There are exceptions to this thinking....I am one of them.....I coach high school soccer, am fortunate enough to have a lot (6) players who play top level ECNL along with another seven who play Lake Highlands D1.....every single one of these girls MUCH prefers playing for their school than playing for their club team.....more fun (by far) less pressure, more positive experience, better fields to play on (by a mile), better facilities, (dressing room, weight room, onsite trainers) than ANY local club team.....
"more fun (by far) less pressure, more positive experience, better fields to play on (by a mile), better facilities, (dressing room, weight room, onsite trainers) than ANY local club team....." So not the case in my area, you are very lucky. Club teams still playing at U14 + have better facilities, even lower level teams. The town club is terrible, and players are punished for not playing for it, even if clearly they are playing for a better team. HS coach says he believes in fitness and never assigns weight room time (XC and track do), and doesn't count fitness. I'm glad you appreciate your situation.
10 hours per week for eight weeks, per year, versus 10 hours per week for 20 weeks per year, and 20 hours per week for 20 weeks per year. 80 hours per year with an unlicensed coach whose main job is teaching vs. 600 hours per year with a C licensed full-time coach. It's great they like to play sports, but it's like me and bowling, I just don't do it enough to be any good.
My son plays on a travel team that plays in the National League and HS soccer, where he has a top notch coach. Last night the HS team was over for dinner prior to a big game today. The camaraderie during dinner was amazing and the kids had tons of fun; priceless! Go find that on a DA team!
On our 22 player varsity roster, 17 of the girls play club soccer, so they are pretty much playing 9 months a year. The other 5 join in regular "Sunday Sessions' with other girls playing 5 v 5 or whatever pick-up games. They also attend the summer camps for 'Competitive Girl Soccer Players' that I run using our schools fantastic facilities...I forgot to mention we have a 'team room' that seats 30, has a drop down screen with computer and dvd hook up as well as a dry erase board.... I will put my playing and coaching resume up against ANY club coach in N.Texas too.
My opinion is this. The Development academy DOES have a good point about the training of elite players. Yet I still think the Federation should do it's best to work with the schools to try and encourage at least decent soccer coaches as much as they can. Because of the above social cache, it would be a great shot in the arm to break the sport out of it's established audience clique and induce some of the "unwashed masses" to get interested in the game. Especially if so and so school has a reputation for sending X number of players into the USDA. My opinions are influenced by the grassroots and youth soccer guru Tom Byer, who not only pushed for high level soccer education and training but for it (the game AND good training) to be as widespread as possible to spread the gospel as it were. What most important is having that big general mass of good players so then the gap between the best and worst is closed and conceivably you could yield even MORE elite players and funnel them into the right system (non pay to play USDA kind of system). Japan and China are and have invested massive monies into these kind of projects, Japan through private enterprises, China through it's government administered CFAs. The federation will never be entitiled to public money and it's means of generating private money are limited, therefore the scope of said academies are going to be spotty for a very long time. What I think, is that by working MORE with schools to improve coaching, you create a positive feedback loop. The game gets better, it creates buzz around soccer in general, more outsiders come into the game, they watch US Soccer team on TV, buy gear makes money and that money is fed back into the federation, if I am getting the system correct. The main point I'm getting at is this; A rising tide lifts all boats. DA's are necessary but you can't forget scholastic sports because that's where a majority of the average americans' heart and attention will be with. We shouldn't focus JUST trying to get developing players for the USMT or so and so league, that's not the main objective of pee wee football or little league. It's just for the fun of it, while still maintaining high standards. However, as long as pay to play gatekeeping is so prevalent you will always hit a wall in that crucial time post age 12 for "soccer mind share" amongst the community. Even people who like the game are not likely to accept the time and money and travel involved with such high level leagues UNLESS there is a critical mass of them in a city or region. And as long as that the case, US Soccer's reach will be limited and will miss out on players more than they should. A lot of on the fence parents and spectators still enjoy scholastic sports, and it's not IMPOSSIBLE that it have a minority role in developing next level talent as it does today. But more so to the point, it's just good to have it out there where it can build the SPECTATING audience, fostering a love of the game for a lot more people. Club soccer as they have in Europe are institutions going back wow, since the late 1800s and were a distinct element in the community. Soccer doesn't have that place in the U.S. and until the cost to play club soccer come down and and become more widespread, there will distinct gaps. So why not use oranizations that have high mindshare AND established facilites like the schools? If we are to fufill our potential we should spread high standards as far as possible and that INCLUDES the schools. Not EXPLICITLY for discovering the next Messi, but so that more people could APPRECIATE the next Messi if and when he came along.
