I don't know if there was a redshirt requirement the last time the Stanford players declined to play for their National Team, but they did indeed decline -- at least, they said they did. In my opinion, the redshirt requirement this year was a good one. It's too much to play the college season and an age group World Cup in an overlapping time period. See Andi Sullivan., who played with the full NT and overlapped with the college season.
Usually the U20 WWC doesn't overlap with the NCAA tournament; the only other years they've overlapped are 2004 and 2008. Other U-20 WWC tournaments have been held in August when colleges are more willing to let their star players go and play for the NT.
Playing for your national team in a global tournament should always trump any college season and I just do not understand any college coach feeling differently. The players should be encouraged to play for the USA in a World Cup at any age level. As we have seen the quality of the top World Cup teams is far superior to what is on offer with the college programs which, as has been mentioned, is all about speed, athleticism, physicality, size and rarely about playing a possession with a purpose game. It is doubtful any of the North Koreans would garner much interest from D1 college programs....they would be dismissed out of hand as being 'too small'. There can be no question the North Koreans would slaughter ANY D1 college team. One can only wonder if there are any D1 coaches out there who will now start to recruit 'soccer players' and 'soccer artists' rather than 'athletes'....don't hold your breath....
There actually are some college teams that play a possession with a purpose game -- not a bunch, but nevertheless some. The Santa Clara and Portland teams that won three national championships in the 2001-2005 period are examples. But, that was a while ago.
I'm pretty dubious of the whole, "there are better players who stayed with their college teams this year" argument. I don't doubt that there are players who could have made the US U-20 team who chose not to come out. Some of them were probably upgrades over what we had. However, there is absolutely no evidence that any grouping of US college players could consistently outplay Germany, Japan and France. The best college team this year, WVU, is basically Canada's farm system and Canada was the second worst team at this past U-20 World Cup. If all these other good US players are getting ran by a bunch of Canadians who are clearly second rate at the world stage, then the net result of choosing "better" college players probably isn't much different from playing who we played.
I like to see US soccer teams freeing themselves from playing like a basketball team, passing the ball directly to another player all the time and not in a more effective way in soccer by passing the ball into empty space for the attacking player to run into. Recently, I have observed some welcome changes to this mode of play in the USWNT and I hope it will continue. It requires good understanding between players which sometimes is difficult to attain when the coach places players in different playing positions in the team all the time. It is something Jill Ellis should pay attention to and avoid.
I agree that the allure of a YNT should have more stature than it apparently does. But, in part, I think it's because the players perceive (correctly ) that the flaws run both ways: YNT training is evidently not enormously better than what they're already doing, and so they don't gain noticeable improvement by committing to it. Then they're still underdogs going in, and not likely to outplay the other top contenders. And even if they did win a WWC-17 or -20, it doesn't make them stars in USA, nor even on their own teams, and doesn't help them get to the next level (NWSL). (And even the "next level" is not much of a carrot, and you'd earn more with your degree at a real job.) At most, it's a footnote in their bio. Consider it dispassionately, and it could seem like a whole lot of work for no permanent benefit, and a low-odds shot at a minute payoff. You'd almost be better off spending the time in a CPR class, because at the end of that you have a skill and get a certificate. How could it be improved? We can't guarantee wins, so we could shift the guarantee to the quality of instruction. Bill it as the most intensive, skull-squeezing 8 months of your career, with gee-whiz tools and more resources than you've ever seen in your young life, all devoted to making you think ahead of the game. (Then we'd actually have to build that, but we could if we wanted.) We can't ask more hours per week of legwork, so we'll ... shift to brainwork. Doodling: More immersive? Camps last 2 weeks per month, all schoolwork to be done off-campus? This builds more of a team identity. (The following musings just don't fit into a short camp.) VR auditorium rooms, with full-team and small-group sessions. Each session is part film scouting, part instruction, part video game what-would-you-do-next. Teach triangles, diamonds, off-ball positions and movement, etc. The VR aspect allows a coach to set up a "canonical instructional position" and then have all players flick to goggle-views and see what they'd really see at field-level (adjusted to each player's true height ), with instructional lanes, cones, zones, and vectors superimposed. Then walk them through the film analysis, but letting them see the actual configurations. Top-down as in a textbook is very different from ground-level at real