Guest players - what to do

Jamisfoes said:
Having a parent find out about the soccer ranking app most likely will send them packing. Before they just know the team is bad, now they know they are the 1245th team in California. That’s too much for one to take.
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You definitely have a point. The good news is there are only ~750 2011B teams in California, so they are already in the top 1000. :)

May depend on the specific area in California, but the parents are reasonably likely to be into tech or related fields - and may be more receptive to data than would be expected; that has been our experience.
 
RandomSoccerFan said:
At the risk of looking like blindly flogging SR, this is an incredible use case that can be used to minimize the silly parent drama.
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Yeah, I already use it. I knew we were going to get battered by the two Tier 1 teams in the tournament: they were both in the top 60 for CA (but playing in the bottom tier of the tournament!) so had warned parents up front. The third game was against a Tier 3 ranked a bit higher than us, which we tied.
 
Karlton Athletic said:
Yeah, I already use it. I knew we were going to get battered by the two Tier 1 teams in the tournament: they were both in the top 60 for CA (but playing in the bottom tier of the tournament!) so had warned parents up front. The third game was against a Tier 3 ranked a bit higher than us, which we tied.
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Honestly, if my son were on one of those clubs, that would bother me more than the whole guest players thing. Like, why are you playing down as a top tier club... that's not going to help your players much if any, and it's just risking injuries for a meaningless trophy.

I like that my son's club is generally always trying to punch a little above their weight, so to speak, in the interest of player development. Yes, sometimes that sucks when they lose a lot, and sometimes it feels good for those teams to get a couple rare wins (even if/when they are somewhat "undeserved" because of guest players). But I'd rather that than the team "win hunting" by playing in weak brackets in tournaments intentionally, and a top 60 team in CA should be better than that (even my club's top B2011 team, which is "only" ~100 in CA, generally plays up whenever they can).
 
RandomSoccerFan said:
At the risk of looking like blindly flogging SR, this is an incredible use case that can be used to minimize the silly parent drama. Look at the team rating. Make a quick spreadsheet of the league table they are playing in, and get an average rating. You will have an objective number, in goals, to how far above or below the team is expected to perform. You can go into these discussions not only with the standings, but a prediction for not only how many games they would be expected to lose, but by how much. Any parent that is screaming for a team that is several goals below the average to continue to play that level is also screaming for the team to continue to lose. You can do the same thing for tournaments. Are they playing teams that are around the same level? Are they entering tournament brackets where the average team is significantly better? Is the team they are playing expected to win by many goals? If a team really does choose to have losing season after losing season (most don't, because the team has a hard time retaining players), the SR info can give an achievable goal for improvement target for each individual game. For a game that the team is expected to lose by 4, playing them close and losing by 1 is a significant improvement, and can be celebrated.
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I was the parent letting everyone else know how good the teams were in league and the tournament. Even the coaches would ask me. Still do it, but use Massey Ratings for college soccer. ;)
 
You can even do more hypothetical models with the same data. Create the spreadsheet for Tier 3 bracket results this past season. Insert your team where it would go by SR rating. And you and anyone else curious can get a decent prediction about where the team would have shown up in that bracket. It has been pretty spot on while climbing the brackets for quite a few levels over the past few years, helping to decide when to move the team and by how much.
 
sigmabody said:
Honestly, if my son were on one of those clubs, that would bother me more than the whole guest players thing. Like, why are you playing down as a top tier club... that's not going to help your players much if any, and it's just risking injuries for a meaningless trophy.
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To be fair, I think the top bracket was ECNL / RL / EA etc.., so those Tier 1s probably slipped down to the second bracket as there weren't enough teams to fill 3 brackets. That said, the first Tier 1 team's parents had vuvuzelas and air horns, which they used for every single goal (and there were a LOT). That got very old. And then the second Tier 1 had to get a better GD to go through, so they'd run the ball back to the halfway line after every goal, which also got very old, very quickly. In fact, after a while, our boys just had fun slowing them down in creative ways.
 
Karlton Athletic said:
That said, the first Tier 1 team's parents had vuvuzelas and air horns, which they used for every single goal (and there were a LOT). That got very old. And then the second Tier 1 had to get a better GD to go through, so they'd run the ball back to the halfway line after every goal, which also got very old, very quickly. In fact, after a while, our boys just had fun slowing them down in creative ways.
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I always smirk when I see in the tournament rules that they are explicitly banning noisemakers, wondering which team is going to bring them to a youth soccer match - but it evidently happens enough that it makes sense to put it in the rules. Must feel bad to be a parent that caused their kid's team to forfeit all results by being such an annoyance on the sidelines.
 
RandomSoccerFan said:
I always smirk when I see in the tournament rules that they are explicitly banning noisemakers, wondering which team is going to bring them to a youth soccer match - but it evidently happens enough that it makes sense to put it in the rules. Must feel bad to be a parent that caused their kid's team to forfeit all results by being such an annoyance on the sidelines.
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To be fair, noisemakers, drums and chants are an essential part of even grassroots soccer in Europe, Latin America and Africa. The use against them has more to do with noise ordinances in the US (same with the UK).
 
RandomSoccerFan said:
I always smirk when I see in the tournament rules that they are explicitly banning noisemakers, wondering which team is going to bring them to a youth soccer match - but it evidently happens enough that it makes sense to put it in the rules. Must feel bad to be a parent that caused their kid's team to forfeit all results by being such an annoyance on the sidelines.
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Noisemakers? While my son was playing at UC Davis, the Big West Conference rescinded its rule against artificial noisemakers in the stands. One of the team moms bought a selection of cowbells online (Davis was the original Ag School in UC) and would hand them out to onlookers (mostly parents) before the games, and collect them after the games. The last regular season game one year was at Sacramento State who played most of its sports in the Big Sky Conference -- their men's soccer team was just an "Associate Member" of the Big West. Cowbell Mom knew that she would not be able to go to the Sac State game, so she entrusted me with the box of cowbells at the end of the home game preceding.