Random Thought: What is so different about soccer from other sports played in America (baseball, basketball, football) where HS cannot develop elite players in soccer like it does in the other aforementioned sports?
Technically nothing. Difference is a couple of things though. The big 3 and Hockey have domestic leagues worth tons of money and fandom. This means that there is added incentive to having lower level scholastic teams and leagues correspond to the big pro leagues. The popularity creates demand and incentive. I think if MLS was as big as the big 4 sports in terms of potential money, most leagues would transform almost over night. Unfortunetly, it's not that simple. Also apparently grooming for high level soccer happens earlier due to distinct techniques required by the sport. I don't know how true that is. But I am willing to bet little league and pop warner do a much better job developing kids to move up a level than youth/scholastic soccer does now. I think it really just comes down to the level of coaching and practice time and competition.
Soccer is a game of skill..football and basketball in particular are games of size, speed, strength etc....soccer is more akin to 'golf on the run with opponents'....and it takes YEARS to develop the skills necessary to play soccer at the very top level whereas if you are a great 'athlete' you could probably have a chance to play either of the other two sports without the years and years of preparation....In soccer technical ability trumps everything else.....not so much the other 'American' sports....
I agree football and basketball are unique in that size and agility can get someone to a high level quickly and HS can adequately do this, no argument, but what about all of the other HS sports where we produce world class athletes while working with the club/national body to coordinate as opposed to soccer that just says it can't work. Swimming, water polo, wrestling are all sports where the US excels on the world stage and they all craft their club seasons around the high school programs. Last year in London there was a female swimmer that won both a high school state championship and multiple gold medals within the same year, that high school season certainly did not hurt her on the world stage. At the senior level these sports also coordinate national events around the NCAA calendar in order to foster that development channel rather than remove the athletes from that channel, the national organization works with the scholastic programs and values the scholastic channel enough to include their members within the national organization. USA diving, for example, includes club, high school, and collegiate personel on their executive board and the "team leader" or head coach for the Bejing Olympics was the coach at the University of Iowa which is admitedly outside of the typical hot bed of talent for the sport. While most Olympic wrestlers are post collegiate athletes, who did USA Wrestling turn to when they faced removal from the Olympics? Cael Sanderson (Penn State), Tom Brands (University of Iowa), and Dan Gable (former Iowa coach), USA Wrestling valued the scholastic channel even though it was outside of the athletes they were ultimately working with in the moment, they valued the long term development of the sport from multiple channels. This is a long winded way to ask the question of "what makes soccer different?" Why can't or won't the multiple organizations work together for the good of the game and the athletes? Granted you are always going to have the athlete that goes pro early or decides to just play club or just high school and that is OK it works for every sport out there except soccer, I just wonder why?
The difference is, people in this country understand football, basketball, swimming, wrestling, water polo, etc. Not to mention that in all those sports the strategy is basically the same. People in this country most definitely do not understand soccer. Even those that grew up playing do not really have a good grasp of the game unless they watch it, which they don't. I can't tell you how many games I attend where parents (and coaches) cheer the big kick, or yell at the 9 year old to pass. Soccer is a game that must be learned with the ball at your feet, and when young, the more selfish you are, the better you will become. Parents and coaches here spend all the players formative years breaking them of the selfishness and taking away vital time learning with the ball. I tell my kids and parents at the beginning of every season, Messi was not learning to pass at 8, he was dribbling. I can teach a 16 year old to pass, but I can never teach a 16 year old to dribble. If kids aren't allowed to develop at an early age, it is never going to happen, thus why High School ball is so terrible.
I must be missing something. You state that all of the problems with soccer people (parents and coaches) in the US is that they do not understand the game and what is important. The wrong things are taught and encouraged at 8 or 9 years old (passing vs. dribbling). You then state this is why high school school ball is so terrible. From my view point, taking what you have said as fact, the problem is well before high school, it is when kids are 8 or 9 which typically, in my area, falls to the clubs, which are sanctioned by USSF. I think your argument is with USSF failing to live up to their end of things which then causes them to deem high school irrelevant because the high school coaches can not fix the problems the USSF licensed and sanctioned clubs/coaches created. To take your point at face value, high school might be the better place for the best and brightest since USSF sanctioned coaching has failed the vast majority of youth in America and the only place they can escape USSF is through nonsanctioned scholastic sports. Obviously I am taking this to the extreme but to say all other sports have a single strategy is extreme as well not to mention patronizing. I don't buy that soccer is much more complex than any other sport played in America and therefore can not fit into a high school system, if that system was to coordinate with USSF.
