Didn't know that, thanks. For some reason girl's soccer was a spring sport where I grew up but boys' was played in the fall.
Midwest (Plains), West, & South - Boys & Girls are usually in the Spring. Lots of crossover between FB/Soccer in OK
Then why don't successful soccer nations use college to develop "depth guys"? I disagree. The university is for gaining knowledge in academics. It's not a place to develop as a soccer player. That doesn't mean good players won't emerge out of college. But on the aggregate you will have a much lower return of quality players than if you sent the same players through a pro-style academy. If Ronaldo at the ages of 17-20 stopped training at Nacional and enrolled at Akron U, by the time he was 21 he would have been half the player he is now.
Because college sports in general, as we have them in the US, don't exist anyplace else in the world. I don't disagree with any of this. But nobody in their right mind is going to give up a college education to make 30k a year as an MLS bench warmer. My benchmark for when MLS will have truly made it is when the worst-paid player in the league makes over $100k. When that day comes (and it will), then large numbers of good (but not great) teenage players may choose to forgo college eligbility to go pro at 16. Until then most of them will stick with the college route, as well they should--unless you're suggesting 16-year-olds who have the talent to get a cup of coffee in MLS but not much more (or a free ride at UCLA) should give up a free college education and millions of dollars of future earning power in exchange for the knowledge that they very marginally contributed to the overall talent level in MLS. Like I said, the college development system isn't ideal, but it isn't going anywhere--so MLS and USSF need to work with the NCAA to help make it the best possible secondary talent pipeline it can be. ETA - If you looked at my earlier post (may not have been in this thread, I'm a few glasses of Glenmorangie deep) I suggested putting kids through the academies and then the ones who can't get a pro contract by 19 would have their choice of signing with a lower division or foreign team, entering the draft, or going to college. Most of these guys would probably go college, raise the level of play in the NCAA, quite a few would end up on MLS rosters and some would probably end up as quality players. For the record, Didier Drogba got his first pro game when he was 22.
I'm sure there are thousands of kids that would opt for the MLS and much less than 30k a year over a free ride. Its not about the money for most
That's right. It's the barrier to entry that is the problem. The only way for most kids to get into MLS is college then draft.
Most don't get a free ride since NCAA only allows 9.5 or 9.9 scholarships. Given the amount that parents invest between 8-18 to develop an elite player for vying for one of those partial to full rides, they're much better off investing it over that decade to pay for school, but there are a lot of people who like to live vicariously through their children. But the shot is even harder for a shot at developing a pro player that will make enough to not just pay back that investment, but be able to support themselves for any length of time.
can someone tell me why the college system can't work for soccer but does work for every other major american sport? i don't think its a change of system that is required... change of coaches, change of emphasis, change of salaries for professionals... etc... but the system has proven to be very good at pumping out elite professional athletes in other sports. just because it's done a different way in other countries, does NOT mean we can't do it this way here. the point is... if soccer was as popular as football or basketball, the college system would work because it would be geared to do so. IF the day comes that soccer players make as much money as some of you are saying in this thread (the required amount to get players to forego college and continue to play in clubs like europe does), soccer will be so popular at that point that the college system will be geared to handle it and pump out elite athletes. there will be no need to change to a euro style at that point. this is a cultural problem... it's a lack of interest and money in soccer. if that all changes... the college system will work just fine... much like it does for the NBA and NFL. in fact, we might see the day when MLS actually prefers players stay in college because it's less of a risk for them to take them on after several years of development. go ask some of these big euro clubs if they could have free farm system much like the NFL has in the NCAA instead of taking these chances on these young kids with large salaries they'd be fools not to take it. the thing is everyone here is so enamored of the european way of doing this. well guess what... here in america we have an incredible system of pumping out athletic talent. it works amazingly well in other sports. we don't have to be like them. we can do our own thing and be just as successful. we don't have to turn into germany. the path of least resistence is to take our existing infrastructure and use it to get more competitive. once you get the best athletes in america playing soccer and the best coaches coaching in college... college soccer will be unbelievably competitive. it's a system that's proven and works. the only thing missing is the athletes. but that's a problem even if you have your euro style clubs. that's still a big problem... and having that euro style set up won't change it. you will have just invested all this money into something that won't work. you want our soccer teams to be good? soccer needs to get more popular here in america. more athletes need to play the game. our system will work just fine if those things happen.
