Some clubs assemble more resources, build better reputations, organize themselves better than others, etc. Everyone agrees about this. The criticisms of DA favoritism are more about protecting cronies. Much in the same way that cronyism protects underqualified insider coaches and keeps better ones out.
To add to this, it easy to act and talk like a good coach without being one. There are plenty of guys who talk all about "doing it right", but really don't. It is part of the skillset of keeping a job without actually being good at the job. If I hear one more quote about how we "keep it on the ground" from a coach of a team that has no idea about what they are doing, or talk of "Developing Players" from somebody who has no idea of what that means...well, I guess that will mean I am near virtually any youth soccer field in America!
Most AEGON Future Cup games will be broadcasted by Eurosport 2. I think they have a livefeed up on their website somewhere. TFC will face Bayern Munchen tomorrow.
I watched the first part of their 0-9 loss to Baltimore Bays. I couldn't watch and left. The Bays have a very good under 16 team and the Kickers have a combination of a very young team with some talent issues. I have a feeling that somebody made a decision that they would try to make up for a lack of talent at that age by playing young players up in the hope that the extra experience will help those players to get better. While I under the philosophy in theory, you don't want for the talent gap to be so great that the kids just keep getting the tar beaten out of them. They have had some games where they have gotten pretty impressive results(for them) - a 0-2 loss to league leading DC United and a couple of wins against other weak DA teams, but it has been painful most of the time. The Richmond Strikers actually have a better under 16 group of players, but their record isn't much better as they have been playing some of their better under 16s up to help their horrendous under 18 squad. Such is life in Richmond where fielding enough talent for two DAs is always going to be a challenge. For what it is worth. They try to play good soccer. They are just young and overmatched. It is interesting that Strikers are able to stay competitive with the Kickers even though the Kickers are fully funded.
Yeah, that's what struck me--I realize there's only so much talent in Richmond, but it's a bad sign that they can't outrecruit the other local DA despite being free.
FWIW, the Richmond metro area has a population of 1,231,980 (2012 est.), the 44th largest in the U.S. If we did a better job of developing players at the youngest ages, the Richmond population would definitely be large enough to accommodate two DAs, but since we don't maybe one is enough.
The Strikers have more tradition in the Richmond area and their park is right in the middle of the upper middle class neighborhoods that traditionally have played soccer in that area. Also, I believe that Bob Jenkins, the former under 18 national team coach (as well as at a couple of division I schools - American and New Hampshire?) is the technical director for the Strikers. If you look at their Alumni page, while it doesn't knock your socks off, you can imagine that it would carry a lot of weight in a city like Richmond. http://www.richmondstrikers.com/Alumni/index_E.html The Kickers play way over on the other side of town. They have more minorities than the Strikers, but I get the impression that there isn't much organization to inner city soccer in Richmond. It will definitely be a challenge for them to succeed, but I am rooting for them because they went from an embarassment to a DA that at least tries to play good soccer. As Peretz48 says, they aren't really that great at player development down there so fielding two DA teams is hard for that city. It will be interesting to see what happens next year. FYI, the Kickers under 18s did beat DC United in Richmond this year, but I think that result speaks as much to DC United's recent lack of focus as much as the Kickers playing well. I don't know what happened, but DC United have shown a really surprising lack of focus since the winter break -although they did recently beat the Strikers 5-1, so the Kickers must have done something right.
Not exactly - instead what they had were some very good youth coaches that worked with some very talented young kids (many of whom came from lower income Hispanic families). Producing good players is not a magic formula. You find reasonably athletic kids, you teach them proper fundamentals at a young age, you create an environment that encourages work hard and practice on their own and you give them good competition to play against.
Are you sure this is SUDano? This is nothing new, although I'm probably doing a much better job of articulating my thoughts in this area.
The issue isn't quality of competition - when the Academy teams did play a few non-academy teams in some games last year the record of the Cal-South Academy teams was almost the same in these games as was their record against non-Cal-South Academy teams. Instead it is US soccer trying to force a model onto a lot of kids that they do not desire and probably is not in the best interests for a lot of them.
If you were running your show, why would you want to take a job at a professional club? In LA for example Chivas has turned over their entire program twice in the past two years at mid-season. Galaxy has had a new U18 coach almost every year in its existence. Plus the money is not as good. The commute is probably not as good. The non-professional clubs are a more stable, but the top guys are the ones who have been their the longest and are not necessarily the best. They often get some good young coaches, but when these guys are good enough they will soon get a reputation and form their own club. In terms of college, I think the scheduling is better than you describe. As I've pointed out most of the true prospects are in a few leagues and most face a strong schedule. And if they do have a few cream puffs, it is often not a bad thing as it gives them a chance to get their bench players more playing time and give their starters a rest. Clearly of the NCAA were more tiered it would be better. No argument. However, I also think more kids are motivated by playing for better teams in better conferences than scholarship money. That is why the UCLA, Akron's, Maryland's are able to reload year after year. So once again while not ideal, I think it is better competition than many give it credit for.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/money-and-march-madness/ Interesting video about money and March Madness from Frontline. Apparently the creator of the whole financial system, Sonny Vaccaro, has gotten a bunch of former basketball players together together to sue the NCAA over the lack of compensation of players. If the system were to break down, that would be a tough, tough blow for college sports, high school sports that feed the colleges and, more specifically, the Development Academy in which the majority of players are focused on playing college soccer. I don't know what will happen with this lawsuit, but the focus on professional player development will dramatically change if Vaccaro and his colleagues are successful.
True as that is, the basic issue is still one of justice. What claim do college soccer programs have on the money generated by basketball? And at the risk of going down a tangent, if colleges are serious about having basketball players be student-athletes, they need to do more to facilitate their preparations for later life.
