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Absolutely. Clubs should not be able to seed themselves into SoCal Flights this season. Promotion and Relegation should be in effect. I understand some of the brackets are inaccurate due to missed games, but you have to start somewhere.
CSL future?
- Thread starter Eagle33
- Start date
Absolutely. Clubs should not be able to seed themselves into SoCal Flights this season. Promotion and Relegation should be in effect. I understand some of the brackets are inaccurate due to missed games, but you have to start somewhere.
SoccerFan4Life
PREMIER
I didnt enjoy having a game at 4pm on Mother's day with a 45 minute drive. Spring league was a money making machine $350 sounded like a good deal until you find out that you also have to pay for the ref fees. Basically it was a scrimmage for $95 per game
Pro/rel has some other virtues (as well as other costs) but proper sorting isn't one of them. You start from the assumption that (unless the team is playing at the highest levels) if they are winning 80% of their games (and therefore clearly promotable) or losing 80% of their games (and therefore clearly relegable) they aren't playing at the right bracket and have lost a year being misplaced. Yet if you look at the coast bronze, silver and even silver elite brackets over the years, we see that there are teams clearly at the top of the bracket and at the bottom. Ideally, with properly sorted brackets, the titles are decided by single goals with most teams spread out 50/50 among wins and losses.
My son's first team was a coast team that was required to play bronze even though as a newly formed team they were winning or placing at most of their summer tournaments. They went on to win every game in league, usually by margins of 5 or more, sometimes double digits. I think they only had one game that was even close. But when they got to league cup, and state cup, the players, especially those on defense, were in for a rude awakening when they started battling silver and silver elite teams, for which bronze had done nothing to make them ready.
The issue with pro/rel is that it is more about player recruitment than actually developing the players. If a team gets promoted, it gets access to a higher quality level of player that doesn't want to play "only bronze" or "only silver". They can therefore cut the weaker players and upgrade their existing players, but it's a process which leads to a wasted year for development of the team in the wrong bracket. The individual players, particularly at the younger ages, are also improperly sorted because you get those "impact players" everyone wants and is advertising for which are placed at a team that is lower than their skill level in order to make a difference in wins/losses. With relegation, it could cause the explosion of the team, and a minimum players will leave, which means how they do the following year depends on the coach's ability to hold the team together rather than any coaching (different skill set). The only way to fix this is to say players are tied to their starting team and teams can only upgrade by recruiting new non league players or by trading existing players, but that will never work because the parents of kids that want to move will just move onto another league that doesn't do that.
I'm not saying that SoCal has it right either, just that pro/rel is not the panacea to fixing the issue. The only way around it would be like some European countries do it (and AYSO kind of does it except they do it with equality in mind) which is to assign rankings to kids and have the ranked kids only get to pick among eligible teams they are from (you can bid up, but not down). That would require though a unified national league at all skill levels, and the parents would loudly complain their kids were not assigned the right player ranking (much as happens in Fifa).
oh pretty interesting. let's do it! even if I just want to see parents lose their minds over it...
(maybe me??)in terms of relegation/promotion, year to year rel/pro doesn't seem to work because the teams will change... I think we'd need to somehow "enforce" kids to stay with teams for 2 years... OR have rel/pro WITHIN the season... maybe break the season in 2 and adjust rankings/divisions based on 1st half of season to place them in the 2nd half of the season + state cup?
The problem with CSL at the moment isn't pro-rel, it is the perception that competition isn't good at the highest brackets, at least on the girls side. Well, the lack of competition hurts the value of promotion. Apparently it is depressing to win league games when last year's top two teams jumped ship. I guess the sheen wears off for winning CRL and state cup when you know the best teams aren't there.
Getting to do USYS national events for finishing at the top of Cal South/CSL isn't great when you didn't have the competition to prepare you for it. Premier G2006 fall season for 2020 (took place in Spring 2021) only had 5 teams in it. This resulted in a Girl's team that was sent to USYS PRO as the Cal South representative with somewhat embarrassing results.