Easy. The answer is global competition. And your definition of 'work' isn't a global one. Is the NCAA FB champion a world champion? The NCAA's main purpose is protectionism. It doesn't answer to anyone, save the handful of university presidents and bureaucrats in Indiana. If it had to take responsibility for developing world-class soccer talent, it would, at a minimum be a money-losing proposition that failed miserably in preparing athletes for the global stage. It's easy to say, we'll college football is good and that seems entertaining, but that's only played in the US. So it has the competitive effect of hosting a tournament in your own backyard where you take all the winnings regardless of the outcome. Simply put, the NCAA isn't an organization that can handle the responsibility of developing athletes for a global stage. It's really nothing more than a bunch of wanna be civil rights lawyers in Indiana.
Edit: The NCAA is an organization that isn't designed to produce world class soccer players, but rather it was designed as a governance mechanism for amateur competitions between universities. Two wholly different things..
you could say the same thing about the euro countries too though. their system is benefiting from a lack of global competition... from the USA. the fact is, we have a lot of high quality athletes in america. not only that, but we have a seemingly infinite amount of dollars invested in infrastructure, support, training, etc to make them even better. small euro countries benefit from a lack of global competition from us. just in the same way the NBA (to a lesser degree now) and the NFL benefit from a lack of global competition from euro countries. my point was it's not the system that develops this talent that makes the difference (college vs youth clubs)... it's the number of world class athletes who participate in them and the amount of resources and funding that goes into developing them. If soccer had the financial and cultural support that football does in this country, there is no doubt that college soccer would be played at an extremely high level... rivaling that of any reserve side in europe.
One word, money. Football and basketball make huge amounts of money for universities and the NCAA. So, there is a vested interest in keeping those athletes improving year round instead of just during their seasons. Look at football. Regular season, bowl season, spring season, summer camps. And this is just the above board. Throw in the mandatory "non-supervised" team activities and conditioning programs. They go as close to year round as they can get. Sports like soccer have to beg,borrow and scrape for everything they get just to make it through a season. They may get access to some of the facilities, but not all of it. They get access to personal trainers who get paid to wait for football players and basketball players to come and work out. For it to change, it would take some wealthy benefactors to come in an donate very large sums of money specifically for soccer facilities and staff. And that would have to happen at each university.
And even then, US Soccer athletes have some of the best facilities in the world, just by virtue of sharing with other sports. I don't think an improvement in facilities would have a dramatic improvement in performance of top-flight soccer talent in the US, because there are a lot of countries that are successful with far less than we have, Brazil and Argentina being good examples. That strikes me as arrogant. Could you prove the claim that US athletes are 'higher quality' than the rest of the world? You're basically saying that this mythical high quality population of athletes in a population of 300 million trumps the potential athletic ability in the remaining global population of 5 billion. That's shaky. Do you really believe that? Even if there were a higher % of 'high quality' athletes, the nuances of the game preclude some of the perceived advantages that benefit other sports. Namely, size and strength. How many 7 foot soccer players do we need?(okay, one) And it certainly becomes a limiting factor as height goes over say 6'5. The population of potential soccer players in the US narrows pretty quickly based on height, size and above all, preference. Our biggest challenge is that athletes in the US have other choices in sports. The rest of the world, it's soccer or nothing. That being said, we have two fundamental problems that US leadership seem content on avoiding. Namely, youth soccer in this country focuses on winning far earlier than our peers in smaller, more successful countries. In countries like the Netherlands, skill development trumps winning, at least for the early ages. We have a shortage of qualified coaches. And by qualified, I mean licensed, trained, experienced developers of talent. We are going to have to import, develop and train coaches before we can expect to see better performance from our players. There are still youth soccer associations that have 3k kids signed up, but have maybe 30 coaches with significant experience. They need 300. Some combination of importing and developing has to happen before most of those kids learn the valuable bits of the game. The US collegiate model is at best a sideshow for other sports. Tennis and baseball being good examples. So I can't help but be skeptical when I hear that the US collegiate model could offer anything to soccer development in the US.
