Pda

Travelmom, this one is for you.

PDA planning and high standards lead to success
by Robert Ziegler 7/19/2005
“Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men’s blood. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work.” – Daniel Burnham

While the great architect likely wasn’t thinking about soccer, his premise applies when talking about the girls program at the Player’s Development Academy in Zarephath, NJ.

When club president Tom Anderson decided to found PDA, the club which recently won four Region I championships on the girls side, he definitely was thinking big.

“What prompted me to do it was that I thought there were a lot of very good soccer players in New Jersey, but that the state wasn’t getting the recognition in terms of national teams,” Anderson said. “I check around and it seemed like our state was zip code challenged. Towns had their clubs and each of them were set up for players in levels A through D. This was getting kids play soccer which is great, but the top kids were not being challenged and motivated. If you can’t bring in players from a larger area, who challenges your top players to do better?”

Anderson compared the concept basketball courts in Harlem, where players stay on the court if they win, and if the lose, go and practice harder.

“Competition makes you better. Everybody has to be pushed,” he said. “We needed a club where the coaches and teams worked together. In the zip code clubs the teams all belonged to a club, but they didn’t work with or even talk to each other.”

“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.” -
Peter Drucker

Knowing what he wanted in term of a player development paradigm, Anderson began looking at how to get from point A to B. He came to understand that setting would play a huge role in the story.

“In checking with some other clubs to see how they developed, it came down to a facility,” Anderson said. “Most clubs don’t control their own fields. They play at parks or schools and have to share them. You don’t know what you’re going to get in terms of quality, and at some point you have to know whether the mistake being made is your fault or the field’s fault.”

PDA, which began fielding competitive teams in 1997, opened a seven-field facility in Zarephath in 1999. Now 11 fields, the PDA facility is one of the best in the country (if not the best club-owned facility).

PDA coach Charlie Naimo said you can’t overstate the value of the facility to the club’s efforts.

“We have a great facility which is hard to find in the northeast,” Naimo said. “It’s colder, but we get to play outdoors more than most people in this area.”

Director of women’s coaching Mike O’Neill said the atmosphere created at the facility is vital as well.

“You come here any night and you’ll find a game,” he said. “There’s never a problem with wanting to do something because you don’t have a field.”

“Everybody’s got plans, until they get hit.” – Mike Tyson

With the plans in place, it was time for the PDA staff to begin the battle of developing players, and that’s where the club has really begun to make its mark. The Region I Championships, where PDA Wildcats (U17), PDA Fury (U16), PDA Pride (U15) and PDA Power (U13) all won titles (along with U18 Boys team PDA Conquistadors), serves as a culmination to five years of lofty success through youth soccer by PDA teams. What makes the success even more impressive is that the club doesn’t hang its hat on trophies won nearly as much on its ability to produce top players.

“For us, the big picture is we want to try and create an atmosphere to provide players the opportunity to play at the highest level, whether with national teams or college teams,” O’Neill said. “Development more important to us than winning, especially at the younger ages.”

“Our focus is not on the trophies. It’s fun to compete and go win, but our focus is on making the players better,” Naimo said. “That comes with the competition. We want to put them in whatever situations will help them get to the next level, that’s what we want as a coaching board. Winning the trophy is a by-product of that. Our true goal is to have more Heather O’Reillys, to use the competition and training to help more girls find their way onto national teams and college soccer rosters.”

While O’Reilly, Women’s National Team star at the Olympic Games, is the young club’s most famous alumnus, there is no shortage of players dotting Division I college rosters, and the wave of early commitments by the U17 Wildcats team shows the product is only getting better.

John Gay, a parent on the U15 team, said the club’s success, in terms of producing good players, helps beget more success.

“One of the things we didn’t fully appreciate at the time we joined is that some of the best teams we play are the other teams at PDA,” Gay said. “We knew we would be entered into top competition but the matches they play against each other at PDA are some of the best they face.”

PDA Pride standout Brooke Nettuno said the intra-club matches are very valuable to player development.

“We play each other a lot. We play the Fury a lot, the Fury play the Wildcats. We play the U14 team,” she said. “It really helps us to be able to play the Fury. They’re so much more faster and stronger. It prepares us for the best teams we will play in competition.”

