A singular league with promotion/relegation would be the worst thing possible for youth soccer. Development depends on high quality clubs with high quality coaches, providing consistent, high quality training for many years. That, in turn, requires that clubs and coaches have financial incentive to do what they are doing. If a real club risks losing $80,000 in fees per team every year when players scatter to yahoo clubs because the team got relegated, the good coaches go away to find real jobs. The possibility that their only source of income might instantly vaporize if a 12 year old girl gets hurt is no way to make a living, and even dumbest soccer people understand that. So you end up with only daddy coaches. All promotion/relegation does at the highest level is destabilize youth soccer and drive the best coaches to find other occupations.
Even aside from the inevitable drop in quality of training as daddy coaches take over, promotion/relegation gets in the way of development in other critical ways. Suddenly every U12 game becomes critical to win at the expense of long term development. Kids are forced to play hurt when an entire team’s worth of fees are on the line. No coach is going to emphasize possession soccer at young ages, because young kids make a lot of mistakes playing possession, and that will inevitably cause them to lose games and get relegated.
And why would we be doing this? Because some cheap ass daddies whose self-esteem depends on how many soccer games their 12 year old daughter wins want it. Because those idiot daddies can’t see past tomorrow and fail to grasp that the real purpose of elite girls soccer is not to win a U12 game, but is really college opportunity. They don’t want to pay for or receive high quality training and development because all they care about is that their daughter wins a soccer game today.
That said, it is possible but doubtful that ECNL may create a very limited 2 tier system, but only to the extent it won’t cause kids to switch clubs if a team moves to the lower tier. It would do this through geographical restrictions so that new clubs are not on top of existing ones geographically.
I think when Maps and ETOL were around these matches had ganas. I will not sign up my dd until I see everything that is required and planned for 2020-21. Wow folks, 10 months? Yuk!!! You have to be addicted and on some serious kool aid. Kool aid was not just served at the GDA. It's served everywhere with so many flavors now. "Elite Grape" "Cherry Premier" "Top Tier Mango" World Class Watermelon" and a new flavor they just developed, "Pink GAL Lemonade." You can find a coach who will serve you up whatever flavors your itching ears like to hear. I will sit on the sidelines now and watch all this play out. What kind of sport have the kids actually been playing? This is a blood bath war for market share and were all the market and of course our dd are forced to be stuck in the middle of all this sh*t. No way. I will not stand for this. HS Soccer baby!!!
