Ask any BMW or Mercedes or Lexus owner who has the best car. You will get different subjective answers. All bragging theirs is the best, all convinced their money is worth spend. You’d just need to convince yourself and that’s not hard to do.
Socal named as Operator for National 1 League
- Thread starter shankbone
- Start date
A fair question. A combination of factors, 1) his buddies play at that club, 2) it is by far the most convenient major club in terms of logistics (which is aided by #1 due to carpooling), and 3) we were strung along by prior a coach who indicated he was on a path to move up--but then the coach and club parted ways.
To be clear, I am not looking to argue that my kid should be playing at a higher level. Rather, I'm looking to get him the resources to address his current shortcomings (his game is far from balanced, but he leans hard on a certain set of skills that are quite effective at his current level--but likely won't be sufficient at the next level). One of the previous posters hit the nail on the head: he is NOT going to miss his friend's birthday party to practice, and the natural gifts that he relied on to let him coast to his current level are not as unique as they once were.
East County Soccer Dad
SILVER ELITE
Does he play an especially valuable position that is hard to come by; strong CB or keeper?
Is his position blocked at the current club?
Have you asked teammates who they train with?
If your kid is the captain and getting full playtime and the top player at his current level, he COULD be playing a higher level already as a bench player (and the problem is then getting him off the bench, part of which is a training issue, and part of it is just playing with higher level kids). Sounds like the club doesn’t want to move him up because it will hurt the current team (lose best player) for not much gain for higher team (lose a slot that could be sold to someone else for not much gain to the higher team). But the catch 22 is he won’t develop unless he not only gets more training but plays with better players. At least you are realistic where your kid stands. 9/10 the problem is the parents aren’t. Unless you go full immersive though trainings take time (meanwhile other players continue to advance as well) and it’s not something fixable over months.
Scrub It Kook
SILVER ELITE
I think you may have your answer. One of the hardest decisions for me as a sports parent was letting my kid deal with the outcomes (many times consequences) of their choices. It's also quite rewarding for them when they elect to put in extra and it pays off. Ultimately, that understanding will do them well through life after sports.
100% Unfortunately high school sports (at least in SoCal) have become such a pressure cooker one cannot reasonably expect to make Varsity without having dedicated many years to the sport playing traveling club--and even then one has to have started early enough to have made the "A team", whatever that means in a given sport. In soccer at my kid's school, that's spelled M-L-S-N or E-C-N-L.
superfly10
BRONZE
Disagree. Plenty of schools in SoCal where that doesn't matter, there are many schools where coaches don't even care about the club they play for much less what badge they have. The good players will always rise.
I've seen schools like Mater Dei where players in the USWNT youth pool are on JV. You see more ECNL players not even playing high school anymore cause its not worth their time.
I feel like the point of the comment you're responding to (which I mostly agree with) is not so much that all the coaches select based on the letter leagues, but rather that you need to be a high-level club player (or equivalent) to make the team. I mentioned before that some of the kids at my son's school, who were playing F2 club soccer, did not make any team (not even the Frosh team), because they were not good enough. I think it's certainly possible to make a HS team without being in a prestigious league, but the chances of a kid being a top-tier player and not playing on a high-end club team already is probably pretty small.
I think it's dependent on the sport and the school, but it certainly feels like SoCal schools have become a pressure cooker for popular sports, where kids need to be high-end skilled already to make any popular sport teams at the school. This is certainly not exclusive to soccer by any stretch, though (my son's middle school had eight boys basketball teams one year, for example, due to their policy of not excluding any interested kids from sports where possible, and interest levels; only two competed, but they had that many extra kids trying to play). It's not really possible to be a recreational player and make a HS team any more, for those sports where the school is competitive.
Also, just to note: there is a wide and quite obvious skill delta between different levels of soccer, in case people don't observe different level players and teams very often. My son went to the previously mentioned F2 team's open tryouts for fun last year (with the coach's pre-approval, as a few of his friends were on the team); he would have been far and away the best player on that team, even though he was only playing F1 at the time. On the flip side, he has guested with some higher level teams also, and I've seen teams at that level play, and he's noticeably weak compared to those players. It not hard at all to tell who the strongest players on the field are, when there are wide ability gaps, and there are a wide range of ability levels (and I think this is true for most sports).
Basketball is the worst because the teams are so small and so many kids want to play it. Used to be if you were tall it would make a difference alone but now you have to be taller and skilled to make varsity all the way down the lower divisions. You can still walk on in gridiron football if you have the right body type and some of the lower division schools actually have a hard time finding players (though competition is just as fierce at the highest division). Boys soccer in the middle…isn’t as bad as tennis, harder than water polo….problematic all the way down to division 5 but if you go small private or charter you could play still as a rec player.