Post by SoccerMom on Apr 11, 2017 7:41:45 GMT -5
Article Written by Will Parchman
At just this moment, the elite girls soccer landscape in the U.S. is more confusing than it’s ever been. Just as most families settled into a rhythm with the ECNL, a league with its warts but plenty of compensatory benefits, U.S. Soccer dumped a brand new venture on the doorsteps of thousands of well-meaning parents and players across the nation.
Now the question becomes less about which club to join in which market, and more about which league to split off into within those specific clubs.
The arrival of U.S. Soccer’s Girls Development Academy (henceforth the ‘GDA’ in this article) this fall represents a major departure for the state of girls soccer in the country, and no one’s quite certain what it means. With so many huge questions to navigate this summer in advance of a nation with two legitimate tracks to college soccer looming, I’m here to make some sense from the static.
What follows is something of a primer for players, coaches and just interested onlookers attempting to put together some semblance of a framework around the coming changes. What does it all mean? What comes next? Which league should I choose? This should help you decide.
Why did U.S. Soccer start the GDA in the first place?
Starting with the heavy-hitting questions, I see. That’s good. Let’s get this one out of the way first.
The ECNL was founded in 2009 under the banner of US Club Soccer with a simple guiding premise in mind. The league essentially wanted to decentralize power and hand the majority of the reins over to each club with limited top-down guide rails. In multiple talks with the media, ECNL leadership has been adamant in its belief that the immensity of the nation should lead the way. Each market knows its own needs best, ECNL reasoned. So they should play a majority role in setting their own agendas.
What this meant in practice was that there were few regulations on things like practice regimens, coaching licenses, the ability to play high school and the sort. The ECNL trusted that each market would control itself beyond the few regulations it did impose. And for a number of clubs with the resources to take this and run with it, they appreciated this hands-off approach.
U.S. Soccer, it should go without saying, thought differently about the whole venture. They’ve run the boys Development Academy since 2007 with a relatively strict set of rules in areas where the ECNL has not regulated. It was thought for a time that U.S. Soccer would simply partner up with the ECNL and create one mega-league, but for reasons that have not been made public (probably a lack of agreement on the league’s core principles) those talks never progressed. Further, U.S. Soccer’s April Heinrichs has publicly stated in the past that she viewed the ECNL as a “business model,” at least more so than what U.S. Soccer plans.
To put it simply, U.S. Soccer wanted to control the nuances of the discussion, while the ECNL wanted more to facilitate it. There are merits to both means, but the processes are far enough apart that they couldn’t be reconciled and then housed within one league. So at least for the near future, we’ll have two.
So what does the GDA actually want to change?
How you respond to the answer to this question might go a long way in determining whether the GDA or the ECNL is the league for you.
Barring some possible announced changes between now and the start of the 2017-18 season, the ECNL will likely continue forward much in the same way it has to this point. Philosophically, it will cleave to the principles of limited governance, which means in essence that the clubs know what’s best for them better than any league could. The ECNL does have standards, and it’s kicked clubs out before for not meeting them, but at its core the ECNL wants to hand the power to the clubs.
The GDA’s philosophical formula is markedly different. For one, U.S. Soccer has stricter mandates on training time and coaching licenses. It may not start this way, but U.S. Soccer plans to eventually require every coach in the GDA to have a USSF B License and every director an A License. Note that this is the USSF-specific licensing course, not one of the myriad other licensing tracks available in the U.S. Presumably, the federation will allow some overlap in the first few years while it asks its coaches to come online with the programming. The message is clear: do it or find another academy.
A raft of other changes are on the way, as well. Like the boys, the GDA won’t allow re-entry subs for players (the ECNL allows seven subs per half and follows the college system of re-entry after halftime) and stick as closely to the FIFA ruleset as possible. U.S. Soccer also shoulders some of the financial burden, which means there are no referee fees or event fees for U.S. Soccer-hosted tournaments. The GDA won’t be free-to-play for anyone, necessarily, but U.S. Soccer does offer need-based scholarships.
The most immediate and telling difference on a day-to-day basis will be in the training requirements. The ECNL mandates a broad 2-4 training sessions per week, with Tuesdays and Thursdays being main training days and Mondays and Saturdays providing supplementary training (mostly things like study and futsal). U.S. Soccer’s DA mandates at least four days of training per week from the U13 age and up, and three for the U12s. The time commitment may not be hugely more in the GDA per week, but it’ll certainly be a more significant time investment.
And then there’s the matter of high school.
What if I want to keep playing high school soccer?
This question has a trickier answer than you might expect. And it’s a big deal in the girls club world, far more so than it was for the boys.
