In defense of the $1000 "C" team . . .

I agree but I don't think clubs should charge the same $$$ for C/D teams unless they are really developing - i.e. same coaches from A/B, same practice times/same drills/all players practice together etc... But we all know that the C/D teams generally get the C/D coaches and are likely to continue at that level unless they are exceptional athletes.

Rec should be overhauled completely in order to develop D and C players at a very minimal cost IMO.

I don't think C teams are sub par, shouldn't be playing etc... I think they often do not get the resources they need to progress forward and that a ton of clubs use C/D teams strictly as money makers. In these cases - charge less at the very least.

There are already some clubs who tout themselves as Intermediate in my area - mostly C/D teams with volunteer parents who grab their E and D license.

They are charging $700.00 for an entire season which is doing it right IMO.

That said my kids best friend is on one of these teams - dad asked in fall "When will we play you?" and just this spring at a bon-fire "When is our game?"

Demonstrates that most people in the far NW are not up to speed on youth soccer - which I am fine with.

Not fine with Clubs intentionally nurturing that line of thought however.

 

My daughter's team did this in TX at the U13 level. They had won the league title several years in a row. The coach approached the parents and gave us the option of competing in the boy's league the next season. We knew we would not win very much, but the girls would be pushed. It was a good age to do it as the girls were hitting their growth spurts and were actually bigger than most of the boys, though the boys were still faster for the most part. I think any later than that is tough.
My daughter did practice with some good boys teams and it helped prepare her for college play, along with playing ECNL.

 

None of it will matter in a couple years.

Half the kids on the A team will no longer be on the A team because they will be the young kids in their group and half the kids on those lower teams will be on the A team. My boys are born throughout year in different months so I have no dog in the hunt.

But the ship is about to be shook and all those super stars are going to have a tough time when they are not physically and mentally the sharpest kids on the field due to age.

 

Let me toss this out as a trial balloon (likely for a future column):

A typical club should have an A team and a B team playing in whichever competition is the major league in the area. Club passes should allow movement between those two. You could even get all fancy and call the B team "reserves." (OK, maybe parents wouldn't go for that.)

After that, clubs should offer multiple "developmental" teams. Accommodate as many players are you can. Just make sure they're willing to make the commitment to train twice a week, make sure they're not disruptive, and maybe hold a tryout just to make sure they're really interested in playing. And that they're coachable.

Some of the players would be full-time developmental, which would mean they don't play in the rec league. Some would be part-time developmental -- they play in the rec league but get called up a couple of times a season to play "travel."

Thoughts?

 

I like it!

 

I think it is a fantastic idea. I think it is horrible in many places that kids are told at the age of 10 that their soccer playing days are over as they are just not good enough. How many late bloomers are being kicked to the curb?

 

Exactly.

The difference between the 30th best player at your club and the 50th best at a tryout at age 8 is negligible. Yet either one of them could be an A-teamer at U12 and a world-beater at U16. So why put them on completely different tracks?

 

This!!! The difference in an "a" and "b" team at anything below u13 is usually about 11 months.
80% of "a" team kids are having birthday parties in September, October, November.
While most "b" teams are made up of kids born in April, May, June.
And "c" teams are made up of kids that might have good skill but are small. Or aren't quite coordinated yet, but have a strong desire to compete. Or have good skill and are competitive, but are just too slow.
The birth year changes will be very interesting. I coach a "b" level team at the u11 level. We play 11v11 with a 15 player roster.
With the birth year changes, we would lose 5 players who were born in 2004. The remaining 10 are all born in 2005. These 2005 players are pretty strong (2 of my best are 2004, it will hurt a bit to lose them). Will we be an "a" level team once the changes are made? I guess we'll find out.

 

I think the impact is going to be huge - bigger than expected. I understand that USY is going to even be looking at the validity of tournaments - not that they can stop a club from making money but certainly this "Non-Profit" stuff may come into question.

It will be interesting to see how this gets managed - if at all, and who will be in charge of doing that.

 

I think doing a tournament when they just come back from a break is useless. It takes at least a month or more training to get ready for a tournament.

 

Agreed...

We just did a festival. Club took 7 u10 boys teams and 4 u10 girls teams and mixed them all up.

Told them to have at it - playing possession ball and distributing from the back forward - no punting.

More like free play - had refs and so on but not an all - out tourney like atmosphere.

From what I was led to believe - this is the sort of tourney that USYS is looking to promote at the lower ages.

 

I don't see the point of tournaments before they are playing full field soccer at U13. I don't even like double-headers for U12 and below, much less four games in two days (which is the norm for most tournaments).

Even at U13, four games in two days is excessive. The new US Soccer mandates call for U13 teams to play 2x35 minute halves with a 15 minute half time. So the powers-that-be are telling us that U13 players should play 70 minute games. Yet tournaments are having these same kids play 140 minutes of soccer game play in two consecutive days. That seems ridiculous to me. If 280 minutes of soccer in two days is appropriate, then why are regular U13 games not 90 minutes? Totally inconsistent.

Look at the World Cup as an example. Those guys get 3-4 days rest between games. Can you imagine if they instead were playing two games per day on two consecutive days?!?!

No one could possibly look at a youth soccer tournament and say that the format is conducive to long-term player development. Not to mention the toll they take on families in terms of both financial and time commitment. We keep being told that the results don't matter for U12 and below, yet the same clubs telling us this tweet out how proud they are of their U10 Labor Day Tourney champions and put pictures of kids with medals around their necks on their websites.

My U10 select team is playing precisely zero tournaments this year. We have 8 league games in the fall, 8 league games in the spring and we typically play 8 indoor games in the winter. Twenty four games seems more than sufficient to me. But most other U10 select teams in my area are playing 4-6 tournaments on top of the games my team is playing, meaning that they are playing 40-48 games per year. And that's with three months off in the summer, so those 48 games are packed into 270 days.

