DA vs ECNL vs everything else

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What I find hypocritically and in fact offends me as a woman who played all the way through college myself is that all these clubs will maintain a boys' DA while abandoning it on the girls' side. If you truly believe that methodology and formula is better, take your boys out of the DA and put them in the boys' ECNL.

Otherwise, this is obviously about power, control, and money, not the girls you claim to serve.

Not sure I agree. I can see them getting out because club leaderships thinks ECNL served the girls better than DA. You also might see boys DA backing out and moving to the boys ECNL.

Agree with the above. DA's aim is to produce national team and professional players. Read their material. They say very little or nothing really about college play as a goal. In fact they restrict participation in college camps because those absences may interfere with creating the best training environment for their NT hopefuls. They don't seem to care if your daughter gets in her preferred college.

- If your daughter has reasonable national team aspirations, choose DA, and forego HS.
- If your daughter has reasonable college aspirations, but not NT, choose ECNL and let her be a star on her HS team.
- If your daughter has no college aspirations or does but has no realistic chance (by U14 or U15 I think you should know that but others may disagree), save your money and let her start on an EDP or CCL A team or be star on a B team and her HS team.

Those appear to be the logical choices. Unfortunately, many cannot accept where their daughter really should land. I might be one of them. Some think they will improve if given a chance. Some will of course, but many have had access to top training and have peaked. More and better is best. Haha..not always. Maybe someone else has said this. Pardon me, I am slow on the uptake sometimes...or maybe the DA Kool Aid has worn off.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Agree with the above. DA's aim is to produce national team and professional players. Read their material. They say very little or nothing really about college play as a goal. In fact they restrict participation in college camps because those absences may interfere with creating the best training environment for their NT hopefuls. They don't seem to care if your daughter gets in her preferred college.

- If your daughter has reasonable national team aspirations, choose DA, and forego HS.
- If your daughter has reasonable college aspirations, but not NT, choose ECNL and let her be a star on her HS team.
- If your daughter has no college aspirations or does but has no realistic chance (by U14 or U15 I think you should know that but others may disagree), save your money and let her start on an EDP or CCL A team or be star on a B team and her HS team.

Those appear to be the logical choices. Unfortunately, many cannot accept where their daughter really should land. I might be one of them. Some think they will improve if given a chance. Some will of course, but many have had access to top training and have peaked. More and better is best. Haha..not always. Maybe someone else has said this. Pardon me, I am slow on the uptake sometimes...or maybe the DA Kool Aid has worn off.

It's tough to see things clearly. We have an offer to put DD on an ECNL team for next year. Yes think it is probably due to this expansion of DA and ECNL teams. Not sure she is really good enough and whether all the travel makes sense for her or our family. I think we will say no but it plays with your mind. How can you turn down this elite option, as you say maybe your kid will improve if given the chance.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Agree with the above. DA's aim is to produce national team and professional players. Read their material. They say very little or nothing really about college play as a goal. In fact they restrict participation in college camps because those absences may interfere with creating the best training environment for their NT hopefuls. They don't seem to care if your daughter gets in her preferred college.

- If your daughter has reasonable national team aspirations, choose DA, and forego HS.
- If your daughter has reasonable college aspirations, but not NT, choose ECNL and let her be a star on her HS team.
- If your daughter has no college aspirations or does but has no realistic chance (by U14 or U15 I think you should know that but others may disagree), save your money and let her start on an EDP or CCL A team or be star on a B team and her HS team.

Those appear to be the logical choices. Unfortunately, many cannot accept where their daughter really should land. I might be one of them. Some think they will improve if given a chance. Some will of course, but many have had access to top training and have peaked. More and better is best. Haha..not always. Maybe someone else has said this. Pardon me, I am slow on the uptake sometimes...or maybe the DA Kool Aid has worn off.

It's tough to see things clearly. We have an offer to put DD on an ECNL team for next year. Yes think it is probably due to this expansion of DA and ECNL teams. Not sure she is really good enough and whether all the travel makes sense for her or our family. I think we will say no but it plays with your mind. How can you turn down this elite option, as you say maybe your kid will improve if given the chance.

That's where we were last June with my DD's DA offer. We could not even watch the team play or practice with them as it did not exist. That might give away the club. I did not know if she would start or be the worst player on the team. Talk about a gamble. I also did not know what I now know about college play potential. All in all, given all we've been through, we would still make the same choice and will most likely stay. However, ECNL is likely a better place for my daughter and 95% of the girls in DA. Logic does not always win. Hope springs eternal.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What I find hypocritically and in fact offends me as a woman who played all the way through college myself is that all these clubs will maintain a boys' DA while abandoning it on the girls' side. If you truly believe that methodology and formula is better, take your boys out of the DA and put them in the boys' ECNL.

