Soccer writer Kyle Williams firmly believed that he and I could have a reasonable discussion about the U.S. soccer landscape and the potential for promotion/relegation within it. And we did. So there. I even found myself thinking of a new way to think about it by the end.
If you want to read even more about this, check the pro/rel page in all its words, er, glory.
How do you get more kids playing youth soccer? How do you encourage the good players to get into programs that help them maximize their potential? How do they do it in France?
For reference, check three Soccer America articles:
Bondy and the French grassroots system: Kids routinely play after school. Then they have a cheap-ish (just under $200) multisport club staffed by adult facilitators and some coaches. Much of the funding comes from a source we generally don’t have available in the USA — the government.
Secrets to the French soccer revolution: Among the noteworthy elements here — 35 French pro clubs have full-fledged academies, but kids rarely leave their home clubs before age 16.
AYSO’s Mike Hoyer: Youth soccer needs options between entry level and full travel/club commitment: He speaks in mostly vague terms aside from plugging two AYSO programs and tossing in an interesting points — kids’ time is being taken up not just by video games and other activities, but by homework.
That may seem like an odd point, but when you see kids go into high school, it’s startling to see how much is piled up. Parents have been fed metrics such as the Washington Post Challenge Index, which rewards schools for getting kids into as many intense AP courses as possible. We’re starting to see some pushback on the idea that cramming for the equivalent of 3-4 bar exams every year is the best use of teenagers’ time, and it’s about time. But that’s another rant.
The AYSO programs Hoyer mentions, AYSO Extra and AYSO United, are designed to give intermediate players more options. You’ll see the occasional AYSO program operatinIg a travel team in your local league. That’s a nice rec/travel hybrid, and we could use more creative solutions like that.
But I see ways to build on that, some of which are antithetical to the AYSO ethos of forming new teams each season for the sake of balance. I’ve kicked around some of these ideas for a few years. Others are relatively new.
No full-time travel before age 12. I’ve written about this for a while. It doesn’t rule out elite professional training and frequent “All-Star” games. It leaves open the possibility of “a la carte” models in which any interested families can get professional training and be sorted into groups that give them challenging games. It lets kids play with their neighbors and friends, as they do at Ajax and other clubs, while also giving them part-time options for advanced play with those of similar ability and aptitude. It rules out forming U11 leagues in which kids are traveling 200 miles for a league game. It also forces club’s technical staffs to look at kids who aren’t on the “A” teams.
Rec soccer that is free-play only. No commitment needed. Want to come play on Friday night or Saturday afternoon? OK — sign up, pay $10, and we’ll bring you out to a big field where we’ve organized many small-sided games and can sort players so they’re not totally overmatched or totally dominant. Maybe we’ll do the same in neighborhoods that just have one futsal court, and we’ll say beginners play at 2, slightly advanced players at 3, and you can scrimmage with our travel players at 4. For many players, this might be all they do. For some, it’ll be a gateway to a more “organized” program.
Above U12, drop the “rec”/”travel” distinction and form pyramids instead. I’ve seen some clubs that are starting to do this. At my coaching-license course this weekend, I met several parent coaches who are leading teams that are moving up from the local “developmental” travel league to the league that used to be the big dog before all these “elite” leagues formed. (Some of those “elite” leagues are, of course, not elite. I can’t understand parents who pay for their kids to be on C teams that travel out of state for “elite” league games.)
Instead of imposing tiers on teams — you’re “travel,” you’re not — just let the teams sort themselves out. If your team is dominating its “rec” league, let it move up to the next level. If your team is overmatched in “travel,” move down. Sure, professional coaches might not go for this because parents will learn that they’ve been paying $2,000/year only to find that their U14 kids aren’t at the level of the local “rec” kids. But that’ll force more change. Eventually, the tiers will be more seamless. The top teams may fire professional coaches. Lower-tier teams will stick with parents. (Though, frankly, parent coaches are often better.) Ideally, clubs will offer professional training for all, then offer a mix of pro and parent coaches on gamedays.
