A look at the SoCal division restructuring impact to date

In the Sept. 16, US Soccer Website article about the start of the 2011-12 U.S. Soccer Development Academy season, one of the highlights was the fact that “The SoCal Division in particular is undergoing significant restructuring. All teams are moving to a 10-month season with the exception of San Diego Surf. During the off-season, Cosmos Academy West merged with Chivas USA.”

Claudio Reyna was quoted as saying “The clubs that are going to a 10-month season is the most important change” He was also quoted as stating “Planning for a 10-month season is something new for them, but will provide the players more time to train which is important for their development. Around the world, kids at the U-15/16 and U-17/18 age level play for 10 months and they train more than our kids, so this helps us close that gap. It's an exciting move for the Academy clubs to commit more overall hours to this environment.”

We since we are now well into the second month of the season it seems to be a good time to take a look at how these changes have helped or hurt the development environment for players in Cal-South. This post will examine the actual changes to the teams. The second will look at the impact to the overall environment to Academy age boys in Cal-South. The third will look at the impact on individual players.

First lets look at the actual changes as far as I’m aware of: Surf no change.

Chivas – No real change. Last year they took a break from mid-December to mid-Feb. This year they seem to be moving their break up from right after the showcase to the last week in Jan.

Nomads – Nomads had a schedule similar to Chivas. So I don’t think there are any significant changes for them.

Galaxy – Last year the Galaxy practiced 10 months but did not schedule any league games from Jan to Mid March so as to not conflict with High school games. From what I understand the players were allowed to play High School if they agreed to attend Galaxy practices instead of High School practices, except if the players had games HS games scheduled on those days. Players that didn’t want to participate in HS continued to practice as usual.

Arsenal, Pateadores, Real SoCal, Strikers – There is no real change in the amount of training time available for these players. During the first four seasons the players on these teams would play in the fall with the clubs U16, U17, and U19 Coast Soccer league teams. Prior to the winter showcase, these 3 teams would be combined into two Academy teams. Since the U17 had a different cut-off the younger U17 players would play with the U16 academy teams and the older U17s would play with the U18 Academy team. The same staff would coach in the fall and the spring. The one big exception was Pats. While all clubs added some players from other clubs, the Pats combined with South Bay to help them go from being having the worst teams in the Conference to some of the best in the entire academy.

Since all CSL league games where held on a weekend there is no real difference in time available to practice. The one exception to that might be on the few occasions there were two games on a weekend, the coaches might choose to give the players Monday off. Of course this is no different in the academy. So the truth of the matter is that with the exception of the Galaxy kids who missed practices for High School games, all the talk about more there being more time available to practice has little basis in reality.

 

Part 2 – Impact on the playing environment

What many people may not realize is that in terms of competition, Cal-South had academy type competition called the CSL Premier League well before US Soccer put together their Academy League. Even last year, some of the best teams in the Premier League were not academy teams and players. Real Arsenal, Cosmos, Irvine Strikers, Pateadores and Real SoCal all had their teams and players in the Premier league. Yet United FC went 10-0-1 at U19 while the South Bay teams won U16 and U17. Last year the South Bay Pats 16 team went 14-5-9 and their U18 team went won the Academy championship with a 14-13-1 despite losing 12 games by forfeit. The year before when the South Bay kids did not participate in the Academy program, the Pats U16 Academy team was last in the division with a 5-15-5 record while the U18 was also dead last with a 3 – 21 – 5 record.

Last year, only Cosmos' U16 team, Arsenal's U16, Arsenal's U17 team, Real SoCal's U19 team and Cosmos' U19 team won more games than they lost. The best Strikers team was 3 games below .500. Finally, the U17 Division Premier Division Real SoCal and ISC Strikers finished in 11th and 12th place respectively with just 1 win between both clubs.

The reasons why a lot of the best players and teams don’t play in the academy program are many. In many cases is it about money. The Galaxy and Chivas are at no cost, but they can’t come close to taking everyone that is good enough to play. For others the transportation needed to get to practice may not be accessible or the time needed to get there is not worth the benefit. Some kids want to play with their friends on the club team while many others want to play in High School. The UCLA assistant coaches are also the Galaxy Academy coaches, yet UCLA players like Evan Raynr, Andrew Tusaazemajia, Reed Williams and Jake Tenzer all decided to play high school soccer. U18 national team pool players like Miles Byass and Steve Palacios also chose to play high school. Many players and families find the coaching, competition, cost and playing time feel in the Academy programs is not worth the benefit of changing from their current teams. Other times kids try out, but more familiar though ultimately less capable players get selected.

This year is very different. Instead of getting high quality games every weekend kids from Strikers, Real SoCal, Arsenal and Pats now get an academy schedule filled with weekends of no games in the fall and the spring. Kids from non-academy clubs who later are often added to the rosters now play in a league without the Academy kids. What makes the environment even worse for academy age players is that the younger teams from academy clubs and some non-academy clubs broke away from CSL to form the Southern California Development League.

While it can be easily argued that CSL’s unwillingness to adjustment to a changed environment caused the problem, the net result is that the older kids are the ones that got hurt. From this years U17 group about 1/3 are still playing with their teams in CSL, 1/3 are on teams in the new league and about 1/3 are in the academy league. While there are still some good non-academy teams, the competition they face is much watered down. In contrast the Academy kids face reasonably strong competition, but unlike virtually every other place in the world, they are no longer coming close to playing games every weekend. While everyone focuses on the latest young hotshot at the end of the day there are a lot of guys like Wondolowski, Demerit, Conrad, Ching etc. who end up doing far better. If we destroy the non-academy environment, we will be hurting a lot of kids who could have made a big difference later on.

