NAIA "All Americans": Oxymoron

And the internationals at the division I and II levels aren't ex-pros just the ones at the NAIA level? And the agency first point is just a tool used by NAIA coaches to bring in ex-pros but when divison I and II coaches bring in internationals from first point all those players are on the up and up? When billaracher started this thread he was bashing the NAIA and first point one without first hand knowledge on the system of recruiting internationals or recruiting at the NAIA level. If you look around the first point website you will see many first point athletes signing with division I and II schools. That number will only increase. From first hand experience and talking with other NAIA coaches, they are losing first point athletes to these NCAA schools.

As other division I schools have already figuire out the talent pool is not that deep in the US. Once the big time schools from the Big Ten, ACC, Big East and PAC 10 are done taking the best players there is not a lot left over. These schools just below are more and more going after internationals i.e. Akron. Best players are internationals and they surround themselves with some solid Americans. No one faults Lolla for doing that. In fact many praise him for his work at Akron as I do. While he might not tell recruits the internationals are getting full ride if NAIA internationals are getting their full education paid for then so are division I internationals.

This is all not true. Not all inernationals at the NAIA and division I level get their education paid for and not all are ex-pros. NAIA and NCAA schools have the same problems

 

As other division I schools have already figuire out the talent pool is not that deep in the US. Once the big time schools from the Big Ten, ACC, Big East and PAC 10 are done taking the best players there is not a lot left over. These schools just below are more and more going after internationals i.e. Akron. Best players are internationals and they surround themselves with some solid Americans.


I have a tough time agreeing with your comments around depth of US high level talent. I follow soccer very closely in Region 1 and for every national pool player from Region 1 there are 10 others that are at least as good and often better that are not recognized at the national or even regional level. THese are the top layers that do not have the sponsorship (we all know this is extremely important)and/or the funding to follow the Regional / national team track. Unfortuantley it takes more scouting work and effort to go out and find these players than just reading the list of US National pool players and then sending them recruiting letters. As you state the top 10-15 schools can fill many of their needs through just recruiting national and some regional players but everyone below would do just as well if they did more scouting and found the many other top players available.

 

You keep wanting to take this argument into the margins of the issue. For the last time. NCAA D1 schools have no allowance of any kind for players who were former professionals . If there are D1 players of that ilk (and there are some), they're flying under the radar, and the NCAA has established a prior professionalism/eligibility clearinghouse to systematically eliminate those occurences in the future. So there is going to be less demand among D1 schools for these players in the future; not more. (Jacksonville University lost an entire season a few years ago, among other NCAA sanctions, when they were caught with several former professionals on their roster.)

Conversely, the NAIA has systematic provisions for the reinstatement of amateurism to former professionals who wouldn't qualify for D1 eligibility . It welcomes ex-pros with open arms, which is the reason that organizations like First Point can remain financially solvent "selling" these players into the US collegiate market.

What is it that you don't understand about any of this? It's REAL straightforward.

 

And again you do not have all the facts of the NAIA rules and not that I fault you because you are neither a coach or in an administrative position at the NAIA level. The NAIA has a new gap rule which states that any athlete that does not go directly fcrom high school to college must submit a form to indicate what they have done during that time including what club team. The players if they have played professionally loses a year eligiblity just like at the NCAA division II level. And again dvision II did this because many of the international players who were ages 26-30 were coming under scrutiny. I can think of one school that was close to where I use to coach in particular that had a team with most of these aged players. And many coaches felt that the players were ex-pros. How did these players slide under the big radar screen of the NCAA with the clearinghouse?



Yes I know about the clearinghouse for NCAA athletes but there are ways around. If you do not think that an club or federation from another country would be willing to lie for one of their athletes or forge documents that is just naive thinking.

The NAIA cleared house already in some sports like tennis where it is easier to verify if a player is pro or not. The ITA website shows which players have received prize money. The NAIA declared many athletes ineligible and some NAIA schools in many instances lost a whole team. So the NAIA does take athletes being pro serious and they are beginning to deal with it and soccer is beginning to take a hit. And really that is just for the few NAIA teams that do not do things by the books just like was the case for the few division II schools that were not doing things by the book. I neither have a preference for coaching at the NAIA or NCAA level. I like the NCAA and if I had an opportunity to coach for one that was competitive I would. It just makes me laugh when I hear people bad mouth the NAIA.

 

For smaller division I schools outside of the ones I have mentioned their budgets simply are not big enough to catch that talent because they do not have the recruiting budget. Coaches only can recruit those players if they are somewhat close by. There is only so much talent in a region l to go around. How do they get the players from II, III, and IV. Many times it has nothing to do with laziness but $$$.

Have you talked to coaches at the division I leve and have they told you the talent pool is deep? Did they tell you if they do not get a player from the national team or regional team that the players from the next tier down is just as good as an international player they could get? I do not think many US coaches would amdit that. That is why the trend is coaches leaning to the international player. That next tier down player is enough of a difference that if the teamn was solely comprised of it they just simply could not compete with a top level division I school.

