Maryland Youth Soccer - Let's compile our experiences here

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If your daughter will be 12U or younger, she'll need to pass a Classic skills evaluation, which is usually held in early May. If she passes, you'll then need to reach out to teams that are in need of players and request a tryout. Some teams will have parent coaches and others will have paid coaches. The quality of instruction and the players will widely vary. If your daughter will be 13U or higher, no skills evaluation is required and you'll go directing to contacting teams to request a tryout. The list of teams seeking players will be posted later this season.

Thank you! She is 9. I assume that if she passes the evaluation she would be trying out for placement on a team for the Fall 2017 season? She's playing on an MSI Rec team this spring.

The evaluations this spring will be for Fall 2017, yes. As to tryouts, MSI will post team tryout notices on their web site for Classic teams that ask them to do this, but a lot of teams may form around school or neighborhood groups or the like and not hold open tryouts. There may also be a huge range of types of coaches and seriousness about practice among Classic teams--from volunteer parents to full-time coaches--so do your diligence and think about what might be the best fit for your child. If you're looking for something on the slightly more rigorous side, there are some organizations that field teams for Classic--for example I know that Brit-Am has girls Classic teams and posts tryout notices on their web site. On the girls' side, PPA may field Classic teams as well. Good luck.

[Anonymous]

My children have participated in MSI Rec, MSI Premier and Bethesda pre-Academy. There's no comparison between MSI Premier and Bethesda Pre-Academy. Bethesda is very well run and well organized with more responsive leadership and better coaching. Bethesda may just be a little too intense for children who are not extremely committed to soccer. However, MSI Premier was very disorganized with practice times and locations changing at the last minute such that once I was not informed of a location change and had a brief moment of panic when I didn't know where my son was. My children have also done PPA soccer camp at Stone Ridge. We had a good experience one year, but the next, we had an incident in which the assistant coach was very disrespectful to the children. When I called the head coach to understand what happened, he was extremely defensive and not eager to use the situation as a learning experience to better train his staff how to interact with children. I will never send my children to PPA again since it takes strong leadership to set a culture of honesty and fair play and set a good example for children.

[Anonymous]

The programs we've done with PPA have been at the Norwood school in Bethesda and Stone Ridge (a summer camp) which is pretty close to Rockville. Not sure how far north their range extends.

I'm pretty torn about PPA to be honest. I think they do a very good job (much better than KOA and some of the other similar groups we've encountered), and the two founders (who used to coach at Bethesda) are wonderful--great coaches, great with kids, and nice guys. But they are slowly taking over the mid-tier level basketball and soccer level in MoCo, which erodes our outstanding, affordable rec programs for both. They seem to get more expensive each year.

I agree about PPA. I wasn't that impressed, and feel that I could have just as well sent my child to county rec or MSI- for far less cost. Of course, county rec/YMCA have barely enough children registered to hold classes now because people think higher cost = higher quality.

[Anonymous]

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