Along these lines …
Let teams stay together. Here’s where a well-intentioned AYSO philosophy backfires. A lot of kids, particularly those who aren’t chasing elite status, want to play with their friends. AYSO breaks up teams in the name of parity, which makes sense. But if you have a pyramid with many levels, you’ll get parity anyway.
More fluid exchanges between club teams. This might sound like the opposite of the previous point. But it’s all about giving kids options and opportunities. Clubs should always have the opportunity to let a kid try a more advanced level, even if just for a game or two. And leagues should allow it. Our local Northern Virginia “rec” league disqualifies players if they play a “travel” game just once during the season, which is utterly ridiculous.
Options. Opportunities. Maybe then we won’t lose so many kids.
I had low expectations for the new 11v11 U.S. Soccer grassroots coaching course, and getting up early Sunday morning to drag myself to Springfield didn’t help. Neither did the uninformative “Introduction to Grassroots Coaching” that replaced the helpful online F license after only a few years.
Five hours later, I wished that U.S. Soccer had done this years ago, back when I was first starting. Or I wished I had younger kids.
Sure, I miss the old (but not that old) F license videos, which should really come back to replace the new intro. The 4v4 online module also was rather disappointing.
But when I took the 11v11 module this weekend, it clicked. I “got it.” And what I got was a new outlook on coaching.
The basic framework of a practice has changed.
Old way …
New way …
Yes, it all relates to a topic. But we’re no longer dependent on explaining a new set of exercises to kids each week, at least in the 11v11 module.
Let’s look at it from the kids’ point of view …
Old way …
New way …
So the exercises don’t change that much. It’s soccer, just with different numbers per side and different coaching points to emphasize. If you take a look at these training plans on the Massachusetts Youth Soccer site, you’ll see there’s not much difference between them aside from what the coach says during practice. The U8 training plans vary a bit more, but they’re not too complicated.
That’s great. More playing. Less time explaining the purpose of the 100 cones on the field. And the coach spends less time figuring out different drills for different occasions. Just go to the Digital Coaching Center, pick your topic, get some suggested points of emphasis, add your own (perhaps based on something your team did really badly the week before) and off you go. Brilliant.
And it’s flexible. We can still do some of the old “four-phase” (warmup, small-sided, expanded small-sided, scrimmage) in the “practice” phase. You can introduce something with your favorite warmup activity — a “gates” drill if you want to sharpen their passing and receiving skills before getting into the tactics of attacking, a 3v3 before you get to the 6v5, etc.
I asked specifically about heading, prompted by a few fellow “candidates” in the course who were concerned about it. We’re supposed to limit the time we spend on heading, and I doubt many coaches were spending a whole 90-minute practice on the topic even before concussion awareness ramped up. My instructors’ suggestion — just take a few minutes out of the practice phase and toss around the ball a few different ways.
But this leads to my basic problem with every coaching course I’ve done — new way, old way or older way …
Is this really a course for grassroots/recreational coaches?
In fairness, a lot of the people in the class had ambitions beyond rec league. To get to the D license and progress up the ladder from there, you have to take three of the eight available grassroots modules, and the in-person 11v11 module must be one of them. (If you’ve played three years in a top-tier pro league, however they choose to define that, you can skip to the C.)
And the parent/professional line seems to be blurring more than I’ve seen in the past. The course’s host, Braddock Road (hey, Vienna — can I be reimbursed?), is moving its parent-coached teams up from the developmental/recreational leagues up to the NCSL. A lot of the parents in the room were anxious to take the D as soon as possible. (Apparently, it’s more accessible for parent coaches than it was in the past when I griped about it.) Maybe some clubs have realized they don’t need to hire pros to be on the sideline for every “travel” game any more.
Also, some parent coaches are really into it. Maybe a bit too much. One coach said he does his practice plans based in part on what he sees in scouting his opponents. At U9. I’ve only seen three distinct styles of play at U9.
But there are two reasons why this “grassroots” module still doesn’t quite meet the needs of a parent coach, even though it’s dropped some of the insistence on incomprehensible practice planning that the E and old D license had.
