Club soccer stuff that drive you nuts...
- Thread starter soccerchaffeur
- Start date
GoldenGate
GOLD
You have proven over the course of many years that you are confusing basic civility with "brown nosing". Seriously, in your meme you are denigrating people doing nothing more than saying something nice and being polite.
Soccer Dad & Ref
SILVER ELITE
You're denigrating Boomer’s desire to copy and paste memes.
I find that people who call out brown nosers or ass kissers are generally incredible awkward people in social situations. Not all the time, but I'd make money in Vegas if I could bet on it. Obviously there are people that go too far for sure....but having a conversation with coach doesn't really mean anything other than someone having a conversation with a coach.
After reading the last page, I am curious about "pay to play". I have always just paid club fees and let coach determine position and play time. My boys get plenty of minutes, so for me, all is well.
But, what do these pay to play parents do? Slip coach a $20 before each game? Buy coach an expensive bottle of scotch? I don't want to hear about the single moms... Anyone care to share some anecdotes?
But, what do these pay to play parents do? Slip coach a $20 before each game? Buy coach an expensive bottle of scotch? I don't want to hear about the single moms... Anyone care to share some anecdotes?
OrangeCountyDad
SILVER ELITE
We had a coach who ran 'extra training' sessions on non-practice days, for a fee of course. It wasn't required, but the coach told the kids more than once "I don't like it when you don't come to extra training." and it was pretty clear insinuation if you didn't come to extra training, you didn't play/play as much.
You've described the most common ways parents get to coaches. Another popular way is to do private instruction aka "privates" with the coach.
Private's usually cost $50-$100 per hour + parents that want to influence the coach do 2-3 hours a week.
You can tell when a coach has good ethics when they refuse to do privates for players on their club team. The optics alone are horrible.
You'd think but often privates become recruitment tools for players outside of the club. Why introduce a new player to your team at club practice when you can do it at privates?
Also, coaches can use privates to pick winners and losers meaning maybe only the top players (whos parents cough up $$$) are invited. This is how you keep the best players + signal to everyone else get better or your off the team without even saying anything + the coach makes cash on the side.
The whole cycle works as long as the coach is winning.
There's all kinds of messiness in the side training business for sure. Another gem is when you have a single coach side training 20 kids and charging $50+/head. We've had to filter through a lot of side trainers to get to the good ones. They exist.
GoldenGate
GOLD
No, when they refer to "pay for play", they are lamenting that they must pay anything for their daughter to play soccer. They don't want to pay club dues, they don't want to pay for the coach, they don't want to pay for the field costs, or for travel to play other comparable teams. They want all of those things, and they want the best of them, but they just don't want to pay what they cost. Of course, not a single one of them can articulate how it could work, other than spewing nonsense about how Kevin DeBruyne is a really good soccer player, so therefore youth soccer clubs in the U.S. should "do what they do in Belgium" and similarly spend millions upon millions on 12 year old girls, although there is a zero percent chance of recouping those costs. They seem to live in a fantasyland in which they believe that their 12 year old princess's soccer skills have tremendous financial value if only other people would just "invest" in her so they don't have to.
If their kid were into piano, they'd lament the lessons and the piano weren't free, or the training and the thoroughbred if they were into equestrian. They're the same people who constantly complain how free public education is terrible but can't seem to connect the incredibly obvious dots that you get what you pay for, and they'd have an even worse problem if their kiddie soccer were free because at least taxpayers pay for public education. And to your point about giving coaches scotch or other bribes, they're almost always the ones spouting ridiculous conspiracy theories to rationalize why their kid is on the bench, because they aren't ready to admit that it's happening because the better players are on the field.
I have some stories about single moms (and some not-yet single moms) but I am not going to share them here.
Docs and the docs-in-training (coaches) are salesmen, always on the lookout for a trade or exchange. They can be pretty creative with the quid pro quo. They’re like Radar on MASH getting the stuff off the black market. Or was it Klinger?
At the ECNL level, I have seen players make the squad or parents have more pull when they have multiple kids with the club.
Hearing all these arguments, I think the the youth soccer club scene is in chaos because clubs try to listen to their customers (parents). I thought coaches are under pressure to win at all costs thus we have stories about kickball, bringing in ineligible guest players, teach players to cheat, poaching players, etc. At the same time, the coaches are accused for taking "bribes" for extra playing time, this contradicts "winning at all costs" because fielding the rich kids that are not qualified will make the team weaker.
The pressure first is always for the club's bottom line, which isn't profits so much as survival. However, ECNL is a strange animal because you can put 10 on the bench to fund the team and scholarship half the starters. That being said, what I saw from the inside was extremely unsettling.
Nope, that's not how it works.
If you have a top level winning team parents will find you + many will literally throw cash at coaches for positions, playing time. etc on that team. There's more players looking for a super team to play on than super teams.
It's not just the lower level players offering $$$. Often top level coaches setup an unofficial expectation that all players good or poor need to be floating $$$.
Believe it or not but parents of top talent are just as worried about their kid not being on XYZ super team as the ones that aren't very good.
This is why some coaches have a win at all costs mentality. Wins directly affect their "under the table" pocketbook.
Been talking to my daughters coaches for the past 7 years. After the game on the way to the car (somehow my daughter is always the last one to leave), maybe before a practice. Only keeper on the team during that time. 3 head coaches. Same assistant. Helped fund raise for others on the team, always ahead on payments, our family helped with transportation. Chatting soccer, college, etc. Only thing I ever told the coaches (yes told, not asked), at age 11 (she is now 16) was that I wanted her to take all her goal kicks. Yes she made some mistakes, but her leg and accuracy improved because of this. Didn't always agree with some of the things they said to her, but if she had an issue she could say something.