My kid just returned from the 92/93 Region II ODP Developmental Camp (young, I know). With modest exceptions, he reported that pretty much every one of the top-rated players at the camp fit the following description: 1) plays center midfield at club level, 2) quick & shifty, 3) small (this follows from the previous ... most of these 12/13 year olds are 5' 1" or shorter), 4) not blazing fast (ditto), 5) not much defense, 6) doesn't score many goals, 7) godlike in possession, 8) smart passer, 9) can dance on the top of a table with the ball. Work rate wasn't really the issue; some of these guys work hard, others are distinctly "luxury" style players. It's fair to say that unlike Clive Charles, the Region II coaches wouldn't have had much interest in Conor Casey. I picked up my Kevin McShane "Coaching Youth Soccer: The European Way" and checked up on what European youth professional coaches seek in young players: a) speed, b) aggression, c) competitive mindset, d) good technique (great, they're less worried about because they believe they can teach). Ironic -- the Euros follow the stereotype of the American model (fast aggressive hard working athlete), and the Americans follow the stereotype of the foreign model (technique, technique, technique). Thoughts?
John...my younger brother just returned from the same camp. He made the national pool, along with several of his buddies that hes made through odp and from playing in many club tournies against these kids. Of the three of them that were hanging out together all week, all of them made the team...and only one of them are center mids. The other two are distinct outside mids. All three are exceptional on the ball, with smooth 1v1 moves and the ability to split a defense with the pass. I also think that the majority of the players selected were hard workers, ofcourse there was the random forward here or there without much interest in tracking back...hey you get that at ALL levels. Overall I think that Region II did a good job of selections from what I've seen on the club scene the last year, and in the different ODP sessions this year. Good luck to your son as well!
In other words, what the coaches are looking for are the Ben Olsen, Kyle Martino, Ned Grabavoy, Nik Besagno types....in the hopes of finding a Claudio Reyna or a Tab Ramos. I am sorry...the Region II ODP selection system is complete screwed up.
Karl: I have seen the "cream of the crop" from recent years in the Pro's MArtino,Gravaboy,Klass,Martino etc and I have to admit I'm extremely unimpressed.Almost robotic pass and play.........and very little creativity.Telling comment made at the World U-20's,,,,,,,Dutch coach was asked about Adu.....Dutch coach a bit mystified by the hype asked the media what the fuss was about as he had at least 5 players yhe same age that were much better than Adu.
I don't know about that Karl. That may be a bit of a stretch. The selectors do seem to be maybe overcompensating a bit for some errors made in a previous life. My understanding is that it was a big, big camp. Based on the way I've heard the selection process went, it seems they went for the most obviously talented technical players first. This would seem to discriminate against the early developers - even if they are technical - who may not have much use or need for ball dancing skills.
I wouldn't take too much stock in that Dutch coach, Celtic. If he had 5 players better than Adu he would have won the whole dang tournament with a 3-0 final. Perhaps the Dutch can be a bit arrogant when it comes to player development.
JohnR - as I've posted before, the different regions do have different philosophies. Region II sounds like what Region I does: emphasize technique over athleticism. Regions 3 and 4 supposedly emphasize more athleticism. So it's unfair to characterize all Americans as you did. The one point I am suprised at is the apparent lack of emphasis on speed. No matter how big the kid is, he's got to have speed. Did your kid report that all the top level players were already identified before the camp? One thing is certain: by selecting only this type of player they have demotivated a bunch of 13 and 14-yo's who do not fit these criteria.
The only comment I'll make is that this is one of the values in having multiple indpendent decision makers picking and training players. If you increase the variety of methods, you are far more likely to stumble upon something that works. Furthermore what might happen is that Coach A might turn out the best strikers, Coach B might turn out the best midfielders and Coach C might turn out the best players all-around. Does anyone know of any infor correlating footspeed at 12 or 13 with footspeed at 22 or 23? Maybe the lack of any real burners is due to a potentially weak correlation between speed at that age and speed as an adult. Any info there?
ABSOLUTELY! That's why I'm excited about Super Y, US Club Soccer ID2, ESP, etc. So many ways and opportunities to look at players. One player I complained about not getting a fair shake and look at his club and ODP has now been involved in Super Y National Pool, ID2, and just recently ESP. If he still doesn't show up at Bradenton, maybe I have to accept that he just is not what they are looking for right now or (possibly) he's not good enough. More and more holes are being plugged as the years go along.