1. We’re not learning how to teach technique.
Sure, at U14, it’s less of an issue than it is at U8. But we’re still getting some players with less experience or players who may move on to travel once they fix a couple of holes in their game. We’re still not getting that.
Granted, former elite players will always have an advantage here. My fellow rec coach who played with Julie Foudy at Stanford will know more about technique (and tactics, and probably a lot of things) than I ever will. No coaching class is likely to make up that gap. But I’m still surprised that, in all the resources and reading we’re given, no one emphasizes the best way to strike a ball, receive a ball, etc.
Heading is especially problematic. Maybe U12 rec coaches don’t need to know the finer points of dribbling and passing, given the lack of potential elite players in their ranks. But heading is an actual safety issue. Shouldn’t we learn how to do it and teach it? (Sure, I learned it when I was a youth player, but that was 35 years ago. Times have changed.)
So my constructive criticism for USSF would be simple. Give us a few videos on technique. In the in-person session, maybe spend 15 minutes on it while we’re on the field.
2. A lot of the information still seemed unrealistic for recreational coaches.
One of our instructors noted that it often takes a year for lessons to sink in. Travel coaches and elite coaches may have their teams for that long. Rec coaches usually do not. If they’re in AYSO, the teams are broken apart and reformed each year.
(Maybe that’s more of a criticism of the AYSO “redistribute the teams” model, but that’s another rant.)
Other notes from the session …
So on the whole, this is an improvement. I’ve talked a lot about what parent coaches need, including a full presentation at an NSCAA convention. This gets us partway.
It’s unfortunate in a way that U.S. Soccer needed to do such a drastic revision. It’s difficult to feel the previous lessons weren’t wasted. But the good news is that any changes in the future should just be tweaks rather than a teardown.
Forget the long grass. Forget the complex drills. Shin guards optional.
That’s the advice from Shoeless Soccer co-author Nathan Richardson, a coach and one-time director of coaching when he’s not busy with his day job as a professor of Spanish literature. (We did not discuss whether Man of La Mancha, a musical in which I once played drums, is faithful to the source material.)
If you missed Part 1, please check it out. If you’ve already listened to Part 1, here’s Part 2:
Nathan Richardson, co-author of Shoeless Soccer: Fixing the System and Winning the World Cup (which I reviewed here), joins the podcast this week to talk about the radical yet somewhat globally accepted ideas in his book. Basically, instead of turning soccer into an expensive coach-driven activity, why not let kids learn by playing? And maybe on hard surfaces so they’ll learn to control the ball instead of booting it?
This conversation should give us all some ideas for how to reform youth soccer, even if you don’t agree with all of them, and it should put the term “rec mindset” to bed once and for all. We all start as rec players, and in many cases, that’s where we (well, not me) learn the things that make us better players down the road.
We ran rather long, so this will be a two-parter. (Here’s Part 2.)
Here’s Part 1:
Practice plans mentioned in the podcast are on the Massachusetts Youth Soccer site.
Thanks as always to Patreon supporters, and keep an eye out for RSD merchandise available soon.
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The just-concluded World Cup is being hailed as many things — great, the greatest in a while, the greatest ever.
It was certainly unique, as Soccer America’s Paul Kennedy says: an unusually high number of own goals, an unusually low number of red cards and fouls. (Granted, you could attribute the latter to the notion that holding is now basically legal.)
At The Ringer, Ryan O’Hanlon argues that this World Cup was the best in decades because of its unpredictability: “There was something so refreshing and so thrilling about sitting down each morning and not having any clue about what might play out.”
At my former employer USA TODAY, Martin Rogers was impressed: “(T)here was a treasure trove of treats to keep a worldwide audience occupied and wove a gripping narrative over the course of a month and more.”
All good points, as is the lack of scoreless draws, but here’s the counterargument I’d make:
1. Sorry to be Debbie Downer, but now is simply not the time to normalize Russia. 2022 probably won’t be a good time to normalize Qatar, either, unless we get proper investigations of the people who are literally working migrant workers to death and unless Qatar liberalizes its LGBTQ policies (among other things). We’re not going to have a World Cup worth rooting for until 2026. (Maybe not even then, the way things are going in the USA and Mexico right now.)