Otherwise, this is obviously about power, control, and money, not the girls you claim to serve.

Not sure I agree. I can see them getting out because club leaderships thinks ECNL served the girls better than DA. You also might see boys DA backing out and moving to the boys ECNL.

There is so much wrong being said on this forum, it’s hard to know where to begin. This thread reflects US Youth soccer in so many ways, primarily through the fact it's based on BAD INFORMATION. Like it or not, most American youth soccer parents are very, very uneducated. They do not know what the game should look like. They do not know what proper training methods should look like. And they do not understand the game, the actual game. Many probably never played. Let’s see if we can tease out one issue: the importance of methodology of a league (and the teams in it) and what is the true brass tax difference between the ECNL and DA conceptually.

To a certain extent we can say that all the leagues accept the DA function the same way, including the ECNL. The 2 main things the ECNL did that was a different was:
1. To gather all the top female athletes together in one league that spanned across the nation (as we really can’t say the US Youth Soccer National Leagues quite functioned in that way).
2. They did put some re-entry restrictions, whereas historically there had been none, though now other leagues have started following suit (such as the NPL at least in some areas).

However, the ECNL had largely the same fundamental methodology as any other league, including the CCL and NPL:
1. ODP not banned
2. Takes off for the high school season, so it is necessarily a shorter season: ~6 months of league with some pre-high school season showcases. The ECNL league ended end of December (for our conference at least).
3. 3 day a week practices (some ECNL teams do practice 4 days a week, usually the ones that have a boys DA program, to satisfy complaints by parents that the ECNL wasn’t being run on the same level and therefore girls weren’t getting enough in the whole separate but equal explanation).

The DA is fundamentally, methodologically founded on different principles. You can love or hate them, but if you deny those, please see your local therapist:
1. No ODP or high school because the season is a full 10 months.
• There is no way I can take you seriously if you claim that high school practices are the same quality as club practices, and I live in an area where the soccer is important enough that the school has to hire a club coach to coach the varsity team. He made some changes, but still can’t really fully change the culture of high school soccer.
• There has been extensive, scientific research done over and over again that any of you can google for yourselves that says that playing 2-3 games a week increases injury rate as much as 6 times. So why do high schools and colleges do it? Historically it was because US athletes didn’t try to go pro in soccer. It was just another sport, so it needed a shorter season to cram it in with the other sports a student was playing. Even colleges are trying to move away from that model and are considering a year round soccer season with one game a week. It is a movement gaining momentum that you can again google for yourself.
2. No re-entry at all. I hear a lot of whining about that one. One important rationale is to make players play their hardest because if they aren’t, they will be pulled out and not go back in. Does it work? Yep. My DD has embraced fitness as a survival necessity to stay in the starters and stay in the game. What happens when you don’t? Just one example: I know an ECNL team with a player that is obese. There is no other way to put it. She is visually clearly overweight and can’t play a full half, much less a full game. But she does have a great shot and some decent foot work. They put her in to score goals, then pull her out so she can recover. Then they put her in again the next half. It wins them games, but that’s not development.
3. Mandatory 4 day a week practices for all clubs.
4. No more than 2 games in 2 days in a row, with a rest period in between. No other league, no other showcase does that. Why? Because 3 days of games in a row increases injury rates.
That is a methodological principle in the DA to protect players, even though it requires the event be longer.
• Research supports the need of recovery between games. Not to come back to the earlier point, but the high school soccer model is insane, and the injury rates support what I’m trying to educate you on. Players run an average of 6 to 9 miles a game (basically a 10K. Even cross country teams wait after a competition for at least a week, maybe two weeks, after a meet. But our young athletes are playing routinely 2-3 games a week.

These are all structural league differences. I have added rationales (which yes, I believe the reasoning behind a decision matters). But even if you want to argue the rationales, the differences are the differences. So you have to ask yourself, which methodology do you believe has the ingredients to protect your DD and to develop her best as a player? A shorter or longer season? Restrictions on how many games in a row or not? Etc etc.

