College Soccer, Bradenton, and our National Team

Thoughtful post.

The problem with Bradenton, as you pointed out, is that other options still cast a wider net. The US needs 15-20 Bradenton's, and the only way to afford that is for the professional clubs to foot the bill. MLS doesn't have that kind of cash flow, yet.

 

Good analysis.

I think we'll start to find less senior players with college experience, just because European scouts are beginning to make more inroads. Don't get me wrong, there will still be some that go to college but not to the tune of 2/3's of the roster. MLS, I think will begin to take on a more involved and decisive role in the development of soccer in this country. With the development of these academies we should, in theory produce higher quality players. Hopefully, in time they can replace Bradenton. As you pointed out, the youth pool is so vast that Bradenton could not possibly identify the best 40 players in this country. It'd be nice to have regional Bradentons right now.

 

Id argue that if anything, Bradenton may be over represented. I think the U-20 level probably is. The reason being, that once a player gets in the US program, they tend to stick around by inertia. In addition, US caps are probably still one of the best ways for a US player to get overseas offers, and Bradley tends to weight heavily toward players with European experience.

College in particular has to be a tool for the US. Its just an issue of development and the number of opportunities. You really dont know who is and is not going to be a player until the age of 21-23 in my opinion, and you have to keep giving players opportunities to advance. I think college soccer really needs a reform movement to get it on FIFA rules, but thats a political battle of epic proprotions most likely.

 

Bradenton was, is, and will always be an attempt to bandaid a system.

MLS doesn't necessarily need to fund it per se, as most US professional leagues don't spend much to develop talent in the Bradenton age group. I think the current Youth and Academy system is sufficient, their just needs to be more effective coaching and scouting at that level. Where MLS comes in is paying for the scouting, and setting a good soccer example and acting as a source to provide the club administrators and coaches who can help train the next generation of players. Thats a long, slow process though.

 

I just posted down in the high school forum regarding this same issue. One of the premises of the DA was to broaden the scope of participation and theortically the identification of our nations best players. In July, the DA named 176 kids to the conference XI's where players were identified by both USNT scouts and recommended by the conference peer group as a result of their participation in the DA. What I curious about in my earlier post was what follow through the DA's has planned for this group of Academy high achievers? I haven't done the cross reference but I would think there is a good 15 - 20% of kids on these lists that have never been in the "system". So what I am asking, what good does it do to ID these kids if there is no plan to groom/develop them consistent with what I thought was at least one of the DA's strategic objectives.

Sorry to take this thread down another path but the Regional Bradenton concept was even mentioned in the concept white paper of the DA. So now that the DA has taken the first step in broadening the ID process, whats the next step for these players using this player pool as an example?

 

Very nice analysis. Repped.

Are the MLS and college participation numbers similar if we sample a younger US team (say the Olympic squad minus overage players)? Just curious if there's a trend away from MLS and college with the higher level players who are breaking through now.

 

I may not have been clear enough. I don't think MLS should fund the USSF-style Bradenton system nationwide, like some kind of benevolant contributor.

I agree that Bradenton is a bandaid.

I think the MLS needs to REPLACE Bradenton on a national level. Each MLS team needs to be able to afford its own "Bradenton" in which it identifies and develops young players at the club's expense. The MLS teams need to take over the identification and development of the US's top youth players, age 16-20. That's how players are trained abroad. Professional clubs making professional decisions and providing professional training, in hopes of developing professional players who peak in the mid/late 20's.

MLS clubs are inching toward that with their academies, but it really isn't truly professional yet, as the MLS doesn't have the financial resources.

The current US non-system is still dominated by local youth clubs and colleges. The incentives are toward college, not professional. Even Bradenton still "graduates" players to college. The training and selection goals accross the US are for what I would call "advanced amateur" players who peak at age 19/20.

 

21-23? Way too old. I take the opposite view. College soccer should, as quickly as possible be weeded out as the major player production system. It cannot produce players, and yes that means we dont really have good players. Technically, and skill wise, we are way behind the curve. Real talent is innate, not something that magically appears at 23. We need to get to players when they are much younger, before their skills are coached out of them.

The NCAA could give a rats ass about college soccer to boot.

