Why Bradenton and DA are far less critical to US success than people imagine

As far as I'm concerned, the 3 videos linked in this post provide a nice visual explanation of some key points in the developmental process of elite players. They represent a more extreme example of the many young kids in this country no one knows about who are working with their dads (plus a few moms) and a few coaches to potentially become the elite national team soccer players of the future. They also go a long way in explaining how the US has emerged from a backwater soccer nation to one that is starting to compete with the best of the world. They also provide a visual as to why I've always maintained that the intense focus on Bradenton, the DA and college soccer is about 10 years too late in the developmental process to create elite players.

First is a clip from 2 years ago of a 4 year old learning to juggle. Notice the bilateral practice which is a key indicator of a player that has been systematically trained to play versus a player that picks things up more informally through imitation and self practice.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1uXgLS2908"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1uXgLS2908[/ame]

Second is a clip of the same child one year later at age 5. Notice the drastic improvement and the bilateral control. There are other clips showing other examples of deliberate practice.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORBUYfVYJKM"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORBUYfVYJKM[/ame]

Finally here is a clip of the same child just 2 years after the original clip actually playing. At 6 he's likely already more skilled on the ball than at least 25% (and probably higher) of the kids currently in the DA program and possibly even some players on our senior national team pool. Even though he's clearly right footed, notice his ability to "naturally" control and strike the ball with both feet. US best practices manual argues that from 6-10 "soccer is not a team sport" and that young children's "intellectual capacity to understand spatial concepts like positions and group play are limited." Yet if you look at the video (primarily from about 3:30 on) you can see this player is very aware of the position of his teammates and can be seen making one touch passes to open teammates on the opposite side of the floor. Many other kids his age are capable of similar things. The primary difference is training and higher expectations of his coach/dad.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhzuI4Q4JJ4"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhzuI4Q4JJ4[/ame]

According to the US soccer best practices "A primary focus for the coach at the youth level, through the U-12 age group, is to provide an environment that comes close to simulating the 'pickup' games of our youth." To their credit they also talk about the need to get comfortable on the ball and even go so far as to mention that mastery … "often (comes) with repetition".

In contrast, research on expert performance argues that that mastery requires almost 10 years of dedicated practice (meaning lots and lots of repetition starting at a relatively young age). The primary reason why the child appears to be creative is because his training has developed such a wide array of skills. He easily can recall and combine his skills to do things the rest of the kids on the floor probably can't even imagine. Arguably the best field player in US history is Landon Donovan. I don't know the exact details of his development as a young player, but what I do know is that I've read Donovan give credit to a trainer named Clint Greenwood. Every session of his I've seen was almost 100 percent repetitive ball skills and relatively little time for "creative" play. Others have said this is the way he trained kids.

The question for the people on this forum is whether the child in the video (who from my perspective seems much better off out of the public eye) become a future national team player, a performer for Circ de Soleil or somewhere in between? Given his ability to practice, the answer will primarily depend on how athletically gifted he is. Given his dad is a trained coach and a professional wheelchair athlete, the odds are probably quite a bit higher than for many other Ulittle phenoms that appear on YouTube or local parks. I'd say a very rough approximate breakdown of what it takes to become an elite professional attacking soccer player is about 40% innate athletic ability (including attitude, mental ability); 40% technical training; 15% competition and 5% tactical training. For those who would argue athletic ability is over rated, please keep in mind great players don't forget their skills or what to do with them. Instead through age or injury, they lose the athleticism that once made them elite. In the case of phenomenal youth players, the loss is instead their once significant maturation or training advantage.

The primary achievement of the DA to date has been to aggregate the mostly athletic talent in many places (no/very low cost options like Chivas, Galaxy, and LAFC along with reduced travel have largely allayed my initial concerns that costs would actually disaggregate it in our local area). While creating a good competitive environment is clearly important to a player's development it is far less important than making sure a young player has a very sound technical skills.

