And this is why state organizations don't give a damn about Rec soccer - there is simply no money in it.
It would be interesting to see how many current college/pro soccer players never played travel. Can it even be done anymore just playing local rec leagues and scholastic soccer? There's probably a few out there.
Interesting piece….complex issue…very market driven…not sure it’s fair to say state organizations don’t give a damn about Rec soccer; I mean there’s only so much you can do counter a $9 billion dollar industry… And let’s be honest, a lot of us own a small portion of the $9 billion… And any moral justification or defence is purely relative…being not that bad or as bad is ultimately a pretty hollow argument…being in the original profit generating league is no better than being in the 27th profit generating league…spending only X amount of dollars is still feeding the beast…I may not be jumping on a plane to Dallas or Orlando (asked and declined), but I’ve driven to Kansas City and Louisville….I don’t even want to talk about the countless hotel stays…. If we want someone to blame, most us just have to look in mirror…. myself included… We are the market that drives all of this… But with that said, these parents they highlighted in this piece are of totally off their nut…they really go out of their way to paints all travel sport parents as bunch of lunatics…. Like only interviewing/showing a handful of alcoholics when doing a piece on the adult beverage industry…yeah, certainly many alcoholics exist, but the majority of consumers actually drink relatively responsibly… These parents, and specially the black couple, are chasing a meaningless temporary “high” and a long shot outcome without any regard to reality or the cost of said behavior…not sure that’s the clinical definition of an addict, but it sounds about right to me… We haven’t done Rec in years, and in hindsight, probably should have left sooner than we did…but I mean Rec Soccer no harm; I got nothing against Rec; I would love to see it grow and prosper….but its stopped offering/providing what I wanted/needed a long time ago…if that makes me the “bad guy,” in all of this, I don’t know what to say…
Yes, they are extreme. I'd also add that baseball is very cutthroat. Way more than soccer ever could be. It's an individual sport that happens to be played on a team. I mean they literally draft 7 and 8 year olds onto all-star teams. They will take the big batting fat kid over the more well-rounded athlete any day. All about the W's. No politics going on there I'm sure.
Who wants to take an unfit kid for any sport other then Rec. you don't win games with unfit. You also don't win games with an all star team. They have to be playing together for at least 2 or 3 months to do well. That doesn't mean your going to win a tournament either. It just means you will play respectable.
Well that's why baseball is different. If you can hit in baseball, you can go a long way without much other skill.
https://morganensberg.wordpress.com/2010/03/19/may-i-have-some-money/#more-251 Morgan Ensberg is a former MLB player. This is a blog post he wrote about kids travelling. It's kind of humorous. He's not a fan of it.
I'm sure this varies by area. By me, there is club soccer, baseball, and lacrosse, along with AAU basketball. Soccer is the first of these to introduce tryouts and cuts which, given our Oct. 1 school cutoff, occur as early as first grade.
I thought of how I would answer the the questions posed to the parents in the article. The main one is "do you expect a return" (meaning college scholarship)? The couple in the piece answered "yes". While I think it would be silly for anyone to say they don't HOPE for a scholarship, any expectation for one is not a reason to be in the sport. I do think for stand out players (blue chip obviously, but not even that level), if you want to improve you do need to go into travel. If the ONLY reason is for "fun" or "exercise", then save the money and do Rec. I love watching my kids play. I love seeing them enjoy themselves. I love seeing them take a challenge on. That being said, if the kids said they don't want to play any more, they'd have to finish the season, but then they're done. I don't get the feeling the couple in the piece would allow that. I did think the 4-5 parents they talked to from the Texas soccer team were a more "true" representation of normal parents. I also want to say Grand Park is an awesome facility to be at.
Yes, perhaps, but I still think the producers when out their way to provide an extreme example…I would think there were literally 100s of teams that weekend who only drove a few hours to be there….Yeah, you’re always going to get some teams coming in from a great distance just the “experience” of it all…but Grand’s Park bread and butter is drawing in all those teams within a 5 hour bubble…which in includes, but not limited to, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Indy, Detroit, Columbus Cincinnati, Louisville, Nashville… Haven't been yet, but I am sure soon enough....
Grand Park is great and you have to go to Big Hoffa's BBQ . We do 1 away tournament in Spring and Fall. Our coach believes that there are good enough teams in the Chicago area that we don't need more than that.
It's not exactly what you're looking for, but the NCAA does have a chart on whether NCAA athletes competed in school, club, both, or neither... http://www.ncaa.org/sites/default/files/2017RES_HS_Club_Participation_by_Sport_20170314.pdf For soccer, 6% played school ball only, 6% club ball only, 86% both, and 1% neither. That's male. For female... 4% HS only, 3% club only, 92% both, and 1% neither.