2. Defense now has the upper hand (literally — again, refs, please blow the whistle when a defender has someone in a bear hug) over possession soccer, resulting in few goals from the run of play. O’Hanlon’s piece at The Ringer actually reinforces that point, showing how France succeeded with a defensive mindset and managed to score four times against Croatia while barely possessing the ball in the final third.
You could argue that’s a fun thing to watch — Mexico’s blistering counterattack was consistently thrilling — but we don’t want soccer to become a sport in which you only need to watch the counters and the set pieces. And seeing Spain flail helplessly against the Russian defense was one of the most frustrating experiences of the World Cup, especially given Point 1 (normalizing Russia / giving Putin more time in the spotlight). Also sad — Harry Kane was brilliant on set pieces but, like his England teammates, simply couldn’t find the net from the run of play.
3. Maybe too much unpredictability isn’t such a good thing. The World Cup is supposed to reward the best teams. When the group-stage chaos left us with a lopsided bracket, a lot of terrific teams (Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Mexico) were dismissed from the action all too soon.
We did end up with a worthy champion — and, though Croatia didn’t win a knockout-round game in regulation, a worthy finalist.
The atmosphere was terrific throughout. And this Cup broke so many records that the Guinness site had to create a long roundup to account for them all. But the USA still holds the attendance records:
1994: 3,568,567 total, 68,626 average
2018: 3,031,768 total, 47,371 average
North America will break that record in 2026 — at least the total, given the expansion.
Let’s hope national teams have learned how to score from the run of play by then.
“Oh, soccer is doing fine!” you may argue. “It’s the Federation that stinks.”
It’s entirely possible that the second statement is true while the first statement is false.
A couple of metrics look very bad:
As with World Cup ratings, the SFIA survey can’t be completely explained by everyone’s favorite scapegoats (Alexi Lalas, Fox producers, Sunil Gulati, unnamed people in U.S. Soccer’s Chicago HQ). We’re not talking about U.S. Soccer’s registration numbers, which have been either flat or declining a bit for a good while — see my attempt to make sense of the numbers.
This survey collects data on everyone. All those unregistered players the presidential candidates touted? Yeah, this survey is intended to account for them, too.
You can question the survey’s methodology. You can even say polling as a whole is in disrepute after the 2016 election, but if you look carefully at those numbers, you’ll see they weren’t that far off — it’s just that the 3 or 4 percent errors all broke in Trump’s favor.
Sure, it’s still possible that there are plenty of people playing soccer who didn’t answer the poll-takers. But you’d certainly be hard-pressed to look at any metric and say participation is growing.
Here’s the trickier question: Why?
A lot of the coverage focuses on misguided Federation initiatives — birth-year registration, the DA’s insistence on not playing high school soccer, etc. More generally, the “travel or bust” mentality parents get — with considerable pushes from the local clubs — leads to burnout and frustration.
But we don’t have data to measure the impact of each of these factors. That’s not part of the survey. (Which is understandable — who wants to deal with a 100-question survey asking, “Did your local club make you want to quit? Or was it the jersey colors? Or do you just want to play xBox?”)
And the World Cup numbers are also difficult to assess. Is interest dropping, or are ratings failing to take into account everyone going to watch parties or watching on their phones? Or do Millennials really just “consume” sports by watching highlights and not complete games?
So the questions aren’t simple, and neither are the answers.
Yet we should be able to agree on one thing: We can’t take soccer’s growth for granted. We can’t turn youth soccer into a joyless breeding ground for elite players. We have to do better with TV coverage. And yes, we need to rev up our professional game in multiple divisions. (And we need to talk about the nuances of doing that — 15 years of yelling at each other on Twitter and prior forms of mass communications of done jack-squat.)
We can certainly agree on this: We’re not where we want to be. And it’s not just a ball taking a bad bounce in Trinidad or a bad call that got Panama to the World Cup. It’s not just parents who want to “win” too badly — it’s also the coaches who pick out top athletes at age 8, discard everyone else and then moan when they have no one to replace the top athletes who pick other clubs or other sports.