speed! Use eye-trackers to analyze where they're actually focusing attention, and train them to shift their reads correctly. (NFL and some colleges already do this for QBs.) Precious drill time (using your real legs ) then repeats these situations, so that everybody gets to see the patterns forming on-the-run, and solve them at game speed. For poor first touch or passing technique, it's probably too late to fix by this stage. But that can be part of the drill (and selection process): just demand that the ball go here-here-here, and then grade players on how well they get it done. If somebody knows she's grading poorly because she can't do the ball-catch-with-outstep skill, she uses an hour or ten of her after-dinner study time to grab another Heath wanna-be and they do the I-lob-you-footcatch game on their own, until their feet get smarter. (This ties into the immersion -- they need enough time together to actually form and execute week-long study plans.) Maybe bring in 30+ candidates, run them all through 4-week wringer courses, and cut the ones who grade the worst. (OK, maybe there's no budget for that even for the full WNT (ahem )) This would be ... way, way beyond the resources of any college program. It might seriously require 3-5 hours offline prep for every 1 hour of player work -- which could actually justify a full-time staff . Parts of it are already being used at the highest levels of their respective sports. Would this really create better training than what we do now? The downside, of course, is that much of this is remedial, fixing late what was never learned young. I don't seriously believe we can just leverage technology to cram for a final ... so when all those other nations incorporate all of the above, they'll leapfrog us again. In the meanwhile, I'd pay money to play this game That might actually be a backdoor route to disseminate such knowledge: somebody really does make Virtual Reality First-Person Soccer, which is like FIFA 2024 but at field-level, with realistic physics for line-of-sight occlusion, sounds, the spin on the ball, and turf conditions. (Fog/ Snow/At Thorns expansion set sold separately) Then kids might learn early on that you win by moving. Then every kid who agrees to play for a YNT graduates with a certificate in VR Technician I, and they go on to play for the NWSL Fauna (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Alphabet). That'll pull them in! Back in reality ... our YNT should be doing something like this already (except without the VR).
Wow! I don't think you understand the whole TEAM concept. Teams win or loss games. Also, tactics affect the outcome of a game. You are oversimplifying the issue.
Wow! I don't think you understand the whole TEAM concept. Teams win or loss, not players. Also, tactics affect the outcome of a game. You are oversimplifying the issue.
I don't think the USWNT needs to stop exploiting its traditional athletic superiority and suddenly become Japan. I'd just like them to play as a team and move as a team or move period. I don't think that's too much to ask.
The USA needs to concentrate of finding athletic soccer players....not 'athletes'....soccer is not a game of bigger, faster, stronger...it just isn't....that sort of stuff worked when the rest of the world didn't give a rat's rear end about girls/women's soccer....but they do now....soccer is a game of skill, of artistry, of creativity, of decision making, of game sense, of possession....the sooner 'coaches' realize this the better off everyone will be...as it is the previous USA domination in the women's game is a thing of the past....
If you look at it, the US never has "dominated" the women's game. At the highest level, they've consistently been one of the best teams, during some periods they've been the best, but they've never dominated. They're doing pretty much as well now as they've ever done.
This US U20 girls team was absolute CRAP! Same as the U17 team! Why do we continue to favor "Athletes" over skillful beautiful "PLAYERS"!? Wake up US Soccer! The U20 team's ability to only play bunker ball/kickball against both North Korea and Japan was an embarrassment! Talk about being such a one dimensional team. Where was our midfield? Who was our midfield? There was no skill, no passing, no control, no creativity, no movement off the ball, no understanding of how to effectively move the ball, no attack, etc, etc! The Japanese and North Koreans that come to our knees in height, absolutely schooled us! Michelle French needs to be fired immediately! She has no business coaching the national youth program! I watched the womens college cup game over the weekend between USC and West Virginia. OY VEY talk about "anti soccer" crap! I wasn't sure whether I was watching soccer or rugby! So unfortunate because this is the same crap we are teaching our youth at both collegiate and national level. Can't continue to rely on athleticism and strength. The rest of the world is catching up because they're teaching their girls "SOCCER" and not kickball!
One answer to all of this. Ellis/Gulati need to decide what the US style is. Choose youth coaches whose teams have demonstrated an ability to play this style and let the new coaches choose and train their players in that style.
I don't know about Gulati having a say, that seems a little odd. With him involved, my concern is that a push would be to have the men and women play the same style. In that case, the decision essentially would be on a style for the men and then require the women to adopt it.