I am going to assume you don't have a high school player. They make USSF look like soccer geniuses. At our high school for instance the coach will pull a defender if he takes more than one touch. High School coaches are typically (at least in Illinois) just a guy who wants the extra stipend for coaching a team. Other sports do have strategies that are different, but not quite so much as soccer. Lump it long, possession, park the bus, counter attacking all involve vastly different set ups and are very dependent on the type of player you have on the team. That requires a level of intelligence in coaching that unfortunately does not exist in many places.
You are fan of my favorite team but don't generalize too much; there are some great HS coaches. The trick is to find them and if your son/daughter does not have any then it is better to go for another option (i.e. DA). My sons' HS coach is great and it is nice to balance him with their travel team coaches. This way they don't just hear the same message/coaching tips from just one guy.
My son is a freshman, in Illinois, and to be honest the experience thus far could not be further from what you describe. Maybe we are fortunate given the school he attends but the coaching staff thus far has been outstanding. I have yet to see an instance of players pulled for mistakes or for trying to create on their own. All of the teams at his school play a very attractive version of possession soccer with the ability/encouragement to create opportunities. If the argument was the number of games played in the condensed season I would agree with you, high school has a problem. Including tomorrow he will have played 6 games in 9 days, in part because he provided bench depth to another team due to the heat we have had this week and that is too much. His team is entirely club players from clubs that are recognized at the state, regional, national, and DA levels and the sum of these parts is much greater than any of those club teams individually. The experience he has gained by playing with those players from other clubs has helped him grow not only as a player but also as a person. Kids he has "hated" since grade school due to club allegience suddenly are not only teammates but friends. This never would have happened without high school soccer. He is suddenly getting feedback from teammates as to which higher level club could be a good fit for him that ultimately will increase his exposure and profile and will have him investigate new opportunities he possibly never would have because of the success and comfort with his current club. I am not saying high school is perfect, far from it but the up side of including high school as part of the so called pyramid and working with the system as opposed to treating it like a disease that should be avoided, is huge.
That's why I said typically, not always. There are some good ones out there, but they seem to be very few and far between. And DA and ECNL are great if that is what is right for your player, but for some that is too much. They deserve to play in an environment that helps them develop and have fun, too often that is not High School.
@keeper dad you sound like you have been lucky. There are very few high level kids at our high school, there is a local club and if you don't play there you are automatically B team, even if you have more skill than the club players. My son came home the first day of practice with a cleat print over his left nipple, seems the starting CB was not clear on how to tackle or play a ball in the air so went in studs up, the coach praised the kid for a good tackle. Our conference, one of the better ones in the state (several state champs in recent years from different schools so not one powerhouse) has an extremely poor level of play and after several years observing there is no improvement on the horizon.
The Academy manifests its hypocrisy by waiving its "rule" against high school soccer if the player is playing for a private school on alleged "scholarship." If the Academy truly believed that high schools cannot provide proper training for its so called "elite" players, the Academy would prohibit all players from playing high school ball. After all, allowing the "elite" Academy pool to be infested with a tainted private high school player must be just as damaging as infesting the pool with a tainted public high school player. Or perhaps Biff's taint doesn't infest as much as Jose's? Luckily some tainted players like Cristian Roldan didn't care and don't care.
Agree that it is hit or miss for HS soccer coaches, and more miss even in our area even with so many youth soccer players and parent coaches. Freshman coach was great, used better kids to teach other kids, fair with playing time. JV coach is best baseball coach in the county, but at least has good training. Varsity coach hired because of connections, has been at school 4 years, and most parents don't get what his strategy is for picking players or playing players, other than aforesaid connections. Game I watched last week had their best defender get maybe 15 minutes in an 80 minute game, and 10 of them were because a starting defender got hurt. As for Roldan, success breeds success (look at Zelalzem's former OBGC team), and had I "had it all to do again", I would have considered the HS soccer reputation when we moved into our area years ago. Football wins, then lacrosse, then baseball, then swimming, and the rest of the sports are about equal. That extra few thousand dollars is not of interest to a trained and able coach, unless there is some way to get him more money based on record and team supporters. Rarely even one varsity HS player in our town goes on to play any level of college soccer. Difficult if the team doesn't have a winning record, ever. The alumni were playing in captain's practices in the summer, both because lack of interest by current HS players and lack of a club team. I find the waiver system alarming, because it does seem to be abused especially by the top academies. And everyone seems to know about it and the USSF does nothing. RBNY 97s were dropped from the pre-academy finals because they added a few IMG players in the playoffs, but not a word about HS players who are playing academy in September and October (not allowed even with a waiver).
