Please note: This is mostly just a vent - just a little frustrated today Sorry, I couldn't think of a better way to phrase this - my consulting days came to mind the term "scope creep", where you start with one project and it gradually grows and grows much larger than the intended size. My son's club keeps growing - even not taking into account the merger of two other local clubs under the one "umbrella" club name. For the most part, the three individual clubs have maintained separate teams - one team will borrow players from the others when needed for games, but the core of the teams have stayed intact. That being said, my son's original team from a couple years ago keeps adding and adding more players. There are two teams within our age group (05), with the top team in USYS National League Pro and my son's team, which unfortunately has become the rest of the players. The National League team keeps adding new talent, so displaced players from that team end up on our team as well as a number of other new players who keep joining from other clubs that have essentially disintegrated (which seems to happen around this age - U17 / U18). Our coach just sent out rosters for the next few months worth of games (between two different leagues) and at last count, we have 29 rostered players. Not quite enough to split out a third team, so here we sit, with different rosters for every weekend. Mind you, I don't think there's going to be any lack of games (we're in three leagues in total - EAL, NPL and MDL, another division within NPL, apparently?). And playing time shouldn't be an issue - most games seem to have 15-16 man rosters). But what we seem to be lacking that my son's teams in the past couple years had is a continuity and comraderie that they built up. It's starting to feel like our team is just a dumping ground. Sorry, this is long winded - again, not really looking for advice or anything, just needed to get it off my chest.
That has to be the first time I've ever been accused of trolling on any message board. Not sure why this would be trolling?
That's.... a lot of players. That being said I know at that age group participation and commitment can be a challenge as they have competing engagements at that age. I suppose it depends on what your son is trying to do at this point in his soccer experience - if he has no plans beyond HS, enjoy it while you can.
I don't see why you assume that. Our son was at a club that absorbed another one and allowed the roster to get way out of whack.
He's decided he's not going to play in college - he plans on trying out for club soccer or playing intramurals, but he's been mostly looking at D1 schools for engineering, and he's not a D1 level player. It's probably his last club season unless he really wants to do it next spring for fun (he's a senior this fall).
The clubs DS played for were never big enough to have a large pool of players to mix and match and send to various leagues and tournaments. Usually there was just one team at each level and sometimes players got invited to guest play for a higher team. Previous two years before the current year, he was on a team with a roster of 22 with two keepers. That, itself, could be frustrating as most tournaments had a roster cap of 18 so some players wouldn't be able to dress. But I definitely can see how being part of a pool would leave players missing the camaraderie of a single set of teammates.