I think a lot of these late league-jumpers are in for a rude awakening, though. They seem to think being middle of Premier is similar to being middle of Discovery when reality is they are more comparable to lower discovery or flight 1. But, at least they'll have a better idea of where they truly stand. Illusions are going to be shattered.
At the bronze-silver level CSL doesn't seem to care enough. Just saw a CSL spring cup where they didn't even have a final because of mismanagement.
I actually really enjoy pro-rel because it gives meaning to league games. Even in CSL you could apply for an exception if you got better players and demonstrated improvement in Spring or Summer. Premier, when there was competition, meant you did something to get there and you earned it. I saw a team jump from F2 to discovery and get wiped out, but damned if parents weren't boasting that their kid was in discovery.
Getting to do USYS national events for finishing at the top of Cal South/CSL isn't great when you didn't have the competition to prepare you for it. Premier G2006 fall season for 2020 (took place in Spring 2021) only had 5 teams in it. This resulted in a Girl's team that was sent to USYS PRO as the Cal South representative with somewhat embarrassing results.
I think a lot of these late league-jumpers are in for a rude awakening, though. They seem to think being middle of Premier is similar to being middle of Discovery when reality is they are more comparable to lower discovery or flight 1. But, at least they'll have a better idea of where they truly stand. Illusions are going to be shattered.
At the bronze-silver level CSL doesn't seem to care enough. Just saw a CSL spring cup where they didn't even have a final because of mismanagement.
I actually really enjoy pro-rel because it gives meaning to league games. Even in CSL you could apply for an exception if you got better players and demonstrated improvement in Spring or Summer. Premier, when there was competition, meant you did something to get there and you earned it. I saw a team jump from F2 to discovery and get wiped out, but damned if parents weren't boasting that their kid was in discovery.
I shared your exact thoughts a few months ago but GA/MLS Next is starting to form more layers to their leagues. A lot of small clubs with good teams are migrating to EA, which would then make it more attractive to move their 2nd and 3rd teams to EA2.
GA/MLS NEXT is doing a good job getting their kids noticed by youth national team scouts. Great female players don't need to move to ECNL clubs to be noticed by youth national teams. It'll be interesting if parents and kids notice this trend.
The landscape of Socal youth soccer is changing all the time. Curious to see where it goes in the next few years. We only have a few more years to go but this seems to be a problem ever since they started creating closed leagues based on clubs. The excluded clubs will always be creating an alternative. A league needs to find a way to include everyone in order to have one league in SoCal because we are big enough for 2 leagues.
Agree 100% socal ECNL does have some good teams. But, this is a marathon not a sprint. What people are going to see is that going all in at 11 years old isnt always the best choice. The likelihood of getting hurt + burning players out increases at every level up the competitive ladder.
At least near me, pro-rel does not end up being a recruiting thing. The teams stay more or less intact each time they move up or down.
I certainly cannot think of a team that "exploded" because of relegation. You just come back next season and try to win the lower league.
SoccerFan4Life
PREMIER
Add to the fact that the younger population is not growing. Too many clubs and leagues for a smaller group of players in a few years. LAUSD just announced a 30% reduction in students by 2030. Birth rates are at an all time low. Should be interesting to see which league survives in 4 years.
In Coast at least I’ve personally seen it happen 2 times and I’m aware of it happening at least another 3, just in my sons age group. With niece of seen it once as well.
There is no meaning to a league game. Unless it’s the highest level, no one is going to care who won 20 years from now. Trying to give a league game meaning is an exercise in futility.
the problem with the exception is the marketing. You can’t start out assuring the parents we’re going to play x level. You can’t court better players unless maybe you absorb a part of another team. You can’t stop some of the better players from looking at other opportunities. The brackets particularly at the younger ages are about the ability to recruit
That's a whole other story. Lots of really solid players out there that miss half of their games.
You are correct about the lack of quality girls teams in CSL. Teams that finish first in Gold routinely get badly beaten in middle tier flights in tourneys.
outside!
DA
That is their choice. Once travelled to Utah for a round robin with two other SoCal teams and a Salt Lake team. We faced the Salt Lake team on Sunday. Most of the team could not play and it looked like the team was just a bunch of subs. Nice of them to ask us to travel all that way and then not show up.