NCAA rule change proposal that could be HUGE for MLS player development

Luckily for us that would be impossible. The majority of development is done before age 18 regardless of what system we have.

I've never understood why pinning our failings in youth development on an institution that doesn't even begin until players are old enough to vote didn't strike everyone as absurd. Do we really think our guys were Rooney and Raul before college got to them? Because I've got bad news, Rooney and Raul were already stars before they were even college-aged.

 

Blah. So what is the solution?

 

I would argue that a portion of our failings is that the youth clubs succeed by developing players who can get college scholarships. Not by developing pros.

A pretty small portion, I'll grant you.

 

I think the solution is starting with the academy league run by the USSF. But any solution is a long-term project, not one rule change.

 

Since there is more than one problem, there needs to be more than one solution. Not everything can be solved in bumper-sticker-sized pronouncements.

 

Except for the fact that there really aren't that many scholarships out there. Divison I football schools can have, what, 65 or 75 scholarships?

Last time I looked Division I soccer teams could have 9.9 scholarships - And even in the elite ACC Conference, many teams do not fully fund those spots. Most scholarships are broken up into portions to spread the money around.

My guess is that the vast majority of potential scholarships are actually not available because they are not funded.

 

I was watching Fox Football Phone-in the other night and Jesse Marsch made a really good comment about youth soccer in this country. The problem with the club system is the unwillingness to try and "tear down players and build them back up". What he was saying is that most coaches (and others as well) don't really stick it to a kid when he has a bad habit but just harps on how good they are. There is a worry in the club scene that if you upset a kid (or his parents) that they will go in search of a rival club. So coaches don't tear down a player to fix his defects and he continues to play with bad habits for way too long. What Marsch was getting at was that in order to really make better players everyone in the system needs to stop coddling them so much. When they make mistakes they need to be forcefully told it is not good enough. They need to respond to that by proving they can do it right and that they are willing to do it right. That is the only way players will actually get a lot better.

I think the academies will be a help in this because a young kid is much more likely to accept criticism from a "professional" team coach than he would from a club team coach. He would be more likely to respond because he knows that he needs to be better in order to get onto the pro side. MLS academy coaches would be ok with letting the kid he needs to do better because their money comes from creating players not from recruiting parents to pay them fees.

 

But there are a whole lot of kids getting college placements with the help of soccer, even if they aren't on scholarship.

Dave's got a good point--historically, most select teams have touted the college prep angle as the apex of development. That's one of the things the USSFDA was meant to help fix.

Of course, even that can be looked at in two ways, kind of like "teaching to the test"--when you had a good school before, it's a distraction to learning, but if most schools have no focus in their educational plan, it's an improvement of a sort. The classic club-for-college system gave us a whole bunch of hard-working but unskilled headless chickens. . . and it gave us Steve Cherundolo.

 

85 in the FBS (I-A)
60-odd in the FCS (I-AA)

Unlike soccer, football is a headcount sport; it doesn't matter if a player is partially or wholly funded, he counts as 1 against the limit.

 

This is one of the side benefits of MLS. We have an ever-growing legion of ex-pros out there. Jesse Marsch has been a solid MLS player and when he's done, perhaps he'll get a youth soccer job. If he doesn't somebody else will.

One of the problems of US soccer has been a lack of institutional knowledge and expertise. I realize that I'm painting with a very broad brush here, but bear with me. It's a big country and it will take a while for all the little things to filter down over time. I'd imagine that the average Little League coach knows more about the subtleties of baseball than the average youth soccer dad/coach knows about soccer. Why? We've been playing baseball for a hell of a long time, but by and large we've only recently starting taking soccer seriously.

It'll take generations and I think it represents a major gap between the US and established soccer countries. We can create a Bradenton and we can improve our established top-level clubs, but that's not the real problem. Good Little League coaches know a lot about baseball not because they played pro or even college, but because anybody who plays even high school baseball learns a ton and can turn around and teach their kids later in life. We need more quality coaching, quality training, and sound tactical knowledge not just at the elite levels, but at the bread-and-butter HS-type level. At that point it becomes institutional and it creates a more sophisticated sporting culture in which our young players can absorb the nuance that they aren't quite getting right now.

The DA system is a step in the right direction. MLS academies are good. I like the rule changes, the tinkering. But some of the progress simply requires patience as the overall level of expertise in our youth system slowly rises. We need to grease the skids for this as much as we can, but there's only so much you can do.