I maintain that Tim Beckham's countless hours of training had much more to do with his son's success than Manchester United's development system did. Certainly ManU helped fill in the technical gaps that assuredly existed and furthered his ability as a player. But if Beckham wasn't already quite as developed at a young age, he never would be considered a top flight player no matter what level of training ManU might still have considered giving him. Same goes for our DA programs.

As for college soccer I think a lot of people in the NBA and MLB might argue that most kids might be better off playing a year or two. What ever might be lost development wise on the skill side is often more than compensated by easing the difficult and large transition from youth sports to professional sports.

30 years ago there were a few dads and youth coaches in places like St. Louis and Kearney teaching children skills. As a result we had to rely on players that grew up outside the US to field a team that could qualify for the World Cup. Since then the numbers of knowledgeable parents have continued to grow on a scale that has been more exponential than linear. So while our top level players are often more weighted toward athletic players with some skill, we now are also starting to get more very skilled players with some athletic ability like former U17 star David Arvizu.

But critically, we are starting to develop Altidores and Donovans - players with the combination of enough athleticism and skill that they and future US field players might start to get into legitimate conversations about being world class. If the USSF really wanted to speed up the process of fielding a team with a realistic chance to win the world cup, project 2010 should have instead focused on the primary source of the problem and overhauled youth programs like AYSO (notice the child is playing with kids based on his ability and not his chronological age) and the younger ages of USYS. Imagine the kind of career a player like Frankie Hejduk would have had to date if he had this kid's skills at age 6 and spent the next 30 years refining and learning how to best use them.

 

I think you are missing the difference between correlation and causation. Either that or you are one of the few people that argue ODP has been a key factor in player development for the US. The fact that colleges have limited budgets and recruit heavily from ODP pools and DA does not mean that these programs played any part in developing the talent that is being recruited.

Many people will argue because of the DA, the US will now start to create great players. My argument is that while the DA has done a generally good job of aggregating and helping to identify talent, I don’t think it has had a major impact on player development. So while I think the DA has been and will be a positive factor, I just don’t consider it to be a significant one. For example, the leading scorer for Wake Forest is a freshman from Southern California named Sean Franklin. Yet I am fairly certain he was never part of the DA. Finally, just because I have D1 in my user name does not necessarily mean I coach men’s D1 soccer in Southern California (I don’t).

 

This child seems to be much more focused than a typical child. However, we don’t know how long these sessions ran or how they were structured. For example the dad could have challenged the child the make it all they way through the course without failing. If so, a motivated child will actually enjoy trying to make it all the way though the course. When one of my kids was around that age, we couldn’t get him to stop trying to make it across a set of monkey bars even though his hands started to bleed. If you make something goal oriented, provide encouragement and give the child a reasonable chance to succeed, children will actually enjoy the learning process. The reason why parents are so successful is that they care a lot about the outcome.

In this case you also have a parent that designed a very well structured program. In contrast, most practices for young children are very poorly structured. Not only do they not promote skill acquisition, but they also are uninteresting for the children. Free play does help make it interesting. However it doesn’t necessarily help make it useful.

To your main point, if the things they are doing are well designed there is plenty of time to give children a solid foundation to eventually choose a wide variety of future activities. Given the law of diminishing returns, most sports development experts have a very legitimate argument that specialization at a very young age is counter productive from a long term stand point. We see nothing but soccer in these clips. But for all we know this child is strong swimmer, takes karate, plays the trumpet and is an avid reader. As he matures he would have to narrow down his activities to be elite one of those areas, but at age 6 he could probably be pretty good at all of them if he had good teachers.

As for Arvizu, he’s no different from many accomplished HS musicians. These kids have spent hours and hours practicing since grade school for very little likelihood of long term monetary benefit. But that is not the point as there is still a lot value in the process of learning how to play an instrument well. Furthermore a kid like Arvizu was able to have some great experiences that very few kids ever get the chance to have.

 

Thanks for correcting a bit of a typo/memory lapse on my part. You are right his brother Mike Randolph played with Sean Franklin on the Galaxy which was probably how I got the names confused.

