Wow, you knew going in that only Kyle and Wynalda of the change candidates had a chance and for Carlos Bocanegra to Bocanegra him the way Klinsmann Bocanegra'd Bocanegra must sting. All in all, Great article Kyle. I think we can all sense the bubbling indignation under the very measured tone you take. Don't feel bad, soccer lost, not you. https://www.si.com/soccer/2018/03/21/kyle-martino-us-soccer-president-election-reflection
"Actually, I know they don’t realize it because they just passed a rule, without asking us, that separates best friends at 8 years old. If they would have asked us, we all would have said don’t do this—it’s bad for soccer.”" WTF is this about? There's a rule separating "best friends"?
He's referring to the "true age" ruling where youth teams, even recreational teams, must form teams according to their birth year. That effectively splits kids in the same school grade up. It has a big affect on recreational kids especially. They can no longer hand the flyer to their school friends and assume they will be playing together which was huge in growing the sport, at least in my area, growing up in the early 90's.
He probably meant the change in the age cut-offs that occured a few years back. My kid went from a U-9 team to a u-11 team in one year and immediately was the worst kid on his team and stopped playing the sport the next year.
I read the whole article with interest and my lap top went into sleep mode while I was pondering its effect. I think the mistake the Athlete's council may have made is in confusing mo' money with mo' money for the few. Good luck to Kyle !
Honestly, after reading that, I don't think I would have voted for Martino if I had a vote. I don't really know anything about the current state of youth rec soccer. Maybe there should be things fixed there. But to seemingly make that the central part of your platform after the USMNT just missed the WC in humiliating fashion? I can see why the Athlete voters weren't into that. It's not like little Jonny and little Joey playing together in u-8 is going to help us qualify for 2022.
It's worth reading, but it doesn't seemed Kyle learned very much. The reality is that these kinds of organizations (meaning non-profits with a number of different constituencies) are run on relationships. You don't go in expecting to change things immediately. You work with people, you pay your dues, you build connections. And he didn't do that badly. He came off as the least crazy of him, Wynalda and Solo and he could probably have leveraged that into some kind of role and built on that. Still, if the defining issue for him is the "true age" ruling, he doesn't seem to care that much about it. He had an entire article to write about things and couldn't even make it clear to us what he was talking about. And now he's going away and be on the board of some organization. Big deal. Even if you think SUM is as powerful as people around here, do you think they care about how they divide things up by ages? This is on the youth side of the USSF. If it's a problem, they caused the problem, and they could fix it if they really wanted to.
Perhaps not, but your kind of thinking is what didn't get the US qualified for 2018 and will NEVER get us a world cup. Ever. Spain, Germany and many follow up countries changed their entire structure to specifically accommodate change at the earliest meaningful connection point with the kids. And as we are vastly different from those countries, I am not willing to say: having fun! is not our path to success. I do know having less players and unmotivated associations is a sure fire way to ruin the sport domestically.
That's exactly the case when staying silent would benefit him. Neither articulate or logical. Not a surprise that those who know him voted for someone else.
The problem is that many years ago Little Jozy and Little Mikey did not developed well in the current piece of sh*t system which caused us to miss the 2018 World Cup. Now go many years forward and Little Jonny and Little Joey will probably do the same if the system doesn't change.
It's a pretty interesting issue and illustrates some of the problems that the USSF faces. Apparently the calendar-year mandate was part of an effort by the USSF to push teams to become more focused on player development and less on winning (and also to align things with the way they are done in the rest of the world). The resistance seemed to be from those who think youth soccer should be more focused on fun since so few players are going to be professionals anyway. I don't know what the right answer is, but I don't think it fits well with a good-guys-bad-guys narrative. It's just that different groups have different interests.
I completely agree with this, except one group has hands on experience with the situation and one has hands on the cookie jar. It's as if an investment firm or an economics teacher, or something, took control of the process looking to maximize back-pass elasticity while people who actually do the um, soccer were cut out of the picture. God knows I've fired a butt load of MBA's for 'knowing' absolutely nothing about closing deals and running operations. Which brings me to my favorite part of the article besides the getting Bocanegra'd by Bocanegra, it's the thought that Goldman partners are anything but brutally disohnest, self-serving, scum bags. Holy cow if any of you actually sat in on those meetings you would run screaming from 'on-suit' cordero like you doused yourself in Rum and lit yourself on fire to kill the contamination. At the very least, this was his Jerry Maguire moment and with the 2026 World Cup in jeopardy, I don't see all the movers-and-shakers doing their jobs on that end either.
I have no knowledge of youth soccer to judge, but wasn't everyone saying that our youth programs were broken, that it was too much about winning and playing the most physically developed players and not focusing on technique, and that's why we aren't producing enough good players. The people arguing against calendar-year age groups were the people who ran that system. Tab Ramos might be an insider when it comes to the USSF but he is an outsider to the youth programs and is at least saying the right things about wanting to change things. That's the choices here, you are either in favor of the people who are running the broken system or in favor of the USSF pushing for change.