Players that do not go pro in a country say like England or Brazil are a completely different class then a player that is not on the Regional or National team. That is why coaches are more and more using internationals

 

I understand the rules completely. The fundamental difference between NCAA D2 and the NAIA is that the NCAA doesn't operate under a pretense of restoring amateur status, while the NAIA does (a long standing tenet). The NCAA had never paid particularly close attention to transfers from NAIA to D1 schools since they hadn't bothered to "pierce the veil" of restored amateurism held out by the NAIA. When they actually started looking into it, they discovered that it was not only possible, but probable, that these types of transfers would not meet the eligibility requirements of the D1 rules. Thus, the requirement for an amateur certification clearinghouse.

The only thing that recent NAIA rule changes have brought about is a reduction in the number of "very old" players in the system. It's still entirely possible for former professional players to matriculate as old as 22 and still have 2-3 years of collegiate eligibility remaining.

 

The Naia is a joke. i am currently playing at a Naia school (yea playing ). Most of the internationals are from youth acadamies, pro teams, lower division teams, and national programs were they have already been capped. That is what they at least claim. i have no prblem with them, but the system flawed. These group of guys are good people. Only half are serious about school and the rest are just here for soccer. The biggest problem is the revolving door of players. I can recount around 25 foriegn players that have come and gone. Over the past three years players come and go like its a proffesional team. The stories of guys getting of the plane and scoring before unpacking are true. At my school it has happened for the last three years. some guys do not even know which school they are playing are the name of the school til someone picks them up from the airport. It is hard to get any attention when you have ex pros playing in front of you. this sucks at times but life goes on.

The quality of some of the internationals is not as good as some of the americans, but the "big timers" get to play because of there nationality or hype.

Scholarships are a joke to. coaches know how to work the system at each school.

 

The arguments will continue....but everything has its flaws. Look at NCAA DI football, BCS vs. play-off. There are great stories in the NAIA as well as every other division with people that do it the right way. There are the few that cause the problems or cheat. The NAIA is a wonderful organization as well as the NCAA. The NAIA has some great teams that do not have pros so does the NCAA. I am sure that there have players that have slipped through the cracks in the NCAA. The difference in level of play between the top DI down to the top NAIA (non-pros) is not that distant. Everyone system has its flaws so lets celebrate the fact that there many choices for players of the world to pursue an education and that we have a melting pot of styles and personalities. Someday (I know it will happen) that the NAIA will have a international restriction.

 

Rep for you.

 

Actually some of the coaches even admit that the foreign players they get are not that great (they would be with the club programs in their home country or playing for a professional team if they were top level) but it impresses some alumni and soccer critics to say you added an international player or two. Plus many schools have special funds available for these internationals as part of their exchange programs so they do not require athletic scholarships. Also I am not going to start naming player names but there are many examples where the club teamates of a highly touted regional / national player turn out to be the better college players. ONce again it does not take much money just a lot of time spent at soccer matches and training sessions to find the talent you are saying is not there.

 

Our college soccer team, which shall still remain nameless because that is the way I want it, brought in a player a year or two ago who played with the AC Milan youth teams until he was to old to play with them. He couldn't cut it with the full squad so they let him go. He was from Africa and wanted to come to the US to play. He got cut. If you think that players from Europe are "a completely different class" then you have been looking in all the wrong places. I never played regionals or national team ODP crap, it is all too political. I only played one year of ODP. But I didn't get cut and a player from AC MILAN, a powerhouse, was... Must be because US Youth Soccer is crap, right? Don't think so...

 

In a way, saying that this player is a 'different class' isn't exactly wrong. You have to realize the difference in style we play here compared to other countries. Flip on FSC and just watch some games from Argentina, Brazil, Italy, etc. Adjusting to styles of play is very difficult to do. I know a lot of guys have a difficult time transitioning from their native land's style of play to how we play here in the USA.

There have been a few foreign players who have come over to play at Drake (the team I follow in Des Moines other than the Menace) who were very successful where they came from but couldn't adjust to the American style. There was recently a guy who made the Canadian U-20 National pool who came to Drake and never saw action in a fall game in two seasons. A few years back a kid from Africa came over after being a starter at forward for a team that won the African club national championship who played 10 games in three years (minimal amounts of playing time in each contest).

It's not that these players aren't good when they come in, it's just the shock of being halfway across the world (in the case of the player you're talking about and also the African fellow I'm speaking of) without seeing family or friends for a long period of time, then adjusting to something very foreign to them, which is style of play.

You can't make an assumption that he and AC Milan are a joke, because that isn't the case at all. US Youth Soccer is a joke in some states (don't get me started) but soccer here in the states is getting better and better every year and catching up with other countries (Note: reference the 2002 World Cup). Our national team is more of a reminder to us all that our soccer is getting better than a lot of places, and why is it? Because we have all the necessary funding to be a powerhouse, which we will become more and more as the years pass.

Sorry, I got off topic. But still, adjusting to all the differences could be a reason he couldn't cut it.