Nettuno noted the club’s success at regionals has provided a good opportunity for a healthy camaraderie, with players and parents from teams congratulating one another and wishing well for the upcoming nationals. Mike O’Neill said it’s important for coaches to work together within the club as well, and that this has been a key part of the PDA success.

“Whenever as a staff of coaches we think something is good, we try to put our heads together to make it better,” O’Neill said. “All the coaches interact to help each other.”

With such a professional approach, it’s easy to see why over-involvement on the soccer end of things from parents, often a problem even in elite youth soccer, is not an issue. John Gay notes that as a parent, he appreciates this as a strong point of the club.

“I trained (his daughter Adelaide) for a while It reaches the point where there’s a limit of how good parents can be as coaches. As wonderful as they are, parents are not full-time professional trainers,” he said. “When we came I said ‘I don’t want to be an assistant coach. I want to sit on the other side and hire you to train my daughter.’ One of values of super clubs is they can afford to have good facilities and full-time trainers who are good. The parents at PDA play a role, but it’s circumscribed. They don’t run the club. It’s almost like sending a kid into a college environment.”

Well not exactly, but the work of the club certainly points them in that direction.

“Ultimately we’re trying to make it easier for the kids at the club to have the college experience,” O’Neill, an assistant coach at Rutgers, said.

“The club has been awesome,” said U17 defender Melissa Seitz said of the college search process. “The PDA tournaments have so many colleges coming in to look at us and help us know what to do when the process first starts. Obviously they want the best for us.”

The actual development of players places a heavy emphasis on skill development at an early age.

“At those younger ages (the youngest developmental squads are U8) we just emphasize repetition to make sure kids are comfortable with the ball at their feet. These kids use staff coaches (each gender of the club employs approximately 10 coaches),” O’Neill said. “We bring guys in to coach and make sure they understand that it’s about the players. We tell them what they have to get accomplished by a certain year. I don’t go look at whether our U11 team is winning or not winning tournaments, I look at how are they developing and are the coaches teaching the things they need to learn.”

Seitz said key elements of the developmental program have to do with lifelong issues like character, and attitude.

“We are very competitive, but failure is allowed, because we learn from our mistakes,” Seitz said. “We have great coaches who love to win just like we do, but we know it’s more about growing up, and our coaches and parents know that too. It really is more about learning than winning.”

While everyone at the club is enjoying the success, Anderson and the coaching staff are clear that there are loftier goals to be reached in the future.

“The ultimate goal for every soccer club would be similar to what they have in Europe, where you eventually end up with a professional team and the entire systems of teams stemming from that,” Anderson said. “Those teams got started by developing home-grown players. We have our pro teams here but how many of those players are actually local heroes that came up through the ranks. I’m glad we have MLS and I hope we can get WUSA back, but we don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. You have to develop a sense of belonging or identifying with a club, and that comes at the local level. We’re closely affiliated with the New Jersey Wildcats (of the W-League) and you can even start to see that happening there, even if on a smaller scale.”

So the theme of setting the bar high, dreaming big as Burnham puts it, continues to mark the club’s personality. Melissa Seitz sums it up well.

“We know we are different. We set a standard for ourselves and aim to reach that standard all the time,” she said. “Because of the atmosphere that PDA offers for us, we are able to reach that level.”

And that, sounds like a plan.

 

I know a little bit about them. Here are the Mass. Premier League standings for the Bolts last spring as U16's http://games.maplesoccer.com/sectiondetails.cfm?sectionID=52 and so far this year as U17's http://games.maplesoccer.com/sectiondetails.cfm?sectionID=41. They are on their third coach since their U16 year; however, the Bolts are know for hiring some pretty good coaches, so this may not affect them.

Oakwood is playing in the Region 1 Northeast Sub Regional League: http://www.region1.com/RegionalLeagues/Northeast/Schedules/U16GR.htm.

Neither team are ranked very highly in Region 1 (if you put any importance on rankings). Both these clubs are better know for the quality of their boys teams than their girls, but they should still provide a competitive game.

So this is why you are coming to Boston?

 

I'm not trying to sell the club, but PDA had 6 teams in the Region 1 Premier League Championship finals (BU15, BU18, GU14, GU15, GU16 and GU18), The Girls U16 and U18 teams won their Championship. The only other club with multiple teams is FC Delco with just 2 teams, the BU16 and the BU17 which won the championship. That's pretty impressive.