Seriously, think about it. How can a system in which you have, what maybe 20 games a year, not nearly the money and effort available to it as a program that the major college sports enjoy, so that players are spending more time studying and less time training. Its great those guys are getting an education. US Soccer players are amongst the most educated. Too bad they are among the least talented. However, the one thing they have over their foreign contemporaries is that they will always be able to fall back on their education.

No, recognition of players has to happen WAY before college. No question. College soccer is where any semblence of talent left in these players goes to
get wasted. Hell, they still are not playing by the same rules?

The real task is to develop a system that produces talent but also doesn't leave the ones who fail out in the cold with few options. This is perhaps where the club youth academies can take over. Players can train from a young age where their talent can be encouraged, developed, and nurtured, but at the same time incentives for college should also be provided as part of the signing. The club could then decide whether to sign the player once he hits college age based on their assessment of his potential.

 

There seems to be a correlation between Bradenton's hits and a player's position being up the pitch. And that trend would be more apparent if Altidore replaced Ching and Adu replaced Klejstan, as they should. Whether that's because it's easier to identify attackers, or the age factor (alot of the defenders and keepers chosen were pre-Bradenton; only Lewis and I think Ching were pre-B of the attackers), or some combination, we can argue about that.

 

Full physical maturity is not reached until that age. How you can conclude you know players are going to be professionals before then is a little bizarre considering you dont even really know their athletic ability yet.

The Jozy Altidores are easy, because they can actually compete against full adults at a much younger age. But the pool in general you cant really start figuring how they are going to stack up against men until they become men themselves.

In addition, emotional maturity takes a while to develop as well. Players who are not mentally prepared to compete vs. professional adults at 18 and 19 often mature significantly while in college. But thats not a garuntee. So you really dont know until they reach their early 20s if they are going to make that next step.

I suggest you look at college baseball, the number of MLB players that played it, and its resource level compared to soccer programs. Here's a hint, they are resourced very similarly.

As mentioned, the rules issue and the coaching issue are things that over time need to be addressed. But to condemn college soccer as a waste is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And, given the college system gave to us a Michael Parkhurst and a Chirs Rolfe, two players who should rot instead of being discovered in college soccer, how can you not recognize that college soccer can be a benefit to players who rely on soccer IQ and skill?

Your talking about a system with a single point of failure. If the club fails to properly evaluate their players, they are simply lost? If a club fails to identify a player, hes outside the system, and is useless? You assume professional=competent. It doesnt. It just means they get paid for it, which helps with competence, but is no garuntee.

What makes college soccer a useful tool is that it provides many, many points of decision. It only takes 1 D1 program to identify and bring a player in to get him to a level where he can get MLS scouts attention. And if your doing it right, it only takes one MLS team not to screw up with him to get him into a professional environment. The number of fekups needed to miss a player in a college environment with a well funded scouting department for each team is staggering.

And it costs nothing additional to fund, because it is already being paid for.

Personally Id divide soccer development roughly into 4 stages:

<16: Learning. You may be able to identify a super-able early developer or two, but this is an exception that requires no planning for. You just make the exceptions as nescessary.
16-18: Exceptional early developers will start to be ready for a pro-environment. You can start sketching out some of the remaining players, but only with a low accuracy rate. Most still need to compete against their peer group.
19-20: Some of those early developers will prove themselves ready for a professional environment. Others will not make that leap, and require more time to gauge accurately. Late developers should start to become apparent, a few who may be ready for a professional environment, though again, a low accuracy rate for most.
21-23: Professional levels of aptitude should be readily indetifiable in all players. Ultimate professional level may be difficult to gauge in some cases.

 

The structure of sporting clubs in other countries is just so fundamentally different, that in terms of building a model for the US, its much more useful to look at sports in the US. The number of professional clubs per person in most other countries is staggeringly high compared to that same number here in the US. The dutch have more top flight clubs then the US, and have a population around what, 30 times smaller?

I think any system that acutally works in the US is going to have more parrallels to US systems then foreign ones.

 

If anything, these two things would seem to drive US teams away from the foreign model. The foreign model involves putting significant outlays of funds by the clubs to develop players. However, if the players go abroad, their is no return on their investments.

Second, the club vs. country aspects just makes the ROI if anything worse.

So MLS wants to try to avoid paying developmental costs. So yeah, college players might go abroad, but it really didnt cost the clubs anything did it?

