Hi there! New here and wanted some insight regarding club tryouts.
I have a 10yo who only played a year at club last year (AYSO and city rec league before that). His current team is the B team, with the coach also coaching the A team. He's not the top but above average at pretty much everything: speed, passing, skills, etc. He is also the most versatile member of the team, usually playing mid/winger, but can play shutdown defense too.
Over this winter, the team lost a few key members, and in case the worst happened, we went around and did tryouts for the first time at a few big name clubs. He played well once he got past the nerves, but we never got any callbacks.
I noticed that both tryouts had scrimmage rotations where randomly assigned teams played each other. I'm assuming this is pretty standard. My kid tends to plug himself in where the team needs, and basically ended up playing defense for these scrimmages.
One of them, his 4v4 team went 7 wins with no losses. I thought he would at least get a second look because of that, but we just got crickets. Did he shortchange himself by sticking to defense?
I can attest that he's not a bad player, as we did a tryout/practice with one of the top teams in his age group in the area and got an invite to play for their A team. But we stuck with his old team because he still had a few friends, I preferred the coaching style, and he's getting around 90% playing time .
We will probably end up exploring other clubs again in the future and wanted to see if you guys had any advice for tryouts.
Thanks!