It’s the Federation and its ham-fisted mandates, but it’s not just the Federation. It’s everyone.
Something’s wrong. Many things are wrong. And we need to start talking about it with a good Kirk-Spock mix of passion and reason. Soon.
Following up on my School of Rock post, here’s another one about a youth program that offers a few good lessons for soccer to follow …
1. Run afterschool programs. Elementary-school parents balk, with good reason sometimes, at having to drive kids all over the place at dinner time and afterwards to get them to soccer practices all over creation. Having a mere two practices a week can be an imposition.
Yet these same parents will send their kids to karate five days a week. Why?
It’s not because they have dreams of their kids being the next Chuck Liddell or Lyoto Machida. It’s because the karate program runs vans and mini-buses to several nearby elementary schools, and the parents have jobs that make it difficult to pick up their kids at 3:15. (Can you tell I’m speaking from personal experience here? The same kid who played travel soccer and is now devoted to School of Rock has a brown belt.)
2. Have a fun but disciplined environment. Learning to break a board with a wheel kick isn’t the most practical skill unless you’re a soldier who does a lot of hand-to-hand combat. But the discipline of martial arts will carry over into anything.
That said, your kid probably isn’t going to be thrilled about going straight from school to a boot camp. Play games, give kids some time to unwind, and then start training.
3. Divide up by skill level, not age. When the time comes to work on particular skills in our local karate program, the brown belts and green belts would go in one room, and the white belts and … yellow? blue? I don’t remember … would go in another. Age didn’t matter. Sure, age and size were a factor when kids started sparring — even with tons of protective gear, you don’t want a 13-year-old kicking a 7-year-old — but that’s easily managed.
4. Be cheaper than other programs. Maybe day care had skewed our perception of how much it costs to have people look after your kids, but karate wasn’t killing family budgets. They could also go to a local place and learn coding, but that’s waaaaaaay more expensive.
5. Be role models. You don’t need to show your kids Christian Pulisic and Alex Morgan to give them someone to emulate. Young kids are going to look up to the adult in charge in the room.
Granted, there’s not much professional karate in mainstream culture. I mentioned Liddell and Machida above because they’re the rare old-school example of karate practitioner in MMA. These days, it’s mostly wrestlers who’ve learned a bit of kickboxing. (That said, the “mixed” in mixed martial arts isn’t a bad thing, and I once walked in to pick up my kids and saw then-UFC fighter Kamal Shalorus teaching wrestling. Persia represent.)
Sure, in soccer, we don’t just want to have fun. We want to find the next Pulisics, Ramoses and Cherundolos. But if you’re bringing in first-graders and second-graders five days a week and helping them progress, that’s not exactly a bad foundation.
It’s easy to be petty. It’s more difficult to make a larger point that overrides the pettiness.
Bruce Arena (with Steve Kettmann)’s book What’s Wrong With Us?: A Really Long Subtitle Follows is certainly petty at times. And it’s tempting to respond in kind.
How many potshots does Arena take at the soccer media? Let’s put it this way — I paused reading about a third of the way and searched for my own name to see if I ever came up in the firing line. I did not, which either means I’m on his good side for now or I’m insignificant. (Maybe both.)
Grant Wahl isn’t so lucky. Arena says Wahl’s book, The Beckham Experiment, takes the
Us Weekly approach as opposed to the more literate SI tradition started by great writers like Frank Deford and Ron Fimrite. The July 6, 2009, issue of the magazine carried an excerpt from Wahl’s book under the headline “How Beckham Blew It” with a blurb that threw around words like failed and alienated. I didn’t take any of it very seriously. When you’re on the inside looking out, you just chuckle at that kind of stuff and move on. Who really cares about stories of players going out for a meal together on the road, and Beckham being told he couldn’t drink unless he showed ID? I guess they call that human interest.
(Yes, let’s all note the irony that Arena cites Frank Deford, a man who prided himself on knowing nothing about soccer but turning up his nose at it anyway, like Dan Aykroyd’s character in Trading Places would scoff at a man with no butler, as part of the great literary tradition at Sports Illustrated.)