Thats not to say every player will go to college, just that I dont think its in MLS's intersets to replace or eliminate college from the developmental pipeline.

 

[/QUOTE]Conclusions
With MLS still in the nascent stage, I think a few things will remain true for the next decade:

• College soccer will continue to play a development role, as it casts the widest net for good players.
  
• MLS will not be the only destination for our national team players, but more often than not, it will be the best starting point.
  
• We still need to create more opportunities for elite players. I think Bradenton is good in theory, but in practice, it's too difficult to predict which 40 U-16s will be the best senior players.

[/QUOTE]

Good Post but not realizing the yr to yr changing of your conclusions:
College will play a role but an ever increasing reduced role each yr.
You did not indicate how many played all 4 yrs vs 3 or 2 or just 1 yr. This point recognizes the point that the 30+ aged played full 4 yrs of college and younger players played only 1 or 2. This indicates to me that younger players are getting better and can play in MLS or abroad at a younger age, not that college soccer is better at developing them
Also college soccer has been the 17 to 18 yr old predominate location to go because MLS has no young player development plan and can't presently pay enough to the elite young player with potential. It is no replacement to young professional development.
The next step is for the Development Acadamy need to somehow merge with MLS so there is a quality continuum of professional development. Every yr we'll see an ever changing environment whereby College Soccer will not be where the elite young professional player goes but rather from Development academy to MLS young player development structure.
Our National Teams will be all the better because of this shift.

 

Strongly agree with this point. Over the past 10 years, I would say our very best MNT performances are in some order the following:

- Landon Donovan (2002-?)
- Clint Mathis (2001)
- John O'brien (2002)
- Tony Sanneh (2002)
- Eddie Pope (1997-2002)
- DaMarcus Beasley (2002-?)
- Brad Friedel (2002)

Of those, only one player didn't get his start in MLS. Many were active in MLS at the time of their best performance. I get very tired of people underrating the importance of MLS to the MNT. MLS play has been and continues to be a good indication of how a player will do with the MNT. When a player is having consistently strong MLS performances (Cooper, Buddle, Kljestan, Holden, Parkhurst, etc) it should not be assumed that their European counterparts are better.

 

Depends on your definition of "good." The list of players who do well in MLS, but whose games do not translate well to the international level is fairly long. Ralston, Noonan, Twellman, Cunningham, Albright, Zavagnin, Gaven, Quaranta, Razov, Vanney. These are just some of the guys who were given significant opportunies with the national team and came up short. There is a much longer list of guys who carved out long successful MLS careers but were never given much of a shot with the nats (in most cases for good reason). I'm taking about the Jose Burciaga's here.

 

It's a fair point. Of the players you listed, though, all but Twellman and perhaps a young Gaven were serious disappointments. The rest were at some point above average MLS players, but not game changers. For example, Vanney was above average way back when, but he was never Eddie Pope.

I don't think there is a formula to predict when a player from any league - MLS or otherwise - is going to project well to the next level. I think there are indicators. When a player is indicating he may be ready, the only way to find out for sure is to try him.

And for the record, I'm one of those who would have never tried out Burciaga. He lacked quickness and positional awareness as a LB.

 

I think you are confusing the issues here. My contention is that the players that reach college lack the skill set to succeed. The skill set, regardless of physical or mental maturity is established long before they reach college age. Determining whether they will be successful as professionals is a wait and see strategy that is played out by any academy in any country. Hence my statement about trying to establish a "better" system in which the overwhelming majority of players that enter these academies don't make it. My impression is that outside of hte united states, take England for example, many of those kids devote themselves to soccer versus education even at such young ages, and when they fail, are left without a good education (or worsem, none) and the prospects for advancement in society afforded to kids that eventually receive a college education.

Yes, I would actually like to see what those numbers look like when you subtract out the foreign players in baseball, you know the ones who didn't receive college educations and devoted their lives to baseball.

In any case, not pretending to be an expert on baseball, but I believe they have a farm system unlike the other big sports. Thus I'd bet that college basketball and football are a better comparison.

