Carrying this over from another thread on the basketball page, youth sports and soccer

[upstater]

@Fishy @kobebeanbryant

Fishy posted this and I wanted to respond to him and Kobe:

Define serious money.

I have extended family who have their kids in sports and they’re traveling out of state every month. I have been to games and watched their kids play and I think they are being sold a bill of goods by their coaches. The expectation of which colleges are going to come calling is disconnected from reality. That whole scenario is driven by the adults who are doing this for a living.

For that reason, let me advocate swimming….the clock is the judge, not some coach.

Our daughter swam since she was eight years old with USA Swimming affiliated clubs. The Metro region is great and there’s no real travel for meets. If there is travel, it’s likely to a championship meet and kids need to qualify on time to go. The furthest we had to travel was Virginia Tech. Outside of that, it was usually to one of the Ivy campuses in NY, Mass or RI. (Even UConn a few times.)

Our coaches never tried to upsell us on a dream. Basically, just, if she works hard, she can swim DI if she wants to. (She did not want to - she swims in the NESCAC.) It was such an atypical experience to what I hear about other youth sports…a few of her former club teammates and her were all swimming at a college meet in Maine last year. The entire club coaching staff took a day off work and drove to Maine to watch them.

I don’t know what I paid, but I would have paid double.

 

[upstater]

VERY LONG RESPONSE:

Kobe, I support your decision to stick with the travel local teams and I'll give my reasons why. Right now, my youngest daughter is playing at the highest levels of US youth soccer, the top league, on a club whose boys are affiliated with MLS Next (in other words, one of the top 80 clubs in the nation). I am begging her to return to travel soccer for a number of reasons.

One, it's too much, too much away from school and school activities. This weekend she was in Canton, Ohio, she missed a Physics test on Friday, and she's struggling in that class. And she's taken an even greater interesting in singing/acting (already making money from it).

Two, I've already been through this with my older daughter who played at a very high level, and what I saw from the outcomes of all her fellow teammates has me returning to skepticism of the whole circus.

Fishy mentions above not seeing a high level of talent on these very high-falutin' teams. That was me with my older daughter several years ago. I kept telling the other parents I doubted this was going to lead to anything for the girls. When the team came up against loaded teams with true talent at far away renowned national tournaments, the girls had their heads handed to them. Our coach sold a bill of goods and absolutely knew what tourneys to schedule and what brackets to join to make his girls look good. But the rubber hit the road eventually.

Now, I said I doubted the girls were ticketed for D1. Turns out, I was wrong. A lot of them went on to play D1 soccer this year. Only 3 of the 18 ended up in D3. I was genuinely surprised that what I considered a lot of mediocrity would be taking that mediocrity to D1. Then I peeled back the layers a little more. D1 recruiting budgets are small. Coaches struggle to identify talent in those small windows. A local D1 coach I'm friends with told me he took 2 boys sight unseen from the Kansas City MLS Club's NextPro team. They sit on the bench and haven't seen playing time all year. One player with our club (one level up from my oldest) was pretty decent with us, but nothing eye popping, she was all B1G freshman this year and scored 10+ goals for Ohio St. I found that shocking. I seem to have underestimated these girls.

OK, so then it's worth it? This summer I found myself at an outdoor concert for the Pixies sitting on a blanket next to a D1 coach I know. And we talked about one of the girls, and he basically laid it all out, what a sham it is, how unprepared they are to play real soccer after all these years (he's a former Dutch First Division pro with a Uefa Pro coaching license). He tells me that all but 2 of his girls receive only a $2k discount on tuition for playing soccer... at his private D1 university. All that work, all those years, all that tuition, for $2k off (and that's really a meaningless number).

So I'm trying to get my daughter to drop down, but the coaches keep pointing to the successes. My older daughter's good friend is in the USWNT youth camp and will be a freshman next year at UNC (top program in the US). Multiple girls have landed at place like Pitt, Ohio St, Alabama and Providence. But all in all, the likelihood is that you'll instead end up at a place like St. Bonaventure footing a $50k tuition bill.

Two positives for high level sports:

1. If you're very wealthy and planning on footing the now $90k bill a year for college, then sports is a good way to get your kid admitted to a top college in the summer special admissions window (where students aren't given any financial aid).

2. We have spent a lot of time in the car discussing everything from music (theirs and mine), books, friends, politics, advice, making jokes. That part has been good.

 

[Fishy]

I had a long response mostly typed up and then this tire fire of a site flaked and lost it.

Will redo it again later

 

[billybud]

We were a soccer family...I played on a team (The Green Cards) that had Brits, French, Nigerian, Moroccan, Argentinian, Ghanan, Jamaican players...I went on to procure my national coaching license and coached travel and a HS team.

Our boy played starting at age 7..travel teams beginning at 11...he developed well...team went to semi final in Florida a couple of times (Florida is a tough state).

We travelled out of state and in Florida from Pensacola to Miami...and, you bet, the travel costs were expensive. I finally paid off my credit cards right before I retired.

Our son went on to play for a college team...As a family, we treasure our soccer memories. And when together, sometimes watch a match on TV.

Travel soccer isn't everyone's cup of tea....some kids follow a similar path with travel baseball and other endeavors.

 

[upstater]

Picking this up again because of a discussion on the basketball board about AAU and how it's hurting sports like baseball and basketball:

If you look at men's soccer and the USMNT, you'll see that 95% of the team and many of those playing in Europe all trained under the DA (Development Academy) program that was in place from 2010-2020. It emphasized practices over games and tournaments, and US Soccer poured money into the system. Many of the DA clubs were bankrolled by US Soccer. The catch was that they had to follow US Soccer's strict training regimen so that all players in the DA clubs across the USA were linked together. I've seen this play out as top coaches around the world were hired and brought into the DA clubs; they got weekly assignments that were highly specific and well beyond what you'd get at any top club without US Soccer guidance. I've seen 2 hour practices emphasizing speed of play which were absolutely exacting about one single element drilled over and over and over.

The money was key for the players too. My older daughter's club had a team out of Rochester in the girls Academy, her coach was UEFA licensed out of Toronto and would drive down 4x a week. The tuition was half of what we pay for the same club with a lot less expertise in Buffalo. Even better, the Rochester DA part of the club bought a team luxury bus and so 3 or 4 teams traveled to all their away games without parents. Hotels were paid for, absolutely free, and so was the food. Mandatory 3 hours study and silent time on every long trip.

I pulled my daughter from that club after 3 months because of the strain of 2 hours driving round trip several times a week. We instantly ended up paying double in tuition for a lesser product, not to mention we had to cover our food, gas and hotel expenses (and more games!).

The point is, before US Soccer went belly-up bankrupt during Covid, we actually had a system of support in the US that made soccer relatively cheaper for families, it taught fundamentals, emphasized practice over games, and best of all, it succeeded in creating the greatest generation of soccer players the US has ever seen.

I remain skeptical that the next generation now developing under MLSNext (with no overarching soccer philosophy, no subsidies or guidance) will be as good as this last generation which was nurtured in a system and also subsidized with real money.