Talked with a few acquaintances around parents, teams, kids, etc, this weekend. Initial thoughts are that the overall environment is going to lose 30% of teams YOY from parents bailing on paying club fees. There are a whole ton of B & C teams getting combined into one because of teams blowing up, coaches furloughed, you know the drill. The kids who are training have -- almost 100% -- regressed in almost all aspects. The families who are opting out of training right now aren't expected to come back at all. There was talk about a survey that was sent to a club's families which came back as more than half unwilling to play league games until a vaccine is proven out. At the higher level, the DA dying less than a month into quarantine caused such a massive amount of disappointment and confusion, and the parents who are chasing letter leagues now are more frenzied than ever plus dealing with the unknowns is making a whole ton of families reassess their priorities. (If the DA is so dependent on cashflow, wtf are we doing this for kinds of arguments)
You guys, this is not a "let's open everything back up" argument. We are effectively losing a generation of kids in real time. We're six months into something that's probably going to run at least another six months to a year, and it's very clear that clubs are going to be fighting for a shrinking pool of players. Going to guess that we have an absolute ton of club consolidation over the next year. At this point I'm not even sure how tryout season will work. Tryouts for what? What's being sold to the families? Overall team quality? Based on this last year? That's an unfunny joke. How do tryouts even get held? Okay great, your kid can do stepovers six feet away from someone, let's get them on the B team instead of the C team?
I hate to be so negative-- I have tried to keep an open mind about how we are all doing, but it's funny, the quarantine started at probably the most reasonable time for clubs. We're already seeing the slow motion unraveling, and once December rolls around with leagues postponing yet again, that's when the real problems are going to start surfacing.