I personally like the approach of gaining a full understanding of the players and coaches and administrators perspectives. Find the key goals and motivations then work from those. Look man, when your U17 and U20 teams have no players west of the Mississippi you're doing a absolutely idiotic job of identifying, scouting, developing, recruiting and coaching. Period. California alone could probably win the world cup before the US. So I completely agree, a change was needed, but one that integrates the core motivations of the players with the improvement of the intensity and quality of the soccer. It is a massive job. Kyle went not just to the foundation, but to where he felt most comfortable and that was largely his mistake. It was the absolute correct choice for making a change and relatively naive if his goal was to find himself elected.
I could never really get excited about any of the candidates to be honest. The establishment types were completely uninspiring, but Wynalda was a blowhard and Martino seemed really naive and green.
Missing the world cup starts at the very bottom and goes to the very top. It's not just a bad day or cycle. Theres probably a hundred things that went into missing the world cup. While this may not be a huge factor, it might be small one. Kids want to have fun. Not playing with friends can mean some of them quit. Lower participation is bad.
I'm not saying this isn't something that should be looked into, but it seems silly to make this the centerpiece of a campaign when the big reason there even was an opening for president was because the senior team missed the WC. Also, when I was playing club and ODP in the 90s, lots of people complained that we weren't producing good players because most kids just treated it as a social activity. You got snacks at halftime, went to tournaments and ran around the hotel all with your friends on the team, tried your game with some girls teams staying at the same hotel, etc. Back then, we weren't good because we needed more sophisticated, more intense training and games that "put players out of their comfort zone." Now we're saying that we're not good because our training of kids has become too intense and they don't have fun anymore?
This is all nonsense about fun. More orange slices will fix that. Kids want to play soccer. 20 years ago my kid and three friends came to U-9 try outs to a pretty good club. One made A team, another B team, two were taken by a smaller club with no try outs. Nobody quit. In a few weeks each of them had plenty new friends.
Exactly right. We used to denigrate the kids who stayed on their local club and didn’t drive 1.5 hours for practice every game to a top level club for not being serious enough about their soccer “career”
Man you brought me down memory lane. The best part going to the soccer tournaments were hooking up with the girls. My teammates would wonder how many girls teams would be in the same hotel as ours. So many stories from those tournaments. Great post. Sorry for being off topic.
But the people who see this as important have votes that you can theoretically us to "win". At the coaches convention, state reps cared about 1) Money 2) Having Fun and 3) Protecting local kids 1) With regards to money, a lot of state reps didn't like that USSF got 1-2 dollars per player in registration fees, especially when it added up to less than 10 mil in the USSF budget. (The $1-2 bucks per player is significantly less than most other sports in the US) Wynalda was promising that state associations would get money back and that USSF would act like a quasi World Bank for state associations which some state associations loved. 2) With regards to having fun, state reps wanted kids to be able to play with friends and/or play for their high school. They wanted a less professional approach to the youth game, especially when the vast majority of kids are there for recreational purposes. 3) With regards to protecting local kids, the state associations have been in opposition to residential academies and/or teams bringing in players from other states. Being an "out of state" player requires 3 different groups to approve. You might not get the athletes / (MLS/USL) vote with item #3, but #1 does the least damage and #2 is something that opposing seems like bad PR. So you campaign on those two things because you have a chance of getting votes. Everything was calculated for Martino and the others with the exception of Wynalda and Solo who seemed to not understand that they needed votes from people with different interests. The only people who gave a damn about Pro/Rel with voting power were the NASL. A handful of state associations supported it, but it had nothing to do tangible with their associations. Wynalda (and Solo) were getting money from NASL owners Silva and Rocco, it's probably why they decided to die on that hill. A few years ago during an open meeting with state reps someone asked Sunil what he wished his daughter got out of playing soccer. He said "have fun" and got a standing ovation. Everybody wants/needs something differently out of USSF. The problem has been that soccer is a rec activity for like 95% of the players. We have implemented rules to find 30-50 players per year from that 5% and we likely will miss out on 3-5 players per year who slip through the cracks as a youth player. While it may be easy to say the rules should only be applied to the 5%, the structure is what is needed to get the 30-50 players and decrease the number of players who slip through the crack. Though, there are players who will still develop late regardless. It's not easy to appease everybody.
Just so we're all on the same page, there si no rule indicating that a kid can't play "up" in age groups. FCD has a 14 year old on their U17 Gen Ad Cup team this week. He's referring to the one-time change in the DA regarding which age group kids are classified in. Basically, we changed to doing it the way the rest of the world does it. https://www.socceramerica.com/publi...r-registration-the-transition-is-upon-us.html
Interesting article. I like Martino a lot but that's based on his commentator/analyst job. I ran into him at a pub a week or two after the vote and he alluded to the shady backroom deals. If I had a vote I might've taken a chance on him BUT I wasn't totally sure about his knowledge of the whole "system". And this article seems to confirm the naïveté that I was concerned about. Still I think he'd be a good smart guy to have on the team in some way. And I liked his heartfelt comments about the movement he was part of and how he's not giving up on that. I feel similarly as I ride a bus to Washington DC right now for what I hope will be a momentous Saturday in America. P.s. It's hard to fathom Wynalda earning more votes than Kyle, but that probably just tells you that he's a better politician.