From my observation most of the animosity against scholarship players being waived to play HS and stems from xenophobia. Many of the kids are either Latinos or African from poor backgrounds and the sight of these (economically) poor kids getting to play on both teams seems to drive some parents up the wall.
That's certainly not true in my area, at least for most academy teams (near NYC). Some academy players with waivers get as little as a 1 dollar scholarship to meet the USSF criteria of going to a private school and getting a scholarship. Most get from $500 to a few thousand dollars off a tuition of $40,000 or more. I would say few are even upper middle class. Hopefully, as the academy program has started reaching younger ages, this will change, but like with any team, transportation becomes a major issue for those not of mean, to and from practices and home games in particular. Best 16 year olds I know of are with their urban town team, because that team has waived fees every year since U7 (before academy program existed) and the coach drives a van with the players who need transportation to wherever they need to go. YMMV. Maybe it is xenophobia to get tired of the rich getting benefits intended for the poor?
The best basketball is played during the spring and summer with AAU teams while the HS teams all play in the "offseason" of the winter. The best baseball is played in the summer as well, not during the spring with the high schools. Football is the only sport where HS is the highlighted time - and that can be attributed to the fact that there are few technical skills in the game and those that do exist can be taught rather quickly. The big reason HS fails is simple - too many games in too short a time with too little time to train with too wide a disparity in talent within teams. My senior year, 12 guys from my club team and 7 from our rival decided we were going to join up and play in a men's league during the high school season (the league produced the Amateur champion two years in a row). We trained three nights a week and played 10 league games and entered the Amateur and Open Cups (ended up playing 3 games in the cups). Pretty much none of us regretted leaving our HS teams behind (while we played for the top 2 clubs in the state, most of us came from schools where we had no chance of winning anything) and we all really enjoyed the season. And playing against the adults prepared us for the physicality of the college game.
The Federation has tried to work with the schools but they wouldn't listen. So the Federation is at liberty to do things on their own such as the DA program. But that is not HS soccer. What players have Japan and China produced? If US should learn from someone it should be from the leading soccer nations such as Brazil, Germany, Italy, Spain, Argentina, etc. None of these countries have produced top class players through school system. All of their players are produced through professional youth academies associated with professional or semi-professional clubs and through "street soccer". The way to develop players has been proven and used for many decades and it doesn't involve schools or HS soccer. I don't think you understand how the Federation makes money. Anyway, they are not in the business to make money. Their interest is in creating/developing players. Ok, it takes money and investments to develop players. That can come from the parties interested in developing players. High schools and colleges do not invest money into developing players, nor should they. They just rely on the American tradition of scholastic sports. MLS clubs and the Federation invest money and they should invest even more, but not when players they've invested money into go to play HS or college soccer. That is not a good argument though. Because the Federation is not trying to make soccer more popular and even if it is, at this point what is going to make the game more popular is more world class American soccer players. These players will not come from schools but from academies. The mentality of the average Americans needs to change - forget schools if you want world class players. Because the nations US is competing with develops players in different, better way. 15, 16, 17 year olds from leading soccer nations are already in professional academies, have been in them since the age of 9 (for example) and play more meaningful soccer than HS soccer. Money is the issue, I'll give you that. But as far as time is concerned, there is no escaping that. You have to put in the time to reach the highest level. But to make high level soccer more affordable, professional clubs and Federation needs to make the investment, not schools. People can still enjoy scholastic soccer if they want. No one is eliminating it. But it is not the path to developing better soccer players. On the flipside, I can tell you that until US creates the same soccer traditions as in Europe and South America, this country will never produce better players. The cost to play soccer will come down when professional clubs and the Federation invest more in youth soccer. The cost wont come down because of schools though. No, it doesn't include the schools and it shouldn't. I can guarantee you that the next Messi wont come from schools nor will he play in any school. The main point that you are missing is that it is not about quantity anymore but rather about quality. Soccer is popular enough at this point, it's just that it is not good enough yet. US may develop great basketball, football or baseball players through the school system, but not soccer players, because the requirements and the developmental path for developing great soccer players are different than those for basketball, football and baseball players. Therefore, the school system doesn't work for soccer.