 

I agree completely with everything you said, but I didn't say that as an indicator that players from Europe are a joke, only that coaches did not, despite what patriotscoach was advocating, need to go overseas to find talent. The fact that he got cut could have had something to do with him having trouble adjusting, but still, that shows that players from overseas aren't a cut above Americans when put on a college soccer team. And that is what patriotscoach was indicating, that after the top tier of players are taken from the US, foreign players are better. I don't consider myself one of the top 150 from my class (not Adidas ESP or anything) but I cut it on a team that he didn't. The point had nothing to do with his overall ability as a player but instead with his value to a college soccer team and the fact that the American player pool provided players just as good or better, even after the top Region ODP guys are gone.

 

After reading all u guys have to say about NAIA and the student athletes, i can understand why the MLS rarely looks at the great talent within the NAIA schools. Its no wonder that non of the First Team NAIA ALL AMERICAN athletes has been called up for any major combines or even been drafted in the MLS draft. Talk about racism!! This is a great example and a huge way of getting back at the foreign players, while at the same time giving "opportunity" to the AMERICAN boys to play the game. These players bring great flavor and a different twist to the game which is much more needed by America's growing soccer programs. It is one reason why MLS will never be as appealing as EPL, French league and many other European leagues because soccer in the U.S is not the most passionate thing, while where these players come from, soccer is their food and sleep. Given a chance to play among or against these foreign players, pro or not, our players will improve greatly and give the game the needed touch and following that the game commands overseas. I would recommend that MLS teams give chance to some of these players, especially Simon from Park University, Fabricio Codeceira Jr. Fresno Pacific Rio de Janeiro, Branko Savic Sr. Lindenwood. This are exceptional players who by all merit deserve a chance to play in the MLS, lets look past our prejudice guys and make the game a fun sport to watch.

 

No one is racist. No one over was racist. I lived in Europe until I was 9. All anyone is asking for is a level playing field. One where foreigners are held to the same requirements regarding amaturism that Americans are. One where 18 year old Americans are not competing against 23 year old Nigerians for spots on the field. How is that being racist?

Racism was never an issue that was remotely touched upon or hinted at. You would have a point if people we asking for more teams to recruit the suburban white athlete over the urban black athlete. That would be racism. Is anything remotely close to that happening? Nope.

You jump to conclusions to quickly.

 

Sadly, Bill Archer is a blind Mexican who thinks he is white. He won't find out until he meets Jesus.

 

There are other issues in regards to MLS.

Other posters who are more knowlegdgable may educate you but it has to do with limited number of foreign players (like in Europe) and age limits in developmental

 

Please be careful not to label D2, D3, and NAIA as "lower levels". There are some DI teams that could not hold their own against some average NAIA teams. There are some NAIA teams that could and have beat high level DI teams. The same could be said for D2 and and D3.

 

How many times am I going to have to read this same post? A million? A billion?

There is nothing factually incorrect in your post, except your assertion that D2,3 and NAIA are not lower levels, which they obviously are.

 

I am wondering how you figuire that since there is no regulation or promotion system in college athletics.

 

Thank you ButlerBob. Some who could summarize exactly what I was saying. I would love to get some of these talented American players but many do not wat to attend an NAIA school or for that matter a division II school. As a coach you have to look elsewhere to compete and that in many cases international players.

 

Let me start by saying this is only my opinion ..... and, afterall, it is a forum where people can give opinions. Ok, I've managed to be a guest for a while now but enough is enough. (For the record patriotscoach I think you've explained yourself very well indeed)

Lower Level? This has already been pointed out, but there is no promotion and relegation, so what constitutes lower? Err, not as good as? Smaller/poorer facilities?

College Soccer is almost unique in that it is a sport where some of the minnows of the NAIA could (given the opportunity) compete with NCAA D1 schools. Yes, of course, I refer to the top end, of both affiliations. They used to do this you know … strangely enough the powers that be decided to do away with it. It’s a shame they don’t do this anymore I’m sure it would spark some interest - especially on here.

Maybe Mr. Archer can research the scores and tell us all how the higher level teams faired against the lower level (NAIA) schools.

Anyone who has any significant dealings with either NCAA D1 or NAIA knows the story. Well, they should do.

I think the thing that annoys some people is that NCAA D1 soccer isn’t up on a pedestal like other NCAA D1 sports. I mean come on, just imagine an NAIA football team taking on a good NCAA 1 school - ugly in the extreme and dangerous, too.

The fact is there isn’t the huge gap in college soccer that there is in other sports. I can’t understand why some people are seemingly threatened by this. By simply labeling NAIA as lower level doesn't set D1 apart from NAIA on the field of play.

Be gentle with me this is my first foray into forumland.

TQ

 

You and patriotscoach must be NAIA classmates. If you're gonna go down that path, you need to first opine at the place where patriotscoach bailed out: ie, the discussion about the absurdity of a system that reinstates professionals as amateurs (Wayne Rooney qualifies, BTW), in a system with a ridiculously "soft" scholarship cap that would allow as many as twice (or more) the number of scholarship players as NCAA D1 schools.

When you chew on that concept long enough, you'll realize that it's the primary reason that the Top NAIA schools as competitive as you suggest they are. The looser set of competitive and academic standards is why the NAIA qualifies as a "lower level" division, as Bill Archer posted several pages back. It has nothing to with who can do what to whom on a given day.