He’s also frustrated with reporters for failing to ask about a penalty kick he thinks Jozy Altidore deserved (“Don’t they watch the games?” he wonders). Then he offers up something that’s frankly a good critique of many young reporters who haven’t found a voice:
Sometimes reporters are like the kind of students who want to make sure you know they’ve done the required reading, as opposed to just keeping their eyes open and asking a question they really want answered.
That was every reporter I edited in college. And probably me at one point. And a lot of reporters I’ve known who just wanted to do the most perfunctory job possible, lie low and avoid layoffs.
But it’s really a pity Arena doesn’t have an appreciation for editors. Because my goodness, this book needed one. Is he Robbie Keane or Robby? Who is this “DeMarcus” of whom he speaks? And the most egregious error of all, in the third sentence of the book, he says the 2002 World Cup quarterfinal was “as far as a US side has ever advanced in the world’s greatest sporting event.” Leaving aside for the moment the fact that the U.S. women have won the World Cup more than once and whether the women’s event qualifies as “the world’s greatest sporting event,” the U.S. men reached the semifinal in 1930. You could argue 2002 was a greater accomplishment given that a couple hundred teams entered as opposed to the 13 in 1930, but it’s still factually incorrect.
There’s also an amusing error that apparently belongs to one of his predecessors but is passed along here with no explanatory note:
Former national team coach Walt Chyzowych, the director of coaching for the federation, gave the course’s opening talk, titled “The American Problem.” Walt said: “We are geographically a very big country: we have three different time zones,
Almost seems like a veiled slap at the Pro League Standards and the “three time zone” rule.
(Granted, book editing seems like a lost art today. I opened up a book on drummers today and read about Steve Smith’s time at “Berkeley” College of Music and that great keyboardist “Chic Korea,” which I can only assume is Niles Rodgers’ new K-Pop band.)
What’s funny about it is that Arena is certainly detail-oriented. My first conversation with him was a live chat at USA TODAY in which I fed him reader questions and then typed his answers. He had the chat open on his computer so he could tell me every typo I made.
Granted, he loves the back-and-forth with the media. He’s often a bit snarky — when I asked him what he thought of the U.S. Soccer curriculum Claudio had just unveiled, he said, “Claudio who?” (It’s fair to say Arena was aware of Claudio Reyna’s existence and the fact that he had been tasked with developing a curriculum.)
And yet he would always give good insight. Many times, I finished an interview with Arena shaking my head, then found several great quotes when I played back the recording.
So that’s why it’s a little disappointing that the reform ideas are so poorly developed. Part V of the book is called “A Bold Plan for the Future,” and it’s anything but that. There’s a checklist at the end that includes a few obvious things: “Hire a national team coach” isn’t exactly ground-breaking, though lengthening the MLS regular season and shortening the playoffs is a bit more interesting.
The biggest complaint Arena has (and he’s not alone) is that American players aren’t getting enough playing time in MLS, and he suggests we’d be better off with more protectionist policies. By his figures, the percentage of U.S.-born players in the league dropped from 62.3% in 1996 to 43.5% in 2017. OK, but in 1996, there were 10 teams with roughly 20 players each — 200 players in all. Let’s do the math — that’s maybe 125 U.S.-born players. (The A-League was fun to watch in those days in part because it still had a lot of watchable U.S. players — something the NASL and USL have difficulty duplicating.) Today, MLS has 23 teams with 28 roster spots, or 644 players. That would mean the league has 280 U.S.-born players, though the league claims 290.
Either way, the number of Americans in MLS has far more than doubled. You could argue that they’re not getting enough playing time. Then again, didn’t we hear for years that American players needed to go to Europe and fight for places in the first team? If they’re now doing so in the USA, why is that a bad thing?
(But I digress.)
Arena’s best suggestion may be his call for MLS and U.S. Soccer to give former players more prominent roles in the front office. That’s not a bad idea. Still not what I would call “bold.” (Maybe he’s learned that this “writing” thing is more difficult than he thought from the other side of the podium?)