Just FWIW, I have no idea how much say French had in who was chosen and why, or how good the people who weren't chosen were-- but given who was actually there, I think she did very well with them. That team was not among the best there, and was greatly affected by college rules fitness. There were people leaving three trails from early on all over the field over and over. Bunkering France to a draw got them the group stage win, and they at least had a chance in the games they lost, though winning would have been against the run. If you are convinced that French had full control over who she wanted to win or lose with, that's different-- but the actual matches seemed to reach the team's max, so...
Sometimes I feel it's not about who plays the best soccer who is chosen on our USWNTeams. Sometimes I feel it's those chosen that will draw the best crowds once they get to the senior team and get the most screaming little kids and their soccer dads to the numerous, ridiculous exhibition games against third world countries where they win 7-0, games. A popularity contest from youth to senior team. I get that thought/feeling at times, I don't know.
That seems like a real stretch to me -- looking at young players and thinking about who would be big draws if they make it to the senior team. If better players are being missed, my guess is it is because players get identified for youth national team looks at a very young age, which tends to exclude late bloomers the players who get identified are those whose parents push very hard to get them working their way up the ladder at a very young age (e.g., ECNL, GDA, ODP) as compared to other parents who aren't that into it or who are concerned about their daughters being more well rounded than a "go for broke" approach would allow players are self-selecting themselves out because they want to have a childhood and youth beyond the pretty much full time commitment that is required these days to work your way up the ladder (I have a young player friend, a good #10, who recently declined to take a step up the hierarchy because it would have cost her both weekend days when travel/carpool pickups are included, and she already is playing four other days a week.)
I imagine one of the biggest issues is identifying players. Look how big and spread out the US is. How many leagues, clubs, and other factors are there. I'm not really up to speed on how it works on the girls side but on the boys I'm involved with the DA program. What was told to me was that it was created so that there was a better, more centralized way of identifying players. The clubs involved can recommend those players to US soccer and those US soccer officials will scout and determine if those players are of the caliber needed for the National team program (at whatever age level it happens to be at). The DA has been expanded this past year in our state so we won't really see how well it functions for quite a few years yet. But I feel a more organized and structured program is needed in order to find the players, especially in a country as large as the US. There are and will be players missed though, no system is infallible. However, there needs to be a better scouting system for the US as a whole and that requires cooperation from all parties to make that happen.
I think that's the technical director's job to choose the style and implement it at every level. The weight of history and past wins probably makes it hard for US Soccer to move to a different style ?
Yes, past wins. But the world has changed. And many of those wins were against poor opponents in meaningless exhibition games where the likes of Abby Wambach can score 4 goals and celebrate like they really did something. (Man, I hated those Pia days where she would celebrate uncontrollably on the sideline when someone from the US scores). Women's teams around the world are getting better and playing actual football. The USWNT better learn how to play actual soccer or they will get left behind in the future. April Heinrichs is the Technical Director, supposedly. Does she even know how to play a technical game? Has the game passed her bye? IMO, it's time for that whole string of coaches to go, starting from the Technical Director all the way down to the lowest age Youth Coach.
Not so much past wins, as the fact that USA has no national style, and no strong top-down infrastructure. We so highly value our local/regional autonomy and entrepreneurship that our social system shall always lean towards a vast, flat cloud of profit-matters clubs. Each club acts selfishly, for their own interests, to maximize win rates against other clubs that are doing the same thing. Rudimentary soccer tactics are endemic and pervasive because they're good enough for our current competition pools, and no alternative mentality can gain traction (by winning more frequently). Our club system is like marsupials in Australia who evolved without ever seeing a mammal or snake, and cannot thereafter outrun them. This approach works for us in most other youth endeavors, and there's no carrot or threat big enough to make us rethink it. (Or maybe there is, and this recent run is it.) N.B. our youth bb and vb teams (and ice hockey?) are facing similar problems these days: we don't dominate int'l youth competitions (except men's bb) because other teams show better skills and more focused training. Better top-down organization may or may not be the answer. Even our most successful pro systems (NFL, NBA) don't have strong farm systems with a track record of developing young talent who move up to the "first team". (MLB does, and maybe hockey, but they're the lovable exceptions who've always done it that way, and nobody's interested in copying their model.) We're creeping toward the point where pro soccer teams (MLS, eventually NWSL???) have strong academy teams who regularly play in lower-tier leagues, with the best talent rising. Can that eventually change the model? There's also the vexing problem that Reign's possession style loses against KC's counter Kids watch that and get the wrong message