ECNL vs. DA turf war has created a 'toxic environment'

MakeAPlay said:
But of course, the "soccer people" came up with a better way that has only succeeded in splintering the gaming circuit.
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Well-stated (even w/o being a SoCal person, the points you are making are applicable to other regions with the older leagues, concentration of talent and teams, opportunity for identification, etc.)

Adults always seem to get in the way of things in the "interest" of what's "best" for kids.
 
MakeAPlay said:
The ODP pathway was good because it brought together all players from the same federation to train together and it did a fairly good job of not only identifying players (the pool had players come in and out from most of the clubs in the region) but also letting those players train together regularly. With ODP very few players were missed in our region (CalSouth). Having competition between the state federations and between the regions further helped to identify top players. ECNL and the GDA both have made this level of opportunity and cooperation within and outside of a state federation just doesn't happen anymore and the game is worse for it. The top team used to get crowned at the USYS National Championships and there was no debate that they were the best team. Now with 4 different championships you have 4 teams that can claim that mantle and none of them are as good as the previous unified USYS Champions were.

Divide and conquer isn't a great plan. The old CSL Premier teams would kick the crap out of the current GDA crop simply due to a more concentrated talent pool. In SoCal there used to be 10 teams in Premier and they were clearly the best teams and promotion and relegation insured that it stayed that way. But of course, the "soccer people" came up with a better way that has only succeeded in splintering the gaming circuit.
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I'd love to be able to see an "old CSL team" try to kick the crap out of the likes of U15 Earthquakes GDA or U16/17 Solar GDA. I think you might be surprised at the skill level of a number of these players nowadays.
 
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Real Deal said:
How can you be sure how many players were missed? I do think they do a great job identifying, but there are too many kids out there for one organization to decide it all in this day and age. It's a good thing that there are 4 teams. Giving more opportunities to talented young kids is a good thing.

Plus I'd love to be able to see an "old CSL team" try to kick the crap out of the likes of U15 Earthquakes GDA or U16/17 Solar GDA. I think you might be surprised at the skill level of a number of these players nowadays.
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There is no perfect system and players will always be missed. But the alphabet soup of programs necessarily means a dilution of the talent - it may mean more opportunities but harder to compare apples-to-apples because the top level talent is going to be spread out more than in past iterations of Youth Soccer. There are many skilled players out there (and many are acquiring skills at younger ages than in the past) but unless the talent pool is endless, there is a limit. Do the U15 Quakes and U16/U17 Solar teams have every top player in their regions? Is there a higher concentration than in past years? Having had kids who have played in 3 pretty distinct iterations, it is hard to imagine that the concentration is higher today on teams like those than on super teams of past years.
 
MakeAPlay said:
The ODP pathway was good because it brought together all players from the same federation to train together and it did a fairly good job of not only identifying players (the pool had players come in and out from most of the clubs in the region) but also letting those players train together regularly. With ODP very few players were missed in our region (CalSouth). Having competition between the state federations and between the regions further helped to identify top players. ECNL and the GDA both have made this level of opportunity and cooperation within and outside of a state federation just doesn't happen anymore and the game is worse for it. The top team used to get crowned at the USYS National Championships and there was no debate that they were the best team. Now with 4 different championships you have 4 teams that can claim that mantle and none of them are as good as the previous unified USYS Champions were.

Divide and conquer isn't a great plan. The old CSL Premier teams would kick the crap out of the current GDA crop simply due to a more concentrated talent pool. In SoCal there used to be 10 teams in Premier and they were clearly the best teams and promotion and relegation insured that it stayed that way. But of course, the "soccer people" came up with a better way that has only succeeded in splintering the gaming circuit.
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My solution after two years of this crap for Socal and the rest of the country: US Soccer can take the top 20 kids in Socal, top 20 in Nocal and so on (the kids who want to go all in with just soccer, soccer, soccer, soccer, soccer, soccer.....................) and have their developmental league. They can have juggling contests, skills contest, who can score the most goals and the ultimate prize, the golden ticket to Hollywood. The rest us can go all in with ECNL. Have a top league of 8 teams equally spread out in the SW. We can have ECNL 2 as well. Bottom two in Champions group get knocked down to ECNL 2 and the top 2 in ECNL 2 get brought up. No more politics. I think we can find 16 clubs in the SW area to participate. Once we do, we can have a tournament of 16 teams to determind top 8. 8 teams play at Silverlakes and 8 in Oceanside. We have to keep those two happy $$$$$$$$. Parents in SoCal hold the power. Vote with your pocket book
 
Mullet said:
I visited many a soccer thread and this debate about juggling is as old as time and so is the above defense of not juggling.

First touch matters and there are lots of ways to develop first touch. There are very few things that require less space, equipment and people to develop first touch than juggling.