When it was first announced in February 2016, the GDA seemed to be following the same track the boys DA did when it split from high school soccer in 2012. Boys players are prohibited from playing high school soccer and in the DA at the same time without a waiver, which is granted on a sparing basis. This was the relevant passage from the release.
“The players in the Girls’ Development Academy clubs will play exclusively within the Academy program and will not play in any outside competition, such as ODP or high school.”
Seems pretty straightforward, right? Well, maybe not.
In a Q&A with Soccer America’s Mike Woitalla in November, nine months after that release went out, Heinrichs walked back the severity of USSF’s initial statement. She said GDA clubs can keep high school players rostered, but those players won’t be able to play in the academy while they’re active with their high school clubs. If a player chooses to play for high school - the season usually lasts maybe three months - they won’t be able to return to their GDA club until the end of the high school season. But the key note here: they’ll be able to return.
U.S. Soccer might’ve gotten pushback from their initial release and refined the details of its high school policy after the fact. Or this may have been the plan all along. The key is that they’re allowing it, which is a clear nod to the entrenched nature of the girls high school game. The DA went through a few small chops of turbulence when it cut out the high school game, but those murmurs died down relatively quickly. On the girls side, no allowance for high school within the GDA at all might’ve made a few decisions tricker.
Of course, for a player intent on staying involved with high school much as before, the ECNL is still the way to go. There is no similar prohibition in the ECNL, and the requirements are more lax. Players are merely barred from participating in high school events in the four days before an ECNL National Event and the two days before a conference game.
Will I get noticed by college, national team scouts if I stay in the ECNL?
The simple answer is yes. But it’s probably about to get a bit harder.
Perhaps the single biggest utility of the ECNL for players and parents was in its direct hookup to college scholarship money and youth national team exposure. ECNL National Events teem with activity on the sidelines, with USSF scouts mingling with dozens upon dozens of traveling college coaches posting up in camping chairs to scout. That is no doubt about to change, the question is merely how much.
Let’s start with the national team scouts. We can probably say for certain that U.S. Soccer scouts at ECNL events will be thinner in the coming years. They’ll look to their own GDA first, and any leftover national team scouts (they exist, but not in plenty) will be sent to whatever ECNL events they can fit in. Heinrichs said as much in the aforementioned Q&A.
“Obviously, our shift in focus will be to scout every girl in the Development Academy environment through our scouting network. And we’ll continue to send scouts to ECNL and ODP and national events as we always have. We’ll always make room for outlying programming.”
So, to put it baldly, yes, ECNL players will continue to make their way to youth national teams. But look at boys YNT rosters these days and you’ll see the likely shift in five or six years; almost every player called into boys YNT camps was plucked from the DA. By 2025, assuming the ECNL is still chugging along, that’s a likely scenario when both the league and the YNT pipeline are controlled by the same people.
College is a murkier thing, but they’ll probably follow the national team scouts. At least for the next few years, the ECNL is a safe destination for top players looking to ring up an upper echelon Division I scholarship at a national title-competing school. But don’t be surprised if the limited time allotted to college coaches to scout and recruit is increasingly skewed toward the GDA. Coaches only have so much time to spend on the road, and if the national team spotlight shifts to the GDA? The coaches follow the players.
So at least for the next few years, you can get to college through either track. But down the road, the safer bet is probably with the infrastructure and the exposure afforded by U.S. Soccer.
So which do I choose?
The final question. And a true Gordian knot.
The reality of the situation is that U.S. Soccer grabbed ahold of the girls development market the second it announced the GDA as a reality. The ECNL has done fantastic work in organizing itself into a legitimate branch on the development tree, but U.S. Soccer’s resources simply outstrip the ECNL. Given time, the bigger kid usually wins.
In the interim, players have to choose. I always advise players to go where the best coaching and competition is, in that order. And that depends largely on the market. For some, the choice will be made for them; smaller clubs will simply have to choose one track or the other. The biggest clubs in the country will have two, with the option for their best players to either stay in the ECNL, with its more forgiving rules set, or jump to the GDA with the promise of a more rigorous training environment.
Until the GDA has its feet underneath it and a full season in the rearview to work out kinks, it’s probably not a bad approach to stick with the ECNL in the interim and see which way the wind blows. The league is stable, has been in place since 2009 and is well run from the top down. That said, the GDA has the benefit of a decade of operational knowledge gleaned from the running of the boys DA, which has improved in leaps and bounds since its establishment in 2007. Given time, it’s hard to see it not becoming an unchecked force.
But ultimately that choice can only be made by an individual family and player. Mallory Pugh developed into one of the best teenage women’s stars in U.S. Soccer history by splitting her time between the ECNL, the USYNT and high school. There is no one developmental silver bullet, so the best course of action is merely to sit down with your options and make an informed choice.