As I was entering the Sac State game, a security guy told me that since they were only an Associate Member, they still enforced the Big Sky Conference rule against artificial noisemakers, and that he would not make me walk all the way back to the car if I just kept the cowbells in their box. He apparently did not know that since it was their last home game of the year, the school was handing out vuvuzelas to all the fans. After about the second vuvuzela toot, the cowbells magically jumped out of their box and into fan's hands.
 
JeterwastheBEST said:
To be clear, not youth soccer though...
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errrr…yes they do…it’s not some huge thing but it does happen not uncommonly…cant speak to the Northern Europeans but most definitely Mexico peru Spain Italy and some of the African countries. Latino league periodically at the beginning of the season has to remind parents not to do it because of noise issues.
 
RandomSoccerFan said:
I always smirk when I see in the tournament rules that they are explicitly banning noisemakers, wondering which team is going to bring them to a youth soccer match - but it evidently happens enough that it makes sense to put it in the rules. Must feel bad to be a parent that caused their kid's team to forfeit all results by being such an annoyance on the sidelines.
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Ug, yeah... off-topic, but we had this happen to us twice at the Cerritos Memorial Cup at Silverlakes, except it was just another team behind where we were sitting, on an adjacent field. You really have to be a special breed of a-hole to bring loud noisemakers to a tournament with fields packed into a park, where you're pissing off everyone around you in addition to the people your team is playing.

The tournament bans them in general within Silverlakes proper, but we were told that since our games were in the adjacent park, and that was a public park, the tournament couldn't do anything about it. It made those games pretty much a miserable experience all around. There are a lot of nice parents in youth soccer, and most people are just trying to have their kids have fun, but then you've got those parents, who are just monumental jerks who are out there to make everyone else as miserable as possible. I feel bad for their kids.
 
Karlton Athletic said:
My youngest plays on a Tier 2 team. They were newly formed last season and were beaten by double digits virtually every game (save for a tie against the league's other bad team). We've played some Tier 3 teams at tournaments and been competitive, though still haven't actually won a game (but, I'd argue have been the better side in quite a few).

Anyway, we were having our butts handed to us even worse by some Tier 1 teams playing down in a tournament, so I polled the parents near me about being Tier 3 next season and it was unanimous, so they volunteered me to speak to the coaches, and they said they'd been thinking the same thing. All good. Coaches call a parents' meeting to talk about the next season, being Tier 3 etc..., and it creates a firestorm, with angry accusations of a bait and switch and that little Johnny shouldn't be playing tier 3 (he definitely should). Wild.

Best I can tell, the parents that play/played soccer themselves want a season of tier 3 so the boys can grasp the basics without being pressed off the ball in seconds, but the non-soccer playing parents are outraged and seem to want another season of soul crushing defeats. These are 2011s, so they have plenty of time.
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I recall my sons first team was a flight 3 and losing every game except against to the leagues other worst team. At the time, SoCal had just rolled out the Flight 4 fall brackets and at summer tournaments they had even lost to some of these teams. When I suggested dropping down a flight to the coach and team manager they replied 'Our club is not a flight 4 club". We parted ways the following season for other reasons, but that team is still together today and still going 1-9-2 in flight 3. Too bad because the boys could really learn a lot and use a confidence boost in a lower flight.
 
sigmabody said:
Honestly, if my son were on one of those clubs, that would bother me more than the whole guest players thing. Like, why are you playing down as a top tier club... that's not going to help your players much if any, and it's just risking injuries for a meaningless trophy.

I like that my son's club is generally always trying to punch a little above their weight, so to speak, in the interest of player development. Yes, sometimes that sucks when they lose a lot, and sometimes it feels good for those teams to get a couple rare wins (even if/when they are somewhat "undeserved" because of guest players). But I'd rather that than the team "win hunting" by playing in weak brackets in tournaments intentionally, and a top 60 team in CA should be better than that (even my club's top B2011 team, which is "only" ~100 in CA, generally plays up whenever they can).
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You can only request a bracket, though, right? Doesn't every (cough) respectable tourney organizer use rankings to schedule?
 
crush said:
ECNL demanded Strikers FC put their boys in ECNL and drop MLS. If they didn't obey, then the Strikers FC girls would be punished and kicked out of ECNL.
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They did this for every team in SoCal. This split the talent on the boys side for a while, but over time the teams that stayed ECNL are losing ground because of the draw of the MLS Academies (justified or not...).
 
Jamisfoes said:
Do they use the Gotsport ranking or the soccer ranking app ranking? The two can be drastically different.
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I can't say what they use (or if they use anything), but Gotsport doesn't have enough data to be predictive and the data they do have is often skewed by clubs that create "tournament teams" to win trophies. Soccer rankings is far more comprehensive.
 
focomoso said:
They did this for every team in SoCal. This split the talent on the boys side for a while, but over time the teams that stayed ECNL are losing ground because of the draw of the MLS Academies (justified or not...).
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It was also harmful to many females looking to go play in college. Like I said when this went down, ECNL should have allowed the older Striker Girls teams to finish out ECNL. That would have been very nice and considerate since mom and dad paid thousands in ECNL club dues and travel cost and they got the rug pulled from under them. Thousands invested in ECNL all gone like a fart in the wind. Ask any of the boys on the Strikers FC or any MLS Clubs if they would play for the girls ecnl and they would all say no.
 
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