I don't know about that. Just because some of those countries are "impoverished" that doesn't mean money doesn't get spent on facilities. Nike has literally paid hundreds of millions of dollars to Brazil just so they wear their equipment. They're currently paying $34 million per year. And each negotiation of the agreement they pony up $100 million plus. If they're not putting any of that into facilities, shame on them. I'm guessing the good clubs in both Brazil and Argentina have better than you'd expect facilities for training. Particularly at the level we are talking about.
results speak for themselves. we are a highly developed and wealthy country with a reasonably high proportion of athletic people. because of those reasons, we produce a ton of athletes. maybe some countries have a higher percentage but they don't have our wealth and our sports culture... both of which are required to churn out world class athletes at a high rate. obviously a 7 foot tall baskeball player isn't going to be a good soccer player. but there are many guys who aren't that tall who play sports other than soccer. there's a plethora of over more popular sports to choose from... it isn't unreasonable to think that some of those would fit very well on a soccer field. your two fundamental problems will be addressed when soccer becomes popular here. when or IF that turning point ever occurs and soccer is more popular than football or basketball, there will be enough qualified coaches to go around and there will be an increased awareness at even the youngest levels of youth soccer for "skill development" as you call it. we will be a much more sophisticated soccer culture when more people play it... when more people watch it. If that point ever comes where soccer is the most popular sport in america... similar to the NFL today... i don't think we will need a euro style club system. we will have an infrastructure in place. and we will use that. creating a euro style club system for development without soccer becoming way more popular doesn't even make sense. it's the wagon before the horse. that's not going to get more kids playing soccer. that needs to happen naturally and gradually over time. the fact of the matter is simply getting numbers of athletic kids playing soccer up will solve a lot of our perceived developmental issues. athletes pretty much solve everything in sports. thats the way it is. if the netherlands or brazil or spain weren't remotely athletic... i have news for you... they'd stink. to do what they do on the field requires a tremendous amount of athletic ability. it's an incredible feat actually... the amount they run combined with the precision and skill it takes... you can't get that soft touch, precise pass or incredible balance after running back and forth for 45 minutes without some shred of athletic ability. it just doesn't happen. we need better athletes. period.
Their is definitely some corruption, and I'll be the first to admit some of the clubs like FC Sao Paolo have incredible facilities. I just don't think soccer is so complex that facilities are a tremendous determinant of success. It doesn't hurt, but it doesn't have to be world class, either. But I think if you look at the average player in Brazil, you'll find they are grateful just to have shoes....
The Netherlands is efficient with scarce resources. They have around 1 million kids playing soccer in a population of around 16 million. The US population is over 300 million, so you gotta think there are a good number of kids playing the sport in the US, too. But at the same time, their development philosophy is different. This article explains it more succinctly than I can..but bottom line, they have to develop the talent they have, they can't simply let Darwin weed them out. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/magazine/06Soccer-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 If it were purely a game of athletic ability, the Dutch wouldn't be any good. I think it's a gross oversimplification to suggest that it's purely a matter of athletic ability.
O/T but have to wonder the atheticism of Dutch footballers? The average Dutch guy is nearly 6'1 but you see loads of guys on their NT are under that height. Sneijder is 5'7, Robben 5'11, Van Der Vaart 5'9, RVP 6'1. Heck even 1 of their GK's Vorm is only 6 feet. Just something I was curious about.
the dutch are good at developing talent. that's not my point. but they couldn't have gotten good at developing it without a soccer culture.. a large percentage of their population who live, breath and play soccer from an early age. we don't have that here... regardless of whether we push up euro style developmental clubs. we don't have that here. and because of that... we will not be successful with adopting that style. that is my first point. my second point is... that by the time we do develop that culture... assuming we ever get to it at all.... we will have the numbers of athletes playing soccer and an existing structure to accommodate it. we do have good coaches here and some really good youth clubs. we also have some really good college coaches and some fairly decent college teams. the problem is we don't have enough. when we get that soccer culture... guess what? there will be more. more athletes playing the game... more sophisticated youth clubs... more sophisticated college programs driven by revenue and everything that drives college football and basketball. you are putting the wagon before the horse. a euro style club program with youth and reserve teams feeding up to pro teams will NOT make the US a powerhouse in soccer. it's the other way around. those countries were able to successfully build that system because of the culture and money supporting it... and infusion of every great athlete in that country. that's why. not the other way around.
Alejandro Bedoya got his degree from Boston College Clint Dempsey went to Furman(don't think he got a degree) Geoff Cameron went to West Virginia but got his degree from URI Matt Besler got a degree from my school, THE University of Notre Dame That is it for our starting line up I believe.
I think Dempsey was successful in spite of the coaching he received. The guy is insanely talented and should have been playing against tougher competition earlier in his career. While he's one of the US most accomplished players overseas, I believe he could have gone further. FTR, the MLS push to mimic the academies of the European clubs is a good move, but Dempsey preceded that era by at least five years.