At this stage, one cannot throw out the college system. My view is that it should be eliminated as soon as realistically possible. We are trapped in this current system. At this stage, it is wrong to say it is a total waste since it still provides many of the players that MLS and the national team use. That said, my point was that these players lack skill and technique, much of this which is a symptom of the youth system down to the lowest tiers to begin with. Regardless of whether we know if a youth player will turn out to be a professional, we can know if he possesses raw talent and skill. These are things that can't be taught. I argue that right now, in the current system, those players are having their skills coached out of them. By the time they reach college, they have become a mold of the standard american player - high on athleticism and low on skill. Then they enter college where likewise the skill level is poor and little chance of development. The conveyor belt of college soccer players only helps to hinders development of the national team program and the the american player.

In my opinion, a kid at 10 here is not much different than a kid in England. What happens after 10 is what is different.

And finally Chris Rolfe and Michael Parkhurst were provided to us because of the college system. Yes, that is true. But you know its because we essentially have no other alternative in place where they will likely have been discovered. But then again, in an ideal world, neither Parkhurst or Rolfe would have made it beyond a lower tier league - the equivalent of the minor baseball leagues. Neither is particularly a good player. Perhaps if they had been reached much sooner, who knows. But to me, Rolfe especially is the classic example of a an essentially skilless american player.

In any event, I am not insisting that college still cannot be a "2nd chance" environment for some players to be discovered. There will always be exceptions. I just think it should not be "the" environment for player discovery and development.

Your strategy is fine, but more emphasis on the < 16 needs to be given. By 16, I believe the irrepairable damage of earlier miscoaching has been done. Having organized youth teams that introduces and exposes them to a "professional" environment seems a good way to go to me. It seems natural that MLS teams should be given the opportunity to run their own academies that provide these kind of environments where the focus is on developing and nurturing their skills rather than focusing on winning at all costs - the american sports mantra.

No matter which way you go, the success rate, by design will always be low.

 

Ok, Im going to side with Steve Nicol on this, And Im not bother discussing this with you any more. You clearly have an axe to grind and an american soccer inferiority complex.

 

I think college soccer is a lot more useful for defensive players (goalies, backs, defensive mids) than it is for offensive players (attacking mids, wingers, forwards). There are two primary reasons for this. First, the style of play in college soccer lends itself towards developing defensive, rather than offensive, players. Second, it is generally much harder for a defensive player to get on the field at the MLS level than it is for an offensive player of the same skill level (all else being equal), so the defensive player is better served staying in college and getting playing time.

 

Thats one way to close a subject.

But, you are mistaken, sir. We all have our opinion, and mine is that its unrealistic to think that players like Chris Rolfe et al. will ever lead to improvement in the national team program. I do not think I am off base. Objectively, I see the same mistakes born out of a lack of technical ability, and naivety in the recent olympic squad and downward as the senior team. The next generation of players are not likely going to win anything significant, certainly not with any level of consistency. I have a more long term view that depends on players yet to come through the ranks that will be able to accomplish the level we all imagine can be achieved, with the proviso of course that the structure of our youth system is indeed rethought in order to facilitate that change.

 

I've wondered about this too. My assumption is that most developmental programs put their best players as attackers and then convert the attackers who don't work out to defenders. The problem for Bradenton is how do you convince a decent forward to be converted to a defender when they can just stay at their club team and play forward.

In a different context, look at Marc Burch. He was a foward at Maryland but was being converted to left back by the Galaxy. He was very unhappy about this (and made it known) and was traded to Columbus. They ended up moving him to left back and he had conflicts with the coaching staff and so he gets traded to DC. Finally at DC he's accepted that he's a left back and he's doing a decent job. But what if he had trained at a left back from Maryland on?

Going back to Bradenton, how do they get defenders? My guess is that they take people who specialized as defenders when they were young. Probably players without the athleticism to be considered for fowards but still with the "soccer skills" to stand out.

Because of this, we end up with U- defenders like Sturgis and Valentin who are decent enough players but just don't have the athleticism for the highest level. What we really should be doing is moving the Spectors of the world into defense earlier than we do.

 

When I think of lack of skill and MLS those are two of the least likely suspects.

Sure, when MLS is at the EPL level then Parkhurst/Rolfe will be lower tier guys. Until then we should probably be thankful college helped us identify two guys who are fringe national teamers and have a skillset that is useful to us when they do play. Neither are "game-changers" but both have very solid fundamental skills that are appropriate to their place on the depth chart.