If wall ball is your thing have at it. If you have 6 kids that can kick the ball around with each other in the back yard, have at it.
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Agree. Most important thing is that your kid has the will/dedication to engage in ball work every single day. It 100% translates on the field, in terms of their composure on the ball. Takes a focused kid though.
 
dk_b said:
There is no perfect system and players will always be missed. But the alphabet soup of programs necessarily means a dilution of the talent - it may mean more opportunities but harder to compare apples-to-apples because the top level talent is going to be spread out more than in past iterations of Youth Soccer. There are many skilled players out there (and many are acquiring skills at younger ages than in the past) but unless the talent pool is endless, there is a limit. Do the U15 Quakes and U16/U17 Solar teams have every top player in their regions? Is there a higher concentration than in past years? Having had kids who have played in 3 pretty distinct iterations, it is hard to imagine that the concentration is higher today on teams like those than on super teams of past years.
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Well I wasn't there back in the day. But I'd venture to guess that, while talent may be diluted, there is just far more of it now. This sport has grown immensely in the past few years, and especially on the girls' side. No, those teams don't have all the top talent in the region. That would take three teams.
 
Real Deal said:
I'd love to be able to see an "old CSL team" try to kick the crap out of the likes of U15 Earthquakes GDA or U16/17 Solar GDA. I think you might be surprised at the skill level of a number of these players nowadays.
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I'm not surprised at all. I have a player who has started every game of her college career on a top 5 team and was a member of the #1 recruiting class in the nation her senior year., so I know what skilled players look like. She also won 2 ODP national championships and trust me the teams that I see on video aren't even close. That Earthquakes team isn't even Deza's best team. His old Redwood Rays/DeAnza Force team would have beaten them easily and they weren't even the best team in their age group and even they weren't as good as the old CSL Premier teams.

I know that it is hard to imagine what it would look like if ALL of SoCal played in one main gaming circuit (Surf was the only team that wasn't allowed to play in CSL Premier due to politics BTW) but it used to happen. ODP was a HUGE deal and was a pipeline to the YNTs. The tendency is to think that newer is always better. The truth is that a concentration of talent always gives you a leg up. The old CSL Premier teams would have almost every top player in SoCal and the top team would often win the USYS National Championship or at least make it to the final against an All-Star team from either Texas, NY/NJ or occasionally a team from either Michigan/Ohio/Colorado/Chicago.

Good luck to you and your player.
 
Real Deal said:
I'd love to be able to see an "old CSL team" try to kick the crap out of the likes of U15 Earthquakes GDA or U16/17 Solar GDA. I think you might be surprised at the skill level of a number of these players nowadays.
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Those teams were 03/04. These two are good teams but they play in a very watered down developmental league.
 
Real Deal said:
Well I wasn't there back in the day. But I'd venture to guess that, while talent may be diluted, there is just far more of it now. This sport has grown immensely in the past few years, and especially on the girls' side. No, those teams don't have all the top talent in the region. That would take three teams.
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CSL Premier concentrated all of the top talent in SoCal. The only region that didn't have pretty much all of their players playing in it was San Diego and that was simply because Surf wasn't allowed in and they had most of the top talent in San Diego. I know that it is hard to imagine in this current climate. The best analogy I can give is for someone who only got to see the 2 and a half years of the Trump presidency would find it hard to imagine a president that isn't a total dumpster fire. It was the case though....
 
Real Deal said:
Well I wasn't there back in the day. But I'd venture to guess that, while talent may be diluted, there is just far more of it now. This sport has grown immensely in the past few years, and especially on the girls' side. No, those teams don't have all the top talent in the region. That would take three teams.
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"far more of it"? How far back are you looking? The participation rates have been really high for a long time - have it really grown that much in the last 5 years (I generally consider "few" to mean 3 but I will back it out further)? I'd be interested to see the trend over the last decade - I do think there are many skilled players, maybe even more of a certain skill level, but I don't think the # of competitive players has changed any more than can be attributed to odd demographic blips (some groups more, some groups fewer)

(not sure how it is in SoCal but the # of girls generally seems lower in the Bay Area in the 06 age range (or maybe I should say the 05/06 group who will be class of 2024) - my twins' classrooms in elementary school were often 2:1 boys:girls and, in speaking to other people from around the Bay, they had similar odd ratios; that is very different than my older girl (02, class of 2020) and my oldest (my son, 98, class of 2016) (my 02 daughter's first club - a very small club that none of you would have heard of - had 3 teams at one point at the 01/02 level, something that is not possible with my 06s at the same club; the club she joined at U13 had a HUGE # of competitive players in that 01/02 group, demographically similar to our local community).
 
dk_b said:
"far more of it"? How far back are you looking? The participation rates have been really high for a long time - have it really grown that much in the last 5 years (I generally consider "few" to mean 3 but I will back it out further)? I'd be interested to see the trend over the last decade - I do think there are many skilled players, maybe even more of a certain skill level, but I don't think the # of competitive players has changed any more than can be attributed to odd demographic blips (some groups more, some groups fewer)