Had the DA prohibited HS play by 2015? If so, it seems odd that only 6% of mens players fall into the "Club Only" category. Granted, this survey includes D1, II and III so maybe that 6% is primarily high end D1.
I believe ban when into effect in 2012…not sure the exact methodology, but I tend to think the effect of the ban wouldn’t be fully evident by 2015….I would expect those club only numbers to perhaps creep up…but then again, 1 season in HS would qualify a person for both…so, the numbers might always be skewed in favor of “both” since it’s such a low threshold to cross…I’d love to see it broken down by number of years…i.e., 4 years club, 1 year HS, etc….
I recalling seeing pro pitchers who look like they eat Big Macs between innings and get winded walking to and from the mound….not that I follow baseball much....
You have a solid coach and a club that supports this. I agree - too much BS traveling to make players and mostly parents think that their kid is big league.
Yup - those numbers are not accurate. - Same with the girls. 90+ % of graduating seniors from the ECNL were partial - full rides.
Always a little jealous of the options Chicago teams have without ever leaving the metro area (I don not envy you the traffic, some of the home prices in areas where my son plays, ...). We travel a little more out of necessity because we're downstate, but even at that my u13 will do two away tournaments this fall (greater Chicago and Indy) plus our tournament and, beyond that, a small schedule of league games that aren't always a huge on-field test but are all within 90 minutes of home. At the other extreme, my wife points out people on Facebook she knows from Texas whose kids seem to be playing somewhere that involves air travel an awful lot of weekends every season. Even if we wanted to, we couldn't do it (the idea of, like the one set of parents in the clip, dropping $15,000 a year on this ... wow). In my own mind I sometimes struggle to justify the soccer expense we do make when my older son, a high school cross country and track athlete, costs us nothing but a few pairs of running shoes a year (granted, they ain't cheap) and gas money to drive to the 10 or 12 meets my wife or I make every year. I do wonder if the older son ever feels a little cheated on this front. To the larger point of the thread, even spending relatively modest amounts and not playing somewhere every weekend, I still have mixed emotions about all of this -- what are we hoping to get out of it? My soccer son has fun, this is a big group of friends who he wouldn't otherwise know for the most part (he only goes to school with a couple of his teammates), and my wife and I have become friends with a number of the other parents. I'm also a soccer guy -- I love that my son loves this sport. And I'm confident that, when he hit high school, he would be behind in the arms race when he tried to play high school soccer. But I hate the way that sounds -- we have to keep up in that arms race, so we do this (never mind any talk about scholarships that, for most of us, would -- if they ever happened -- never justify the time and money we put into it). And, bigger picture, would we be doing something that longer term would benefit him and us more if we weren't doing this? I don't have an answer for that.
Agree that thinking of sports as an investment (ie hoping for a scholarship) is a silly ideal. I came to the realization that I don't really mind spending money on youth sports a few years ago when I filed my taxes and my daycare total came to $14k+. I figure now, my kids can do orchestra, rock climbing, gymnastics, soccer, dance class all summer and before/after school; or I can pay nearly the same rate to have a minimum wage employee babysit them. I let my kids play sports so they are having fun and staying fit, but leave their level of dedication in each activity up to them. We do have activities seven days a week, but that's because I think extracurriculars are better than Spongebob and video games. My oldest daughter has decided that she wants to focus on soccer, but also competes in rock climbing, and participates recreationally in gymnastics (she is also a bomb snowboarder & dabbles with the violin and drums). My youngest wants to focus on gymnastics (which BTW is way crazier than any form of travel soccer), but still does soccer, rock climbing, dance, and is a bomb skier...that wants to try snowboarding . Long story, short: Do what makes your kids happy, if you have any other motivation, might want to pump the brakes and do a quick giggle check.
If you thought soccer was cut throat, try dance, We won't let our daughter dance for company (think Travel) just because of how utterly insane it is,
I think this is the inverse(?) of the findings. It does seem to be true that DA/ECNL are shoo ins for scholarships/roster spots etc. But it is not true that the majority of the kids on D1 rosters come from that system. A glance at most D1 rosters and the bios will quickly tell you that indeed the majority of the kids appear to have been high school legends, ODP regionals and regular ol' club kids (if they hailed from America at all.) This seems especially true of kids from the region in which the University lies. This topic hits very close to home for us. My son is top drawer top 150, a handful of NTCs, just walked on to an MLS academy midseason, etc. and after all that we made the difficult decision to drop out altogether because we simply live 4.5 hours from the nearest DA and after having him hosted and doing a cost benefit analysis, we decided to go the high school/odp/club route. Don't get me wrong, if we were in the neighborhood we would def. still be in. But we don't and I'd like my kid to play soccer AND be a normal kid. We still fully plan to pursue the local D1 schools going to their ID camps etc which their rosters suggest is entirely possible -- provided a legendary high school career and other accomplishments along the way.