Take Southern California Players!!! Not a single player from Southern California on this past U-17 team. The USSF needs to stick to its bases. The area has produced more professional players in the United States than any other state. The competition is consistently the best in the nation and the huge Hispanic influence creates a better soccer environment and skill level than any other comparing state. Hackworth is a fool for not recognizing and he needs to be let go ASAP.
I think he needs to be let go but not beacause he didn't take a kid from a certain region of the country, however bradenton is not the way to go and hopefully the development acedemies will fix that, do you think the development acedemies will largely expand the field for the next u-17 world cup?
Current crop of 1992's from So Cal heading to Residency are predominately latino. Not to belittle these boy's accomplishments but a fair number of these kids are "early maturing". I don't believe there is a single anglo from Southern California in that pool. I do concur that with constraints placed on the So Cal ODP program by only allowing one ODP team per calendar year player has done the So Cal kids a disservice. I also believe this constraint is by design and triggered in part by fear of a Californian imbalance by the East Coast soccer establishment We Californians know all too well this East Coast bias. Hopefully for some of the high achievers in Southern California being overlooked, the Academy concept creates some opportunity for those that are falling through the cracks and those being missed are smart and migrate to those clubs with the Academy designation. But to your point to not roster a single Southern California on this last roster is bullshit plain and simple. Southern California has one of the largest player participation numbers if not the largest. I also don't subscribe to the brotherly love concept JH has employed in his roster decisions as in the Zimmermans etc. That to me is the lazy mans approach to recruitment as what should occur, is the nation be scoured for the best possible player at each position. Just because one brother is succesful doesn't equate to the next brother in line being as good. I saw that happen with the Ortega brothers out of So Cal over the past three - four years too. Again, this team should be fielding world class players for each position which entails a significant and thorough scouting effort. Instead, the concept of cronyism is getting worse.
Not sure what you mean by an East Coast bias, more like SoCal got screwed for one cycle. But the rest of the West Coast seemed to do fine. In terms of current fashion for Latino players, the (ongoing) interest in early maturing kids, the habit of selecting younger brothers and/or coaches' kids, yep I see that here in the Midwest (at the Regional level) as well.
A'92 Regional ODP player I know states that every Bradenton invitee from the '92 class attended the 2005 national camp. That would be very depressing, if true.
I think the lesson we learned is that it is time to dump Bradenton ... to identify a specific # of players and run them for a year like that is a sparse bet at best. It is time to let the MLS enterprises train these players within some set of USSF guidelines ..... expand P40 into a regional training environment ... ODP can be a set of inputs but let the pros make the determination.
The overall lesson seems to be that we don't identify the right players early and therefore we don't develop the right players into world class stars. One problem, as been mentioned before, is that we identify early maturers. They look dominant at an early age because they are so much faster and stronger than other players their age. There also seems to be a privileging of athleticism at the expense of soccer intelligence at the younger ages. T What if we took a completely different approach? What if we privilege soccer intelligence early on at the expense of size, speed etc? What if we selected for players at U14 who were the smartest on the field, the hardest working and who had the most commitment and are the most coachable. I'm not saying that they shouldn't have some athleticism etc, but that this is not the primary attribute we look for. We take these players and give them elite development for the next 4 years so they are more comfortable on the ball, learn good tactics and learn to be creative with the tactics. Then we reverse the process. At U18, we look at this pool of players and from them we privilege the best athletes--the biggest and fastest etc. It would seem to me that by U18, most of the players will have matured enough to know who is fast, strong, big etc. I believe that smarts is something that can be identified early on and usually stays with a person. The smart player at U14 will still be a smart player at U18, given the right guidance. (If they don't get the right guidance, however, I don't think this will necessarily be the case, so coaching is still crucial here). However, the biggest and fastest player at U14 will not be the biggest and fastest at U18. So if we do it this way, we will have 'culled' the group into the most athletic and smartest at U18. If we look at the most athletic first early on, we take a gamble on whether or not they have enough soccer IQ later on. There seems to be this idea that if you are athletic, you will be able to make up for your mistakes (eg. if you take a bad touch, you can use your speed to quickly recover). But what if we took the players who make very few mistakes to begin with, who are athletic enough and see how they develop and mature.
Makes sense to me, but in fairness the top European clubs appear to do much the same as us -- pick for athleticism, aggression, and technique. With similar stupid screwups, such as cutting Andy Johnson because he's not athletic enough, dumping Roy Keane because he is too small, etc. So I guess I didn't shoot down your theory after all, did I?
The real solution is to simply cast a wider net. Trying to predict how a 14 year old will develop is inherently unpredictable and, frankly, pretty much guesswork. Hard to project how an early teen will develop physically, mentally and socially. Simply too many unknown variables. Other countries do not have a magic formula for eliminating the guesswork. Instead they simply cast a wider net to account for those kids who are late bloomers while at the same time not putting all of their marbles on those kids who simply peaked early. Increasing and diversifying the talent pool is what is needed. Once you do that, then the cream will ultimately rise to the top.
What are we supposed to do about kids from Bunnell, Florida, or Seattle, Washington, or St. Louis, Missouri?
It won't matter much in the future the way the US Soccer "powers that be" are running around the world identifying future prospects in other countries and then helping them get visas, citizenship, etc. You'll soon be asking, "what country did they find him in".Little Johnny from Hoboken won't have a chance to reach the highest levels of soccer in this country.
Everyone is looking to find that one star that will make them famous as the person who found XXXX in the wilds of some third world country. Takes a lot longer and alot more skill and patience to develop players here. Same theory that some college coaches seem to use in their recruiting.