That's all very thoughtful, and I won't be able to do full justice in this response.
Politics is certainly an issue with youth sports generally, and youth soccer in SoCal is no different. There are things that happen behind closed doors that no one outside can control; that's why we've just tried to build our club and hope that, eventually, others would agree that there are enough players for everyone and good local competition helps us all.
As for resources, being at the mercy of LAUSD didn't help us as we came out of lockdown, though we certainly weren't the only organization affected by its reluctance to grant permits. I will say that the cancelled games were examples of poor admin by SOCAL schedulers. When LAUSD informed us they wouldn't be able to process permits for some dates we'd been promised, we told SOCAL and assured them that we had alternative fields we could use; minutes later our games were listed as canceled. As you can imagine, that inflexibility was incredibly frustrating--particularly when we were at the same time agreeing to reschedule one of our teams' games because their opponent had a conflict with prom. Fortunately we were able to move our training and home field away from LAUSD, at an incredible facility, and meet any league requirements.
Regarding depth in the player pool, I think that opens up a broader issue in youth soccer: the emphasis on results over development in younger age groups. When some of our 05s were first coming together as 8- and 9-year-olds, Jacob warned parents that if they were only looking for trophies for the next few years we might not be the right team for them. Winning is more fun than losing, but our focus was on development and effort; and we don't want to change that just to impress whoever might be looking at the results of our younger teams. Those 2012 girls might have 70% possession and be learning how to build out from the back, make smart overlapping runs, etc. and lose to a bigger, more direct team on two free kicks. We'll take that loss and tell the girls that, when they're sixteen and the sizes have evened out, things will be different. Our 05s have proved that point (not just with "easy" league wins but with tournament and showcase results, as well as college recruiting) and, we hope, set an example for players, and parents, in the rest of the club.
Coaching education and retention is critical for any club. We have an insanely talented, committed staff right now, but any club that isn't constantly striving to improve its coaching depth is either naive or coasting.
We don't have 100 girls coming to try out in every age group; our margin for error is smaller than bigger clubs, who can basically just swap out underperforming teams. All we can do is develop the girls we get as well as we can and then play whoever we're put against. (Trust me: our girls would have loved to play higher than the 6th bracket last weekend, but we were happy to go where the GA put us.) But yes, being in the GA would certainly help us bring more girls into our program; based on what we've already accomplished, we think that would be good for us and for the GA.
