
Great information. This matches the U14 McLean 14 game schedule with basically 5 away games in NC or SC (3 trips) plus 2 local away games (BRYC and Richmond). The U14s at Spirit play 25 games, and it looks like only 8 of them are away in PA or NJ (and one in NY). Not sure how Spirit does the travel for those 8. Thanks again. |
NJ and North can be bus trip while the PA games are up to the parents. |
Other than the PA drives with parents, and the one NY weekend (where looks like it was for 2 games, not 1), are these others all one and done bus trips to NJ without a hotel stay? Nice that the 17 other games were all around the local area. I wonder if that could be different next year? |
- but did u look @ the differences in roster size,, &playing time? WS roster seems huge....r any of those DPs? Maybe they need so many games because there r so many players & can take only 16-18 to each match..... |
Kids played up on the 03’s which does not have a large roster. |
Good point. No advantage in playing 2x the games if you are only getting 1/2 the playing time per game. In the end it would work out the same. Someone else also mentioned that ECNL teams can supplement their league play with tournaments, which is also a good point. Gotsoccer shoes BRYC did 4 and McLean did 3 tournaments in the fall. For BRYC that amounted to 15 additional games in the Fall alone. Figure another 6-8 tournament games in the Spring, and that actually puts them ahead of the DA in terms of matches played. Whether it's really such a great idea for 13 year-olds to be playing multiple 11v11 games in the same day (or on back-to-back days, for that matter), is another matter. |
Again, the 04 roster was large but many kids played up on the 03 team. What isn't accounted for are injuries. There is no DA method for reporting games missed due to injuries. Regardless of the club, if you see a kid not getting reported for many games it is likely that they were dealing with an injury. There is just no way tha distinction can be made. |
I don't think you can say DA is far shorter. Go look at the maps online. DA is VA, MD, PA, NJ. ECNL is VA, NC, SC. Not too much different. ECNL used to be worse, but the current conference alignment is ok. |
We were in ECNL last year, and DA this year, and the travel has been similar in frequency, distance, and expense.
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On the girls side, the DA will start to improve on ECNL in 05/06 age groups and going forward. Right now, for the most part players in 02/03/04's seem to be staying with their teams and the ECNL teams in this age group is stronger overall than DA. |
ECNL is all for wins, tournament games will fa or best XI, DA is supposed to be focused on development, so ideally more players would get to start through out the league games. It's been proven already, training is the best way to improve. |
Lots of good info at those links, thanks for sharing. Digging down into the DA website especially has tons of data in the game reports about minutes played and games played. In addition to being helpful in thinking about choices for my daughter i’m impressed with the level of data collection. |
Well you would think that being a "Development" Academy, that its all about "development" but that is spotty at best. If you look at the playing time distribution, WS is pretty even... they appear to be trying to develop uniformly across the depth chart (perhaps necessarily). Other clubs like (you can see all this online BTW) FCV for example has a heavy bias on the starting 11. Unfortunately ECNL stats are not so obvious but I don't think you can generalize as PP has done. As Nicki would say, do your f**kin research. |
How would you compare the expected total costs for your 2017-18 season, versus last year in your 2016-17 season for ECNL? I presume you were with FCV for both. Ballpark your total financial hits. |
The coaching is the same, the travel is pretty much identical, one can conclude that the costs are pretty much the same between ECNL and DA. In time, Spirit could be fully or partially funded whereas FCV cannot. |