Here are my thoughts:
High School - I have mixed emotions on this one. My dd played DPL in the fall and was a DP for the DA. She was offered full time DA just before HS started and was given the choice of moving to the DA then or after playing HS. She chose to play HS (junior year). She liked the friendship part and as a parent I love the packed stands, newspaper articles and accolades she received. So on the plus side it feeds the players and parents egos. The negative is that even though we won league the quality of soccer was quite poor. Almost unwatchable at times. I also think 2-3 games per week is a bit too much along a lot of cheapshots occurring between rival schools. My dd will not play her senior year (her choice) and says she won't miss it. Ultimately, I don't have a problem with the No HS rule for DA. Girls that want to play HS have other options for leagues.
Substitution Rule - I don't have a problem with this rule. The problem I would have is how a club implements it. Carrying 22 girls on a DA roster is just way too many with this rule in place. Ideally a team would carry 16 - 18 girls. Then they would use their DP slots to pull players up from their reserve team as injuries occur or reserve players develop. This allows the girls that would have filled out those last roster spots to get substantial playing time and still get DA exposure. I think the problem occurs with clubs driven to fill their last 4-5 roster spots to make more money.
Outside Competition - I am okay with this rule for the team but not the players. I believe DA teams should be allowed to assign players to their reserve team for an extended period of time and that they then can return to the DA in the same season. Think of baseball and how clubs use their minor league teams for marginal or up and coming players. For example player X gets injured and is just returning or player Y is not getting much playing time. They still practice with the DA but they get sent on assignment to play for their reserve team until they are able to contribute to their DA team. The time frame would need to be in weeks to avoid teams shipping players to their reserve to just to gain wins.
This underscores the maxim that everyone's situation is different and there is no single right answer. While some people may have a worse time with these particular DA rules, in your situation, it worked fine and you got the results you were looking for. Also in your case, it is good that the DA format worked because the ECNL options are more limited (north LA). For others, the DA format is terrible and ECNL works better.
All of the back and forth about the pros and cons of DA's particular format vs ECNL's format reminded me of an
article I read about the marketplace battles between new tech formats like Blu-ray and HD DVD years ago, and applies to adoption rates for programming languages today and software for wireless controls. Contrary to what I thought early on, the DA vs. ECNL battle will ultimately not be decided by the consumers (paying parents/players) but rather the alliances behind the scenes. Here's a quote from the article about what ultimately tipped the scales in the Blu-ray tech war: "However, practically none of these factors (the pros and cons of each format) played too great of a role in the war. One of the main reasons why each format performed the way that it did was because of the alliances established by the major corporations backing it. Hitachi, LG Electronics, Matsushita, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony and Thomson founded the Blu-ray Disc Association, and they quickly gained support from Dell and Apple before the product was officially released. HD DVD had several supporters who remained affiliated with the DVD Forum during this time, including Toshiba, NEC, Sanyo, and Microsoft." In the end, the movie studios started to fall in line with Sony and the others because of licensing and distribution relationships, and once a couple bigger studios went that way, it was only a matter of time before HD DVD was dead.
In this analogy, the clubs are the studios (the content providers) and the leagues are the tech formats. Once influential content providers (such as the PDA, Michigan Hawks, etc.) make a full commitment to ECNL over DA, this could predict similar migrations in SoCal. I think the DA has a better chance of hanging on here because of the deep talent pool, but if the clubs across other regions put all their best teams into ECNL, and just one more influential club here follows SoCal Blues' lead and matches up their best older teams in ECNL, the dominoes will fall rapidly.
It could go the other way too. But these announcements by big clubs like those in New Jersey and Michigan are very significant because marketplace behavior is herd mentality all the way.
