It does sure look like between the two of them they already control NV, at least on the girls side, so coming together has the potential of making the teams even a bit stronger.
View attachment 21047View attachment 21046
It probably will make the teams stronger, but merging two established clubs with good teams in a limited market doesn't alway go smoothly or as planned. It can also backfire. You have to shuffle all the coaches so that no coach remains with an age group they were coaching prior to the merge. Otherwise, there will be a perception of favorites and unfair team selection, even if the teams are merged based on player merit. If you leave coaches and teams together, others will be upset when they become second fiddle.
Here is how the drama starts: DOC limits the amount of players that can be cut/added to specific teams. Top players start to get moved to the second team due to roster limitations; creating a domino effect where mid level first team players are now fighting for a spot on the third team. Second team players who were on the cusp of moving up, are now completely overlooked. Some of the Coaches don't agree with the shenanigans, and take their entire team/teams over to the competing club. Good players who ended up on second and third teams easily get picked up by the competing clubs first teams, so they leave. Flight 3 and 4 teams who were happy to be playing with the teammates they are with were prioritizing the social aspect of their established teams, and not concerned with 1st team, 2nd team, or letter leagues, suddenly have their team completely shuffled due to all the drama previously stated. These teams say no way, leave as a team, find a new coach, and become an outlier affiliate with a "local" club, but work independently to keep the team together. The remaining players start to get irritated with the soccer team "Three Card Monty" that is now playing out at the new LV Hot Surf & Turf club and look elsewhere.
A lot of the players who leave for many of the reasons above, are top level players, and the Club they joined becomes stronger, immediately becomes a viable competitor and begins to expand. The outliers begin to regroup at the club who is now pulling talent from the Merger. The players who had a bad experience with the merge will forever refuse to be a part of the merged club. Within a few years you have the exact same situation as before the Merge, just with different names.
LV Hot Surf & Turf will have strong 1st teams as long as they have the ECNL designation. As they are the only ECNL show in town, they will always fill out their first team roster; they will never be at risk of being overtaken in the current scenario. It's all their remaining teams that will struggle if they don't pull off a fair and unbiased merger. The only way I can think of ensuring that, is to shuffle all the coaches, and have the new team coaches make team selections. Whatever club takes up the void left by the merge will also get better. So in the end, you will have two slightly stronger clubs in the area, and a bunch of outlier clubs with more teams. The cycle starts over.
On a philosophical note. You don't make products better by merging competitors, you make products better by increasing competition. The only way to make Las Vegas teams stronger in the ECNL is to have an ECNL competitor in Las Vegas. Otherwise you just have the same scenario with different names over and over. If ECNL wants stronger competition out of LV, they need to make one of the other clubs in LV an ECNL club. You can have too many ECNL competitors in an area and end up disbursing talent; that is not happening in LV.
surfsoccernation.com