But to my main point, the issue is not whether a player is "known" or "unknown" but instead to the extent a certain process improves a players development. In theory the DA is supposed to significantly improve the development process such that Sean Randolph and other players in a non-DA team like CZ Elite should have have fallen behind in development as compared to players that went to DA teams. Given that Randolph appears to be doing quite well for one of the nations top teams, this doesn't appear to be the case.

 

Randolph is largely irrelevant to the discussion and when and how he was recruited is completely irrelevant. The fact he was announced two months after their main recruiting class seems to indicate he was something of an after thought. But in any event, I just happened to see his name in a headline a few days ago and it popped in my head when an earlier poster challenged me to name a high level player that wasn't out of DA. I originally started to write Slammers player Reed Williams from UCLA 2010 recruiting class. But I reread the question and noticed the poster for some reason added ODP I then thought of Randolph since he was barely a blip on the OPD radar.

Going back point - I'm surprised no mentioned John O'Brien. He would be a more realistic counter argument about the importance of the DA academy since he went to Ajax just after he turned 17. That program had a great reputation and O'Brien, when healthy, was arguably one of the most complete soccer players to ever play for the US national team.

Of course I'd argue the key to O'Brien's success is that he had the very good fortune to train for many years as a young player under Afshin Ghotbi, the current coach of the Iranian National team who Hiddick brought on to help him with the Korean national team. At that time Ghotbi was running something called AGSS which was Ghotbi's version of a European model youth academy. O'Brien was clearly a very special player before he went to Ajax if for no other reason that Ajax agreed to take a player of that advanced age - especially a foreign player from the US. Furthermore, the general level of play in the US is much better today than it was 10-15 years ago. So while Ajax would still improve the development of a player today, the gap would not be quite as big as it was during O'Brien's development.

 

I agree. But again the key is not just running around playing but doing technically proper things. The advantage of higher quality games is that kids have higher quality material to model from. But these things are somewhat out of the control of the USSF.

What is more under their control is doing whatever they can to make sure the youth programs are well run and providing the necessary foundation needed to build great players. Some of the well run "Academy" programs that for Ulittles that clubs are starting to run (mostly for identifying and recruiting talent) will actually have a bigger impact than the training they do at the older ages.

 

I have never argued that DA was irrelevant. Instead that is will be at best a marginal improvement in some places and a little more significant in others. But it is not the transcendent step that many people believe it to be.

The critical part of the game is to get kids that will grow up to be very good athletes and get teach them proper skills at a young age so they will be ingrained when the start to reach maturity. Where academy becomes important is providing environment to develop skills related to speed of play. You can practice first touch and quick passing by yourself. You need a group of quick skilled players to do so. But is the training environment to learn these skills better in clubs like Real SoCal, LAFC, Pats better now that they are in the academy? Are they better than similar clubs like West Coast, Legends, CZ Elite etc.? I don't think much has changed. Where it has changed is in Bell Gardens due to Chivas. Now kids can stay in their local community and slower maturing cans can get a chance.

There are about 400 or so posts about the 14 year kid from Hawaii. Was trained at a young and has great skill on the ball. I wish him the best, but he's got a couple of challenges to overcome. The biggest is that for a HS aged kid, he's really physically challenged. There are hundreds of local kids his age that are probably more competitive than he is. Second is that the level of competition in his area is not very strong so it will be more difficult for him to develop skills related to speed of play. I'm also a bit surprised that people were so impressed with a 14 year playing indoors against 14 years but not as impressed by a 6 year old doing similar things against 8-12 year olds.

Finally to answer your question about JOB, I thought I read that he was around 14 when AGSS made a trip to Europe and was eventually signed at age 17.

 

Clearly that was not top opposition in the video. But is a huge age gap and that is clearly a very skilled, composed young player. Look at the technical quality that he shoots the ball with his weaker foot. Imagine if he grows up to have anywhere near the physical ability of athletes on the U20 team.

I'd bet a large percentage of the most technically gifted players started much closer to the time they started to walk than 7 or 8 that is more typical in the US. That is why many of so many of our youth national team players look more athletes who play soccer rather than soccer players who are athletes.