If you believe that the ECNL is better, you had better believe so for how it is structured, or I call bull sh**. Now, could these clubs go “all in” on the boys side? Yes!! PDA, Michagan Hawks, and FC Stars already have boys ECNL teams. So go for it then, if that’s what they believe. At least then I could respect that they are choosing a methodology.

Other than being structured differently, to a certain extent, we could say a league is really only a function of the teams that are in it. If the ECNL and DA were ran the same way, then I would just run down the list, find the better competition and go there. I’m choosing the philosophy of my DD getting more training and on an organization that cares if she gets injured or not, and structures accordingly.

Some news for you genius, you added nothing with that diatribe that hasn't been said by many previous posters. You apparently can't drown out the noise on this forum. But -- thanks for "clarifying" for us!

[Anonymous]

Must make all current NT players play in DA.
Must disallow Boys DA clubs to have ECNL
Must breakup 16/17 age group.
Must become real Academy and not a league.

USSF are clueless

[Anonymous]

OK. Let's be blunt. DA is no where near what it was chalked up to be this year. There are a few categories of girls in DA in our area:

- players who have played on national teams or have been to national team camps who were told to find a DA team. These are the players DA wants and serves;
- those for whom ECNL is a possible skill level option but not a geographic option (maybe less of an issue now in VA);
- those who are very good but not great and could not make ECNL team more room on DA roster;
- roster fillers who knew too little to make an informed decision and wound up in the wrong place (on the bench).

This has created uneven teams with very uneven play time within some of the teams. Others have been more fair. Why did this happen? Poorly implemented recruiting. Held out too long for ECNL defections that never came and made too many late offers. Will they fix it next year? We'll see. Will the training compensate and turn the lower half of the team into elite players? Maybe. Will they need to cut the bottom few? Most likely.

So what happened? PDA et al don't like wasting their time blowing out everyone but one or two other teams in their division. They go back to ECNL as the no HS play restriction and other hassles are not worth it especially since level of play seems lower than ECNL. If USSF plays hardball on national team spots, they will lose their top players. No big deal for those who remain. They are better off in ECNL.

[Anonymous]

Hardball?

ECNL playing hardball...so just roll over and die?

You lose all crediabilty by not having all NT players in academy. Please believe, they will not pick HS over NT. Absurd notion.

[Anonymous]

DA wants to train and identify the one percent. Yet they dont require the one percent they currently have to be in their youth system?

Anyone following me on this?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Hardball?

ECNL playing hardball...so just roll over and die?

You lose all crediabilty by not having all NT players in academy. Please believe, they will not pick HS over NT. Absurd notion.

You misread it. I could have written it better. If USSF plays hardball on NT spots, PDA will lose their best players. Calm down dude. I've finally figured you out. Your daughter has been to an NT camp. DA serves you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:DA wants to train and identify the one percent. Yet they dont require the one percent they currently have to be in their youth system?

Anyone following me on this?

Does USSF really require NT players to be in DA? I thought NT players were only strongly encouraged to play DA. Has it changed yet? Maybe only one girl's parents in the DMV can answer that? LOL.

[Anonymous]

FYI:

https://www.soccerwire.com/news/clubs/youth-girls/more-large-youth-clubs-leave-girls-da-for-all-in-ecnl-status/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:FYI:

https://www.soccerwire.com/news/clubs/youth-girls/more-large-youth-clubs-leave-girls-da-for-all-in-ecnl-status/

Title of Article:

More large youth clubs leave Girls DA for All-In ECNL status

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DA wants to train and identify the one percent. Yet they dont require the one percent they currently have to be in their youth system?

Anyone following me on this?

Does USSF really require NT players to be in DA? I thought NT players were only strongly encouraged to play DA. Has it changed yet? Maybe only one girl's parents in the DMV can answer that? LOL.

If DA is not training their current NT players then the DA shouldn't exist

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:FYI:

https://www.soccerwire.com/news/clubs/youth-girls/more-large-youth-clubs-leave-girls-da-for-all-in-ecnl-status/

Title of Article:

More large youth clubs leave Girls DA for All-In ECNL status

Your late to the table. Dinner is cold. Go to your room

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hardball?

ECNL playing hardball...so just roll over and die?

You lose all crediabilty by not having all NT players in academy. Please believe, they will not pick HS over NT. Absurd notion.

You misread it. I could have written it better. If USSF plays hardball on NT spots, PDA will lose their best players. Calm down dude. I've finally figured you out. Your daughter has been to an NT camp. DA serves you.

And I get you..your daughter plays ECNL and you want it to be the top league.