(not sure how it is in SoCal but the # of girls generally seems lower in the Bay Area in the 06 age range (or maybe I should say the 05/06 group who will be class of 2024) - my twins' classrooms in elementary school were often 2:1 boys:girls and, in speaking to other people from around the Bay, they had similar odd ratios; that is very different than my older girl (02, class of 2020) and my oldest (my son, 98, class of 2016) (my 02 daughter's first club - a very small club that none of you would have heard of - had 3 teams at one point at the 01/02 level, something that is not possible with my 06s at the same club; the club she joined at U13 had a HUGE # of competitive players in that 01/02 group, demographically similar to our local community).
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Not sure if this is behind a paywall but this article takes issue with the continued growth of the sport: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/14/sports/world-cup/soccer-youth-decline.html
 
http://www.coastsoccer.com/2006/sG190P.htm

This link is from Alex Morgan's senior year. She was on the Cypress Elite team. Click on the yellow cards and you can see her referred to as Alexandra Morgan (who by the way started club soccer at 14 which would be "too late" under GDA desires because she was a multi-sport athlete).
 
MakeAPlay said:
http://www.coastsoccer.com/2006/sG190P.htm

This link is from Alex Morgan's senior year. She was on the Cypress Elite team. Click on the yellow cards and you can see her referred to as Alexandra Morgan (who by the way started club soccer at 14 which would be "too late" under GDA desires because she was a multi-sport athlete).
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One million percent agree that all things sports-related start too young and continue to get younger and younger. Kids get put on a pedestal too young, and kids get discouraged too young. For some, the pressure to stay on top is overwhelming, and for others, it is the pressure to catch up. If participation is declining, that may be one reason why. Also may contribute to anxiety and depression rates as it seems the trend in everything.
 
dk_b said:
"far more of it"? How far back are you looking? The participation rates have been really high for a long time - have it really grown that much in the last 5 years (I generally consider "few" to mean 3 but I will back it out further)? I'd be interested to see the trend over the last decade - I do think there are many skilled players, maybe even more of a certain skill level, but I don't think the # of competitive players has changed any more than can be attributed to odd demographic blips (some groups more, some groups fewer)

(not sure how it is in SoCal but the # of girls generally seems lower in the Bay Area in the 06 age range (or maybe I should say the 05/06 group who will be class of 2024) - my twins' classrooms in elementary school were often 2:1 boys:girls and, in speaking to other people from around the Bay, they had similar odd ratios; that is very different than my older girl (02, class of 2020) and my oldest (my son, 98, class of 2016) (my 02 daughter's first club - a very small club that none of you would have heard of - had 3 teams at one point at the 01/02 level, something that is not possible with my 06s at the same club; the club she joined at U13 had a HUGE # of competitive players in that 01/02 group, demographically similar to our local community).
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My daughter was at West Coast FC at the U10-U12 level and they had 3-4 teams at every age group (one of the reasons that we left is that they had one coach coaching two teams in the same bracket!). I am not sure about the numbers now as I am 4 years removed from club soccer, however, there were a TON of teams back in the day.
 
MakeAPlay said:
This is a good read.

https://www.socceramerica.com/publi...ldhood-soccer-of-crystal-dunn-an-environ.html
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Great article. I like the juggling part. I played basketball. Every practice we shot free throws at the end. If you wanted to be the best, you stayed later or practiced when others were surfing. It's a choice. I will say I saw very little coaching and teaching on juggling at practices when my kid was a youth. It was understood that you would work on that skill on your own. As one coach said to my kid, "the soccer ball has to be your best friend. Do you talk to your best friend everyday?"
 
Real Deal said:
One million percent agree that all things sports-related start too young and continue to get younger and younger. Kids get put on a pedestal too young, and kids get discouraged too young. For some, the pressure to stay on top is overwhelming, and for others, it is the pressure to catch up. If participation is declining, that may be one reason why. Also may contribute to anxiety and depression rates as it seems the trend in everything.
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Alex Morgan’s team was the 3rd place team FYI. Having a top player and having a top team are two completely different things. Having all the top players in a region playing in one gaming circuit used to be awesome.
 
Real Deal said:
Okay so you have 10 teams and a team at the top that is 9-0-3 and one on the bottom is 1-8-4. That isn't too different from what we see today ;)
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Look at the scores though. They are close because all the teams had a roster full of talented players. The only team not in that league that could compete was Surf and even the last place Premier team would murder the rest of the teams in the country other than maybe a Dallas Sting, PDA, Colorado Rush, MVLA or Michigan Hawks team.

Teams would travel here to play against the best and the only time SoCal teams would travel would be for the Vegas Showcase, PDA Showcase, and the USYS championship.
 
MakeAPlay said:
Look at the scores though. They are close because all the teams had a roster full of talented players. The only team not in that league that could compete was Surf and even the last place Premier team would murder the rest of the teams in the country other than maybe a Dallas Sting, PDA, Colorado Rush, MVLA or Michigan Hawks team.

Teams would travel here to play against the best and the only time SoCal teams would travel would be for the Vegas Showcase, PDA Showcase, and the USYS championship.
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Ding ding ding ding.......Socal sold out for $$$$ folks. And if you don't fully commit yourself by 12 years old to full time soccer, you get regulated to ECNL. What a a bunch of BS.
 
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