And make no mistake, nobody’s altogether sure what the future holds. The best course of action is merely to plot a sturdy next step.
At just this moment, the elite girls soccer landscape in the U.S. is more confusing than it’s ever been. Just as most families settled into a rhythm with the ECNL, a league with its warts but plenty of compensatory benefits, U.S. Soccer dumped a brand new venture on the doorsteps of thousands of well-meaning parents and players across the nation.
Now the question becomes less about which club to join in which market, and more about which league to split off into within those specific clubs.
The arrival of U.S. Soccer’s Girls Development Academy (henceforth the ‘GDA’ in this article) this fall represents a major departure for the state of girls soccer in the country, and no one’s quite certain what it means. With so many huge questions to navigate this summer in advance of a nation with two legitimate tracks to college soccer looming, I’m here to make some sense from the static.
What follows is something of a primer for players, coaches and just interested onlookers attempting to put together some semblance of a framework around the coming changes. What does it all mean? What comes next? Which league should I choose? This should help you decide.
Why did U.S. Soccer start the GDA in the first place?
Starting with the heavy-hitting questions, I see. That’s good. Let’s get this one out of the way first.
The ECNL was founded in 2009 under the banner of US Club Soccer with a simple guiding premise in mind. The league essentially wanted to decentralize power and hand the majority of the reins over to each club with limited top-down guide rails. In multiple talks with the media, ECNL leadership has been adamant in its belief that the immensity of the nation should lead the way. Each market knows its own needs best, ECNL reasoned. So they should play a majority role in setting their own agendas.
What this meant in practice was that there were few regulations on things like practice regimens, coaching licenses, the ability to play high school and the sort. The ECNL trusted that each market would control itself beyond the few regulations it did impose. And for a number of clubs with the resources to take this and run with it, they appreciated this hands-off approach.
U.S. Soccer, it should go without saying, thought differently about the whole venture. They’ve run the boys Development Academy since 2007 with a relatively strict set of rules in areas where the ECNL has not regulated. It was thought for a time that U.S. Soccer would simply partner up with the ECNL and create one mega-league, but for reasons that have not been made public (probably a lack of agreement on the league’s core principles) those talks never progressed. Further, U.S. Soccer’s April Heinrichs has publicly stated in the past that she viewed the ECNL as a “business model,” at least more so than what U.S. Soccer plans.
To put it simply, U.S. Soccer wanted to control the nuances of the discussion, while the ECNL wanted more to facilitate it. There are merits to both means, but the processes are far enough apart that they couldn’t be reconciled and then housed within one league. So at least for the near future, we’ll have two.
So what does the GDA actually want to change?
How you respond to the answer to this question might go a long way in determining whether the GDA or the ECNL is the league for you.
Barring some possible announced changes between now and the start of the 2017-18 season, the ECNL will likely continue forward much in the same way it has to this point. Philosophically, it will cleave to the principles of limited governance, which means in essence that the clubs know what’s best for them better than any league could. The ECNL does have standards, and it’s kicked clubs out before for not meeting them, but at its core the ECNL wants to hand the power to the clubs.
The GDA’s philosophical formula is markedly different. For one, U.S. Soccer has stricter mandates on training time and coaching licenses. It may not start this way, but U.S. Soccer plans to eventually require every coach in the GDA to have a USSF B License and every director an A License. Note that this is the USSF-specific licensing course, not one of the myriad other licensing tracks available in the U.S. Presumably, the federation will allow some overlap in the first few years while it asks its coaches to come online with the programming. The message is clear: do it or find another academy.
A raft of other changes are on the way, as well. Like the boys, the GDA won’t allow re-entry subs for players (the ECNL allows seven subs per half and follows the college system of re-entry after halftime) and stick as closely to the FIFA ruleset as possible. U.S. Soccer also shoulders some of the financial burden, which means there are no referee fees or event fees for U.S. Soccer-hosted tournaments. The GDA won’t be free-to-play for anyone, necessarily, but U.S. Soccer does offer need-based scholarships.
The most immediate and telling difference on a day-to-day basis will be in the training requirements. The ECNL mandates a broad 2-4 training sessions per week, with Tuesdays and Thursdays being main training days and Mondays and Saturdays providing supplementary training (mostly things like study and futsal). U.S. Soccer’s DA mandates at least four days of training per week from the U13 age and up, and three for the U12s. The time commitment may not be hugely more in the GDA per week, but it’ll certainly be a more significant time investment.
And then there’s the matter of high school.
What if I want to keep playing high school soccer?
This question has a trickier answer than you might expect. And it’s a big deal in the girls club world, far more so than it was for the boys.
When it was first announced in February 2016, the GDA seemed to be following the same track the boys DA did when it split from high school soccer in 2012. Boys players are prohibited from playing high school soccer and in the DA at the same time without a waiver, which is granted on a sparing basis. This was the relevant passage from the release.
