most D1 women's soccer teams are so terrible to watch IMHO.
 
Highlander said:
You are so right about size for girls...I'm a big Cal Fan and watch their women's soccer team. They play the ugliest style of soccer...just a bunch of big and fast straight line runners. Zero creativity. I feel that the smaller gifted soccer IQ types get the shaft on the girls side. I will say USC plays a fun brand of soccer and has a smaller midfielder (forget her name) who is amazing. Wish there was more of this. Most D1 women's soccer teams are so terrible to watch IMHO.
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Cal plays this way because they can recruit bigger and faster + they have a limited amount of time to get the team to play together.

If they played a similar sized team that was possession based they'd loose.

You see it all the time in the youth levels. XYZ team tears up the B level + parents get all excited that their kid/team is going to light the world on fire. It's occurring because the players are bigger, faster, stronger than the competition. That same team jumps up to the A level the next season + gets smoked by teams with smaller players that play possession.
 
Expansion is coming. FC Bay Area Surf and Placer United joining ECNL for the fall. This has to be in pairs due to travel. No current ECNL club can stop norcal expansion this year. ECNL will set itself apart from the Norcal GA and Norcal MLS Next leagues this year by expanding teams.
 
soccerpalace said:
Expansion is coming. FC Bay Area Surf and Placer United joining ECNL for the fall. This has to be in pairs due to travel. No current ECNL club can stop norcal expansion this year. ECNL will set itself apart from the Norcal GA and Norcal MLS Next leagues this year by expanding teams.
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source? Not saying it's not true but just curious. If adding 2 clubs, those would be my 2 picks as well
 
Poaching? No one is kidnapping kids and forcing them to play soccer elsewhere. Players (and their families who can manage it) want to train and play with/against others who will make them better. There is a kind of gravitational pull that draws kids to the stronger teams that makes their time more worthwhile than spending it with less focused, less talented teammates. The Bay Area has enough population and density that talent clusters like MVLA, Mustang, San Juan, and Surf form and draw players from elsewhere, including from some of the other ECNL clubs. College players emerge from other clubs but the recruiting is easier for coaches through established pipelines. And that interest is stoked at the national events, not in league games between teams 30-360 minutes apart.

There are clearly good players in the valley as evidenced by strong high school teams from Clovis every year. Are their enough families there to support the expense of attending the national events and the out of state trips? That is the real question to ask if it makes sense for ECNL to include them in its league.
 
dddad said:
Poaching? No one is kidnapping kids and forcing them to play soccer elsewhere. Players (and their families who can manage it) want to train and play with/against others who will make them better. There is a kind of gravitational pull that draws kids to the stronger teams that makes their time more worthwhile than spending it with less focused, less talented teammates. The Bay Area has enough population and density that talent clusters like MVLA, Mustang, San Juan, and Surf form and draw players from elsewhere, including from some of the other ECNL clubs. College players emerge from other clubs but the recruiting is easier for coaches through established pipelines. And that interest is stoked at the national events, not in league games between teams 30-360 minutes apart.

There are clearly good players in the valley as evidenced by strong high school teams from Clovis every year. Are their enough families there to support the expense of attending the national events and the out of state trips? That is the real question to ask if it makes sense for ECNL to include them in its league.
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The question is whether we want to have a structure which only really works for “families who can manage it”, as you put it. We’re splitting the kids into two groups: kids from rich families and rich areas in group A, kids from poor families and poor areas in group B.

Splitting the talent pool makes it more expensive and less competitive for everyone. Who cares if Clovis or Ajax parents want to fly to national events? We are talking league play. If a norcal team is top notch, it belongs in the top norcal league.
 
soccerpalace said:
Expansion is coming. FC Bay Area Surf and Placer United joining ECNL for the fall. This has to be in pairs due to travel. No current ECNL club can stop norcal expansion this year. ECNL will set itself apart from the Norcal GA and Norcal MLS Next leagues this year by expanding teams.
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How do you know that? With the advent of the ECRL there are very specific metrics used to promote clubs. FC Bay Area doesn't play in the ECRL and I don't think Placer has met those metrics.

Of course nothing would surprise me with ECNL doing this and going around everything they had previously laid out in terms of adding clubs to ECNL.

Logistically those two clubs are about ~150 apart...not sure how that would work as travel buddies.
 
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