It does, sure, and it sounds like it's not a bad idea at all to play a couple of tournaments. I was just a little skeptical at the outset because I see so much of the following: 1. "We have to travel three hours for a league game to get a competitive game. Never mind the fact that every other team within 20 miles of us beats us in State Cup. We're in a different league, so we don't play them." (I could name names, but I'll be nice!) 2. "We took the 12 best players out of a pool of 200 people and put them all on the same team, and now they can't get a competitive game!" In THAT scenario, the solution is pretty obvious -- split up those 12 players. Perhaps that's all the more reason we should be playing rec soccer longer than we do. You could still assemble those 12 players to go play tournaments, but the bulk of their games should just be in House. (Hopefully with weekly training sessions with good coaches in addition to or even instead of the typical House training.)
I understand your skepticism…I know there are lots of teams that travel just to travel; in search of status and/or rather meaningless wins and trophies…I like that think that’s not really the case with us; that we really do have a need for it… I think some of this disconnect comes down to demographical differences (the whole big city/small town thing I mentioned earlier)…I have to just smile at your examples, because there isn’t a team/club that plays State Cup (at least consistently) within 200 miles of us…and nobody around here has a 200 kids player pool to choose from… I don’t disagree…there are a lot of things that should be happening in Youth Soccer, that aren’t…I would love to see a lot of your ideas and suggestions come to fruition, but I can’t wait for that to happen; I have to deal what’s in front of me right now… Like I say, our club just started an in-house rec league just this season…so maybe in the future things will be different/better…
I would love to see more Rec tournaments! That was always a problem for my rec teams - very few tourneys. I felt such an experience was good for team building and just having fun.
Understood. Yeah, I'm probably within 50 miles of about 25 clubs that have State Cup teams. And yet some of them travel to New Jersey for league games. Watch for an upcoming column on that! Nice to see those roots being built.
That solution won't help their development nor the less capable kids they would then be toying with. Instead what would help both groups is just playing them against kids that are a year older. Probably a half year would be fine. In the halcyon days of my youth we didn't play in strict chronological 1 year age bands. We gravitated towards groups would be competitive and raised or lowered out expectations based on who was out playing that day.
My daughter plays on the D team(by year's as a team) but as a first year team they tied or had a 1 goal game against the B and C teams. Not bad for a brand new team. With league play, state cup and training I pay $240.00 a month for 8 months (HS age). its pretty average for other sports/activities. Everything costs. This is what my kid loves.