Just a small correction. This is a soccer site. Therefore, proper nomenclature dictates said individuals to be called "basketballers," rather than the term you used. Thank you, please carry on. Lol!
Basketballer was a term that was used a lot in the 20s-30s. It's since been slanged to "baller"........................ I knew those trips to the basketball hall of fame had some semblance of value.
What u don't realize is that DCU have lost their top players from u18 squad over the break, suli,kainoa, seaton.
I know what is going on with them. I watch them a lot. Like so many teenagers, they are all over the place and in serious need of adult leadership to refocus them. My experience with youth soccer is that often the "star players" that everybody talks about are not as important to the team as people want to believe. The truth is that the "star system" often covers up dysfunction in a team. FYI, Kainoa Bailey holds the ball too long, but he doesn't do it with purpose like the kid in Houston. I find that, with some players, they hold onto the ball to cover up that they are not reading the game quickly. Kainoa fits into that category. Stepping on the ball for no reason. Looking to do flicks that add no value to anything while missing opportunities to penetrate or exploit the other team. Michael Seaton took a lot of games off at the academy level and often became a "black hole" where the ball was fed into him and never came out. Suliaman Dainkeh is a good prospect and I was glad to see him make the under 18 team. In my eyes, they are missing one valuable player and two additions by subtraction. I am glad Seaton is doing better with the first team than he did with the academy, but I think over the course of his career, his tendency to put it into cruise control will come out. I think that he is a laid back kid who has a different perception of what effort is and how it should be used. If he does permanently transform his approach toward effort, it will evolve over a long time, but quite frankly, even though he had a great effort in the preseason, I am skeptical. Regardless, I thought his leaving the academy was as good for the academy team as it was for Michael Seaton. Unfortunately, the lack of focus that Seaton showed in the fall is now showing throughout the squad. Kids that I really liked during the fall, like Abdi Yusuf, are just losing their direction and talented kids that were holding it together, like Cristhyian Najar, have just given in and are all over the place. I am not sure what has happened behind closed doors, but something is not right with this team at the moment. Focusing on missing "Star Players" would just distract from the problem.
I don't mean to say that it should be 'simple'. Far from it, somebody somewhere that's a 'winner' in the current arrangement would have to lose out in the new one. And you're right, one of the big Catch-22s involved in youth development that it costs big money in a lot of ways, and if you're the LA Galaxy, it's hard to lay out that kind of dough until you have prospects generating transfer fees, and it's hard to have prospects generating fees until years after you've laid out the money. Exactly. Which is why I would think when and if we ever do get a successful system going, it would seem to involve having to incentivize coaches to do something they otherwise wouldn't. I don't disagree about that, either, but one thing occurred to me: Caleb Porter has less 'job security' at Portland than he did at Akron. . . but only if you look at it in a really short-term sense. If he gets fired out there, his college coaching credentials are still valid, and if anything, the mere fact of having coached in the pros should give him one more bullet than he had before. (Or to use another example, Greg Andrulis went to Columbus, got fired, landed at a better college program than the one he came from, and is still there.) Again, just coming from picturing the successful system where the pro clubs have the clout, the prospect of being fired in a year or two shouldn't be dissuasive; just from having been there, you should have a CV bullet that most of your competition doesn't. It's not that I'm trying to paint is as that bad in the context of normal thinking about college schedules. I'm saying more like, compare it to pro schedules. National champions IU played ranked (top 25) opponents 7 times (and several other teams I'm surprised weren't ranked). Not too bad, but imagine your Div I only had 35 or 40 teams in it. Then it would take an effort not to play top 25 teams. Yeah, the whole club system was born out of hucksterism, in a sense, it's surprising they made it as far as they have. At least it's likely a little bit harder to talk your way past a major organization that's been around a while than it is to talk your way around parents, which is all one had to do circa 1995.
On the other hand, Steve Sampson was an NCAA champion coach who rose to the US national team, qualified for a World Cup, and won an MLS title, only to find himself unable to land a job at major program. (In part, this is because openings at major colleges are rare.) But you'd also spend vastly more time and money traveling, and for what reward? Marginally better competition.
I would doubt he was really unable, (I think a lot of college programs would be damned fools not to hire a Steve Sampson if he actually applied, and I think they'd probably know it) I'd just guess that's no longer where his priorities were. In my original hypothetical, I'm basically transferring some portion of the scholarships from the schools that are no longer in the new 'Division I-A' to the schools that are. In that case, not only are you dropping the weak sisters, but every school left is fractionally better. In that case, it's probably worth it. If you're only dropping the weakest parts of the schedule, but adding a bit to the travel because of it, it might not be. (Although your walk-ons might still get a bit better.)
It was widely known that Stanford chose Bret Simon over him, and I've been led to believe that he has applied elsewhere, as well. That all makes sense to me, although it's extending pretty far into the realm of "what if." Also, I'd be wary of unintended consequences. For instance, if you give coaches a few more scholarships, there's a good chance they'll use them on older foreign players who can squeeze younger American players off the field. These days, even UCLA goes foreign.
Fair enough, I don't think he'd necessarily be able to name his school. But I would think there have got to be programs out there that aren't powers, who would like to be, who would love the name recognition (although it's been long enough now that most recruits wouldn't remember anything). True. Honestly, that doesn't worry me as much. If the rosters went from 80% American to 50% American, but the byproduct was better play, chances are in terms of professional development it would be more than worth it. It's only if the rosters went from 30% American to 10% American (which I don't think would happen) that you'd have a problem.
http://www.dartmouthsports.com/ViewArticle.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=11600&ATCLID=207055961 Not a DA but interesting in light of our recent discussion. While no one would mistake Dartmouth for an elite program, Cook was doing very well there.