 

part 3 - The players

Below is a table of games so far this year for all the kids who were named as Western Conference Best XI last year. * Denotes USDA Best XI. NG means no game scheduled. NP means they didn't play in a game that was scheduled. Each Academy team played a game against the California Development Academy club on the weekend of Sept. 3 so each of these players might have played and Sorto might have played a couple more games in that league with SB since he was not originally on the Galaxy roster. If there are two numbers under the same date that means there were two games scheduled that weekend.

Code:

2011 West Conference Academy Best U18 Best XI (SoCal Div Players)									
Player Name	Last Yr	Current	10-Sep	17-Sep	24-Sep	1-Oct	8-Oct	15-Oct	22-Oct
Javan Torre 	SB/Pats	Galaxy	?	90, 90	NG; 	 90,  	45; 	NG; 	NG
Marvin Iraheta 	Cosmos	aged out 							
Dennis Flores 	Arsenal	Unknown							
Reed McKenna 	Surf	UCLA							
2011 West Conference Academy Best U16 Best XI (SoCal Div Players)									
J. Cervantes 	SB/Pats	Galaxy	?	90, NP	NG	NP	71	NG	NG
Oscar Sorto*	SB/Pats	Galaxy	?	?	NG	66	69	NG	NG
Raul Mendiola*	Arsenal	Galaxy	?	75, 15	NG	85	NP	NG	NG
Juan Samayoa 	RealSC	RealSC	?	80, 90	90, 90	NG; 	NG	90	90
Rob Escudero*	SB/Pats	Pats	?	90, 67	NG	90	NG	67	90, 70
Chris Carrillo 	Chivas	Chivas	?	13, 24	NG	64	NP	90	NG
Justin Dhillon 	Galaxy	Galaxy	?	90; 90, 90	NG:	70; 	NG; 	NG

The reason I picked these players is because they in theory represent the best of the best and should be playing a regular 90 minutes week after week. Last year only Samayoa didn't play 30 Academy league games (he played only 29. Last year everyone of these players with the exception of Carrillo and Dhillon also where on teams the played 11 CSL games in the fall (of which they likely played all of them slnce the rosters for CSL were smaller). Dhillon played on a good HS team in a good league and only Carrillo played the 10 month schedule similar to this year.

Several things to notice: One of the goals of the development academy is to teach players to play 90 minute games. Yet many of these players rarely get 90 minutes during a weekend. Much of the time they are playing no games or playing 180 minutes or close to it. This brings up another point that if teams are rosters of 22 to 27 players, you would think playing time would be much more evenly distributed when there are two games on a weekend. But this does not seem to be the case. While a top player might get 170 minutes a weekend, his teammate might get 10. So much for the big concern of overworking kids and development.

Another interesting thing is that Carrillo and Dhillon have played just 13 minutes of U18 soccer between them so far this year. One would think these kids should be playing U18 this year, especially since they both played U18 games last year (especially Carrillo). But with Chivas and Galaxy packed with good players, it appears that they are playing on the U16s rather than picking up 10 - 15 minutes every 3 weeks like some non-starters appear to be doing. This begs the question of whether concentrating the talent on a Chivas and Galaxy is really good for development given neither of these teams play a more competitive schedule. Certainly a few minutes in the 10 reserve games a season doesn't make it worthwhile.

Finally I couldn't find out what happened to Dennis Flores. According to TDS he doesn't graduate until this year, yet I could find him on a roster. Also missing was Kevin De La Torre. I recall reading that he scored a bunch of goals for Chivas at Sum Cup this summer after returning from Bradenton, yet he is no longer on their roster.

 

I agree to a point. Promotion and relegation does cause some negative issues - especially for coaches on big named clubs that like to carry a full roster of very young paying customers. On the other hand, CSL's structure kept things honest and accessible. Clubs like Celtic, Valley United, Barcelona, Italia and the like provided anyone who could play an opportunity to do so. These and other lower cost clubs gave a lot of kids access to top leagues that otherwise wouldn't be the case.

It was pretty well know that top boys teams paid nowhere near as well as the top girls teams because in order to be competitive with the Latino based clubs, you needed allow a lot of kids to play at lower to very little cost. With a more closed shop and no competition from low cost clubs, it will be a lot easier to raise player costs. They can load up rosters and talk about how game time is not important compared to practice and won't have to worry about getting hammered by some unknown Latino team where the kids are constantly playing games.

 

Is it better to be playing almost every minute of every game with Pats or practicing Chivas and splitting minutes with a bunch of other good attacking players? Many people will think that latter, but I think playing is better. Of course one can also make a very good argument that SoCal kids don't play games since neither Chivas nor Pats had Academy games the first two weekends in November.

 

Why would playing less in Chivas help him more to become a pro. Clubs world wide send their players to other clubs to get them playing time.

 

You are constantly quoting theory. I prefer to deal with reality. It is not about being a "star" but instead it is actually playing. If the training in the USDA is so much better than what is outside of it, then how did South Bay come in and beat everyone? How was Jose Villareal able to get good enough to attract interest from Borussia Dortmund U23?

If you read the Galaxy boards to talk to people who know their youth team they will tell you one of their better prospects is a kid named Matt Tilley. He came from West Coast (where they used to play games every week) last year and joined the Galaxy in the Spring. He was moved of their U16 team to their U18s and I heard from some people he was the strongest defender they had at that level. This year he's started just 2 games and is now supposedly looking overseas.

Finally if you were more familiar with how things really worked, you'd realize that some smaller clubs in England for example are know for having very good academy programs. One reason MLS teams are important is that they are not pay to play. The other reason they are of value is that they allow kids from Academy teams to play with first team players. But if a kid is not going to be involved with the first and his parents are able to pay, then being a full-time starter at an Academy club like Pats is better than being a part time starter at a club like Chivas or the Galaxy.