“The players in the Girls’ Development Academy clubs will play exclusively within the Academy program and will not play in any outside competition, such as ODP or high school.”
Seems pretty straightforward, right? Well, maybe not.
In a Q&A with Soccer America’s Mike Woitalla in November, nine months after that release went out, Heinrichs walked back the severity of USSF’s initial statement. She said GDA clubs can keep high school players rostered, but those players won’t be able to play in the academy while they’re active with their high school clubs. If a player chooses to play for high school - the season usually lasts maybe three months - they won’t be able to return to their GDA club until the end of the high school season. But the key note here: they’ll be able to return.
U.S. Soccer might’ve gotten pushback from their initial release and refined the details of its high school policy after the fact. Or this may have been the plan all along. The key is that they’re allowing it, which is a clear nod to the entrenched nature of the girls high school game. The DA went through a few small chops of turbulence when it cut out the high school game, but those murmurs died down relatively quickly. On the girls side, no allowance for high school within the GDA at all might’ve made a few decisions tricker.
Of course, for a player intent on staying involved with high school much as before, the ECNL is still the way to go. There is no similar prohibition in the ECNL, and the requirements are more lax. Players are merely barred from participating in high school events in the four days before an ECNL National Event and the two days before a conference game.
Will I get noticed by college, national team scouts if I stay in the ECNL?
The simple answer is yes. But it’s probably about to get a bit harder.
Perhaps the single biggest utility of the ECNL for players and parents was in its direct hookup to college scholarship money and youth national team exposure. ECNL National Events teem with activity on the sidelines, with USSF scouts mingling with dozens upon dozens of traveling college coaches posting up in camping chairs to scout. That is no doubt about to change, the question is merely how much.
Let’s start with the national team scouts. We can probably say for certain that U.S. Soccer scouts at ECNL events will be thinner in the coming years. They’ll look to their own GDA first, and any leftover national team scouts (they exist, but not in plenty) will be sent to whatever ECNL events they can fit in. Heinrichs said as much in the aforementioned Q&A.
“Obviously, our shift in focus will be to scout every girl in the Development Academy environment through our scouting network. And we’ll continue to send scouts to ECNL and ODP and national events as we always have. We’ll always make room for outlying programming.”
So, to put it baldly, yes, ECNL players will continue to make their way to youth national teams. But look at boys YNT rosters these days and you’ll see the likely shift in five or six years; almost every player called into boys YNT camps was plucked from the DA. By 2025, assuming the ECNL is still chugging along, that’s a likely scenario when both the league and the YNT pipeline are controlled by the same people.
College is a murkier thing, but they’ll probably follow the national team scouts. At least for the next few years, the ECNL is a safe destination for top players looking to ring up an upper echelon Division I scholarship at a national title-competing school. But don’t be surprised if the limited time allotted to college coaches to scout and recruit is increasingly skewed toward the GDA. Coaches only have so much time to spend on the road, and if the national team spotlight shifts to the GDA? The coaches follow the players.
So at least for the next few years, you can get to college through either track. But down the road, the safer bet is probably with the infrastructure and the exposure afforded by U.S. Soccer.
So which do I choose?
The final question. And a true Gordian knot.
The reality of the situation is that U.S. Soccer grabbed ahold of the girls development market the second it announced the GDA as a reality. The ECNL has done fantastic work in organizing itself into a legitimate branch on the development tree, but U.S. Soccer’s resources simply outstrip the ECNL. Given time, the bigger kid usually wins.
In the interim, players have to choose. I always advise players to go where the best coaching and competition is, in that order. And that depends largely on the market. For some, the choice will be made for them; smaller clubs will simply have to choose one track or the other. The biggest clubs in the country will have two, with the option for their best players to either stay in the ECNL, with its more forgiving rules set, or jump to the GDA with the promise of a more rigorous training environment.
Until the GDA has its feet underneath it and a full season in the rearview to work out kinks, it’s probably not a bad approach to stick with the ECNL in the interim and see which way the wind blows. The league is stable, has been in place since 2009 and is well run from the top down. That said, the GDA has the benefit of a decade of operational knowledge gleaned from the running of the boys DA, which has improved in leaps and bounds since its establishment in 2007. Given time, it’s hard to see it not becoming an unchecked force.
But ultimately that choice can only be made by an individual family and player. Mallory Pugh developed into one of the best teenage women’s stars in U.S. Soccer history by splitting her time between the ECNL, the USYNT and high school. There is no one developmental silver bullet, so the best course of action is merely to sit down with your options and make an informed choice.
And make no mistake, nobody’s altogether sure what the future holds. The best course of action is merely to plot a sturdy next step.