A good gloss on my comments. My son's information is absolutely accurate about the '93s, less so about the '92s. Thanks for the correction. I wonder how they defined technical among the '92s? Among the '93s, it was mostly dribbling/craftiness on the ball/short passing. Striking the ball, crossing, long passing, and so forth didn't appear to be important, in large part because they never played full-field games (the format was 4 vs. 4 and 7 vs. 7). But perhaps full-field play was done more with the Regional Pool '92s.
My unscientific opinion is, very high. I know that when Eddie Johnson was discovered at 11 or so by an ODP coach, the guy laughed in a later interview how easy it was for Eddie just to run past the opposition. Ditto for Michael Owen, who scored 8 goals against a U.S. team as a 12 year old, almost all on breakaways. I am sure that I could dig up 1000s more examples. No doubt, if EJ and Michael Owen were there, the ODP guys would have stood up and taken notice. They just didn't happen to have much interest in the next level down, i.e. our state's poor man's version of EJ. Four of the five fastest, highest-scoring, and most marked forwards in the state's top league showed up to camp, and none of 'em ever got a sniff. Again, these comments apply to the U12 (late 92/early 93) group, don't know so much about the older '92s.
At that age, under-sized kids have a huge advantage in quickness. However, they are the worst kind of early bloomers. Once the other kids stop growing, their motor skills close the gap, and all the little guys have left is the disadvantage of being small. By contrast, at least big kids (not named Adu) tend to grow into big adults. Note that there is a vision of Latin American players being small and quick. However, if you compare Amado Guevara or Carlos Ruiz to the average Honduran and Guatemalan, they are big, strong guys. If you compare Samuel Caballero to the average Honduran, he's an NBA power forward. Apart from the US, practically every national team in the world is dominated by players who in their home country are at least average in size. Thankfully, Bradenton has been moving to get more big kids into the pipeline. They still have a harmful tendency to pick goalkeepers who are too small to pan out internationally, but other positions are getting better.
Actually, I would say that the U.S. team is about average in size, on the whole. Let's take a look a possible WC lineup - Eddie Johnson - big Brian McBride - big Eddie Lewis - medium DMB - small/medium Donovan - small/medium Mastro - small/medium Cherundolo - small Vanney - big Boca - big Gooch - big OK, back to the subject at hand ...
Yes, agree completely. On the goalkeeper issue, I think one of the issues here is that youth national teams do have to win. As a result, they pick the most athletic kids with the quickest hands and feets -- and after those three things, go for size. So therefore you see the kids you mention early.
Additionally, I am not seeing the preponderance of good athletes in goal at the youth levels like I used to see in the 80s and 90s. More and more of the goalkeepers on the top teams are second, or even third tier athletes as the better athletes are opting to stay on the field.
That's a bad thing for developing the next Kasey Keller but pretty good news for U.S. soccer overall, right? I don't know how things were 10/15 years ago, but I certainly agree with your assessment. I'd say that maybe half of the top U12/U13 teams have true goalkeepers. The rest have guys who would have been cut from the team years back, unless they agreed to play in goal.
No disagreement; I wasn't suggesting our guys were short, so much as that all the other countries skew towards being tall. Looking at Confederations Cup squads, Germany only had one guy below 5'11. Granted, Germans do tend to be a little taller than Americans, but Australians are about the same size, and they didn't have anyone below 5'9. Mexicans are a good deal shorter than us (5'7 on average), and their Confed Cup team only had three players below that. Now, we obviously lose a lot of big athletes to other sports, but that's equally true of Australia. More to the point of this thread, if big kids were being selected to ODP teams, they'd be more inclined to keep playing.
OK ... if this particular angle is dying out, let's look at a slightly different perspective: attributes vs. results. The Region II and European methods might look for different attributes, but they are both alike in that they are examining aspects of a player, rather than directly measuring the results that he is associated with. In other words, they don't say "Does this kid find a way to win?" Instead, they offer the scout a checklist of features, and if the checklist is met, the player is accepted. Is there any merit to taking a different approach? Say, mixing the kids up among various random teams, then tracking their individual results via a plus/minus system? I can argue this both ways -- one argument being no, if you identify the key attributes that determine future success, it's best to concentrate on that. The other argument being, but soccer is soooo much more than just creative trickery or speed or size or any handful of attributes that you might favor, and it includes things like decision making and mental toughness and intelligence and vision and unselfishness and other aspects that are hard to measure but which are very important to soccer success. So maybe looking at results would capture that success. I ask because without exception, the players from the two dominant U12 teams in the state were placed into oblivion pools. That struck me as a bit odd, two teams that wiped out everybody else in the state (they went 4-0 against my son's team, beating our boys by an aggregate score of 17-5 -- and my son's team was the #3 team in the state!), and all of their guys are crap.