I hold some weekend training sessions for my U10 team in lieu of attending tournaments. I believe that my 9 year old players get more out of a single 90 minute training session than they do from 240 minutes of tournament games spread over a weekend. And the parents pay nothing, have a 15 minute drive to and from practice and have the rest of their weekend to do as they please.

 

I have a gu11 team. We backed off on tournaments this summer compared to last year. But we did play a lot more friendlier.
This will upset some of you, but from September 2014 thru August 2015, we played in 51 games. 24 league (12 spring, 12 Fall). The remaining were made up of tournaments and friendlies. I think it's too many and will keep it lower this year.

 

In our area, local league play leaves a lot to be desired…the one year my son’s team played in the local league, even playing up an age group offered my son and his teammates little in the way of a challenge, what good is it for anyone beating every team 0-12…regional tournaments (2-3 hours away), are really the only place they find comparable or better competition… now U13, they are doing a regional league, but even so, the teams they play against are mostly from the Chicago area (~3 hours away), so many of those league games get bundled into doubleheaders or mini-tournaments…

I would have loved to have just played locally the last 3 years or so, but think my son’s development and enjoyment would have suffered greatly….

 

~50 games in a seasonal year is not uncommon at U10/U11 select level. I'd say the norm is around 40 games. You play an unusually high number of league games in the fall and spring. From what I've seen, most leagues play 8-9 games, and I've seen as many as 10, but you play 12 league games. I've never heard of that. I'd actually much prefer that over attending tournaments.

With your team playing 51 games in a year, I wonder how many formal practices you have. I would imagine your training to game ratio can't possibly be more than 2:1.

 

I think tourneys are okay. Most I know of are typically 2 games one day and 1-2 games the next day.

So your looking at 3.5 hours of soccer for a u10 in one weekend. I see nothing wrong with that.

But what value one gets from that is different. I think many are just fine tuning new recruits on teams as well as getting kids back in the swing of things so they don't toss off their first few league games.

Not the right reasons and coupled with trophies and so on, it does become a step away from what should be just time on the ball.

 

I can see the value of tournaments in your situation. When I take my team to tournaments, we play the same teams we play in our league plus a few other teams that are pretty much identical to the teams we already play.

 

u11 and under I would say 1/3 of the teams we come across in tourneys are in our bracket\league. The rest are in a lower division.

U12 and up we will generally play in Regional based tourneys at competitive clubs... Minn, Thunder, MI Hawks, SLSG etc...

That way we are playing against teams where our kids have to push themselves.

 

We train 2x per week for 90 minutes. We take a month off in winter and a month off in summer. And a few weeklong breaks here and there.
We also do a pre-season (fall only) camp for 5 days. 3 hours per day.
Spring and summer are a little bit relaxed. Many kids play other sports and will miss a practice or a few weeks.

 

Sounds like your club needs to re-form the teams.

Do you have multiple local leagues splitting the talent, or does everyone drive from miles around to get to your club? If it's the former, the leagues should merge. It it's the latter, maybe your club should just form a house league instead.

 

You mean like multiple teams per an age bracket? Yeah, we don’t really have that…at least not when my son came up; things are changing a bit…most age groups behind my son (U13) are now able to field two teams…and just this year, the club is starting its own house rec league, so maybe things will change even more in the future…

There is one local league in the area….and while my son played in it, it didn’t provide much of a challenge, even when playing up a year…I guess we could have played up 2 years and find a challenge, but nobody was really motivated to do that…

This league is made up of 1 big area club (the one my son currently plays for), 1 medium-sized, up and coming club, and a handful of community/independent teams/clubs….outside of our local area, there are a handful of clubs from other somewhat smaller cities within an 1 -1.5 hour drive…

The problem is this 1 big area club is generally and collectively better than everyone else…it just tends to suck up the best talent, provide the better training, etc…we are kinda the big fish in a small pond (in very relative terms)…we just seem to need go a to a bigger pond to find a challenge, which has typical meant the St. Louis area and more recently the Chicago area…

Maybe it’s a big city, sprawling metropolitan area vs more isolated, even if large, city thing…even at 100,000+ once you leave the city limits, its mostly corn fields and very small towns…

 

If you're sucking up all the talent, then it seems like you should be able to field at least two teams that you can mix up so they're more evenly matched. Surely you also have a lot of players in the club who aren't world-beaters as well, right?

It just seems statistically improbable that you'd have an area in which you have a team full of extraordinary players and then no other players in that area, either at your club or elsewhere, who could help you make a player pool big enough to have a handful of decent teams.

 

First, I am not saying my son’s team is the best 19 or so kids in the area…some certainly are and there are some very good players in our area not on this team…however, they are all some of the best players in the area, and collectively they make the strongest team in their age bracket, by a wide margin…a margin that seems to grow every year….local teams that a few years ago, might have provided a little challenge, offer very little now…

Why is it improbable that in rather closed, limited environment, that one team through recruitment and development comes to dominate the local competition? This is not Chicago, St. Louis or the DC metro area with multiple big time clubs all competing with each other and vying for their share of a rather large player pool…in my area, there is one, established and dominate club…

I am not saying this an ideal or even a good thing (I would love things to be different, very different), but it is the reality my situation…and a reality that favors regional tournament play over local league play…

Now the top tier Chicago or St. Louis teams will clean our clocks six ways ‘til Sunday, but their lower level teams are far better than any other local teams in our area, and we can hang with them…

 

So if we did have two teams, are we suppose to play that team 12 times in row and call it a season?

Not that winning or losing matters, but doesn't variety count for something?