But What’s Wrong With Us? is still an entertaining read, filled with fun behind-the-scenes stories from the USA’s most successful (since 1930) World Cup and its least successful (since 1985) qualifying campaign. The reader will learn more about U.S. soccer from those stories than she/he will from the reform suggestions, but maybe that’s for the best. Arena always was better at coaching than punditry. Here’s hoping he gets another job in which we can interview him more often.
In a vast country, how do you make sure everyone has an opportunity to go as far as he or she can go in soccer?
Not an easy question. Today, a lot of the focus is on inner cities, where several organizations are working to set up futsal courts and programs.
But we can’t forget smaller towns, either. Meet Chris Kessell, a passionate advocate (and someone who doesn’t just talk about it but also gets out and does it) for West Virginians:
Every community big and small deserves the ability to dream. Every child in this country who loves the sport deserves the ability to be able to dream about their place in the sport. Continue to speak up for lost and forgotten communities in this nation and advocate for #ProRelForUSA and #ReformUSSF.
It’s tough to argue with people who are doing such good work. But this argument isn’t about the work or the intentions. It’s about the overarching solutions. Pro/rel has long been called the “third rail” of American soccer, and my attempt to reset the conversation earlier this year went nowhere.
And so, with the utmost respect for Chris’ work, I’ll suggest the following:
The English system wouldn’t give these kids much of a dream. A modified pro/rel system may help, but even if that happens, we’ll need some creative programs to reach kids like the ones Chris is describing.
By “English system,” I mean a straight up-and-down ladder. That’s what England has in its first five tiers of soccer. Only then does it start to resemble a pyramid.
We can’t reasonably ask a fourth-division team to travel cross-country. And I think most people get that. So a lot of the plans I’ve tossed out for discussion have a much wider base — a national top tier, a West and East region in tier two, then tons and tons of D3 teams.
Here’s the bottom line: We want to create opportunity.
And England demonstrates that a healthy pro system doesn’t necessarily mean every club has a thriving academy. See this post, which is generally about the “pros” of pro/rel but also gets into the English situation.
Finally, the pro-affiliated academy system can’t reach everyone. The biggest club in Cornwall appears to be Truro City, which is in the National League South — England’s sixth tier. It’s in a town of about 21,000 people, not far from other towns about that size. The closest fully professional club is Plymouth Argyle, which can be reached in 71 minutes if you live at the train station. After that, it’s Exeter, then you have to go considerably farther. If you live farther west than Truro — say, Penzance, which also has about 21,000 people — it’s longer. Morgantown (WV) is actually closer to a pro club (Pittsburgh Riverhounds), even in a country that will likely never have the saturation of pro clubs that a small, football-mad country like England has.
So let’s consider options:
So you can see why I’m skeptical when someone says kids can dream if only they had pro/rel. I’m not saying and I certainly hope I’ve never even implied that I don’t care about kids having that dream. Quite the opposite. I keep coming up with ideas. People keep ignoring them and telling me I’m ignorant.
Yet this is a topic I’ve been tackling in a lot of detail since I left USA TODAY in 2010. I didn’t discuss it much at USA TODAY — I doubt my editors would’ve been interested in a story on it, and I was busy covering soccer along with MMA, Olympic sports, high school sports, poker, horse racing, etc., etc. USA TODAY hasn’t had a full-time soccer writer since Peter Brewington in 2001. (Great, great guy.) They’ve been lucky to have a few people who sneak in some soccer content — not long after I left, former George Mason player Mike Foss came in and revamped their blog, making sure it had plenty of soccer.
Meanwhile, at other news organizations, you’re not going to see much talk about pro/rel. It’s not because people are told not to talk about it. It’s because the idea just isn’t gaining a lot of traction. People talk and talk — see the Chattanooga summit. And yet the UPSL, NPSL, PDL, USL and NISA are all doing their own thing. The UPSL brags about having pro/rel in certain areas — just like most other amateur leagues.
And the idea isn’t gaining a lot of traction because we can’t talk about it without egos and emotion getting in the way.
What can we do to change that?
Duresport.com 