In this state, and in region 2 pool picks of kids from this state, there seems to be an overwhelming bias toward kids with "ball trickery", whether or not this "skill" translates to any kind of game ability. Kids picked for the state team are overwhelmingly kids who can put on an excellent show while standing alone on the field handling the ball. They are often not on the best teams in the area (not by choice) and are not usually even particularly strong, or what I would term "critical" members of the teams they do play on. There is little notice of speed, size, decision making, passing, or ability to impact a game. Perhaps USClub has the right method, they scout players in actual games with their club teams. No doubt there is still some politics involved, but at least they see the kids in a game environment, playing with teammates with whom there is at least a small amount of chemistry.
Of course, the argument would be that while these kids might not dominate games now, they have the tools to dominate games at an older age, when things really do matter. I'm not saying that is wrong. Maybe, maybe not. Genuinely, I do not know. Am interested in hearing from others who do believe that they know.
You got me thinking on this one. My friend accompanied his California youth team when it played in a Spanish U14 (1991) tournament earlier this year. He reported that Real Madrid's and Barcelona's squads were taller than the teams they play against in California, with the average player being about 5' 8" in height. He sent me a photo of the game that showed most of the players being taller than the adult referee -- which makes sense, because the Spanish are a short people, the average man being about 5' 7". Weird. Although the U.S. has taller people overall than Spain, in my state, in my kid's year, they're not playing soccer. Or at least if they are, they're not showing up to ODP. There were 60 kids in my son's '93 ODP pool and he was the second tallest of those 60 kids (the tallest boy was not picked for the state team, so my son is the tallest on the state team.) He currently is a decidedly ungiraffelike 5' 2 1/2", which projects to about 5' 8" in 2 years from now, when he is a calendar-year U14. For reference's sake, this would also equate to be 6' feet even as an adult. So ... our tallest player = their average sized player = 6' tall as an adult. Double weird. I guess it's different in other states, other years. But damn, Illinois has 10 million people ... and only one kid who projects to be taller than 6' tall showed up for the statewide soccer talent identification program?
In terms of the size issue,tall kids in the United States are not pushed to play soccer, any kid with size is put on a basketball court at the first sign of height. While smaller kids see soccer as a sport where size does not matter as much. I was a very serious basketball player for a some time untill I was about 13 years old when I realized I was not going to be any taller then 5'8 and I begin to put more time in to soccer. On the other issue of developing players I do find that many coaches are stuck on playing "pretty soccer" and constantly take players with more ball skill then speed, when ball skill is somthing you can teach and speed you can not. As the saying goes "Speed Kills"
Since nobody knows if these kids will even play soccer six years from now these selections are a crapshoot. If I'm picking a team, I'm going to pick the players with the best ball skills. At least I know they have been working on their game. As we all know, since speed and size can't be taught, you can wake up in the morning and be big and fast. I wouldn't hold size or speed against a kid that knows how to play soccer. It will be interesting to see how these kids perform as a team. I'm sure they will eventually play against a big, fast and unskilled side. If big and fast wins, I'm sure the coaches will see the error in their ways. I bettin' on big and fast, because Karl said so a couple of months ago, in another athlete v skills thread.
Please be clear -- the debate is only about a certain type of ball skills, not having ball skills vs. not. I'm talking about a situation where all the players have a good first touch, they can all juggle 100+ times, they can all place a 25 yard pass with proper weight in space to a guy making a run. The prime difference is, the smaller, shiftier players use a lot of stepovers & roll the ball with their feet etc. to create space, while the faster and (usually but not always) bigger players dribble more via feints & speed. It's my own fault for couching this as a size argument -- that's not actually at the heart of it, although it's indirectly related. I think what I'm saying is that I noticed a preference for Joe Cole/Cristiano Ronaldo type dribblers, the guys who are wonderful tricksters, vs. Eidar Godjohnson (or Arjen Robben) type dribblers, the guys who don't dwell on the ball, but just go at people with speed. Yes, that's definitely what I'm saying. From what I heard, the coaches at this particular camp would pick Joe Cole over Eidar in a heartbeat. So I guess their assumption is that these would-be Joe Coles will do what Joe Cole did this last year and what Freddy Adu (another in this type of player, in fact the U.S. prototype) has yet to quite learn, which is how to combine those skills & tricks with the understanding of when to get rid of the ball, and to add some steel to their all-around game. I can see the logic -- as long as you had a few Marvell Wynnes around to win some balls in the back, a bunch of the Chelsea version of Joe Coles wouldn't be a bad thing. But I hope they consider an Eidar Gudjohnson or two along the way ... I know Eidar ain't as fun to watch, but he's pretty useful -- and technical -- in his own way.