Travel Soccer teams around NOVA let's discuss

[Anonymous]

Everyone knows the best players are in ODSL.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Everyone knows the best players are in ODSL.

Well, this is pretty true, I didn't mean to disrespect ODSL.

[Anonymous]

There are a couple elite teams that go through NCSL. Like someone earlier said, they rise through the ranks and move on from the league after a couple years. Everybody has to start somewhere. What I meant was, the elite teams within the NCSL structure, or within a couple leagues higher than NCSL, such as CCL or NPL. Further, your comment had nothing to do with my post, which was about sandbagging by bigger clubs. You contributed nothing to this conversation, and only showed what an elitist snob you are. As far as NCSL, it's good enough to get my players noticed by some colleges and hopefully get a scholarship somewhere, which is the ultimate goal. We're a low income team and our biggest aim is to try and make it easier for these kids to get a higher education, and play some quality soccer while they're at it. Bethesda South and Arlington play nationally and are ranked, and they came up through NCSL. Fury won the State Cup a few years back and they were coached by volunteers. That's the beauty of the sport, not what $4000-a-season you can sign up little Johnny for.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There are a couple elite teams that go through NCSL. Like someone earlier said, they rise through the ranks and move on from the league after a couple years. Everybody has to start somewhere. What I meant was, the elite teams within the NCSL structure, or within a couple leagues higher than NCSL, such as CCL or NPL. Further, your comment had nothing to do with my post, which was about sandbagging by bigger clubs. You contributed nothing to this conversation, and only showed what an elitist snob you are. As far as NCSL, it's good enough to get my players noticed by some colleges and hopefully get a scholarship somewhere, which is the ultimate goal. We're a low income team and our biggest aim is to try and make it easier for these kids to get a higher education, and play some quality soccer while they're at it. Bethesda South and Arlington play nationally and are ranked, and they came up through NCSL. Fury won the State Cup a few years back and they were coached by volunteers. That's the beauty of the sport, not what $4000-a-season you can sign up little Johnny for.

Arlington Red came up through NCSL?

[Anonymous]

I'm not the prior poster, but, yes, if you fired up the wayback machine and took this thread to 1985, you could watch the retro equivalent of Arlington Red play SAC Premier Blue in an NCSL Division 1 regular-season game at Virginia Highlands Park. I played in that game. I am a fat middle-aged man with bad knees. Thanks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There are a couple elite teams that go through NCSL. Like someone earlier said, they rise through the ranks and move on from the league after a couple years. Everybody has to start somewhere. What I meant was, the elite teams within the NCSL structure, or within a couple leagues higher than NCSL, such as CCL or NPL. Further, your comment had nothing to do with my post, which was about sandbagging by bigger clubs. You contributed nothing to this conversation, and only showed what an elitist snob you are. As far as NCSL, it's good enough to get my players noticed by some colleges and hopefully get a scholarship somewhere, which is the ultimate goal. We're a low income team and our biggest aim is to try and make it easier for these kids to get a higher education, and play some quality soccer while they're at it. Bethesda South and Arlington play nationally and are ranked, and they came up through NCSL. Fury won the State Cup a few years back and they were coached by volunteers. That's the beauty of the sport, not what $4000-a-season you can sign up little Johnny for.

I love the club pitch...we develop players and are not worried about wins/losses. Yet we sandbag tournaments all the time to put our teams in lower divisions and I hated it....you have to beat the best to be the best. With that being said, I don't think it matters which league you play in. It tees up teams to test the squad on what they learned during training, that's all. There will always be good and bad teams in every league, since they are all really just financially driven.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There are a couple elite teams that go through NCSL. Like someone earlier said, they rise through the ranks and move on from the league after a couple years. Everybody has to start somewhere. What I meant was, the elite teams within the NCSL structure, or within a couple leagues higher than NCSL, such as CCL or NPL. Further, your comment had nothing to do with my post, which was about sandbagging by bigger clubs. You contributed nothing to this conversation, and only showed what an elitist snob you are. As far as NCSL, it's good enough to get my players noticed by some colleges and hopefully get a scholarship somewhere, which is the ultimate goal. We're a low income team and our biggest aim is to try and make it easier for these kids to get a higher education, and play some quality soccer while they're at it. Bethesda South and Arlington play nationally and are ranked, and they came up through NCSL. Fury won the State Cup a few years back and they were coached by volunteers. That's the beauty of the sport, not what $4000-a-season you can sign up little Johnny for.

How or why should anyone contribute to an anonymous accusation? You mentioned neither the clubs or the tournaments where said sandbagging happens. At least name names otherwise you are just whining.

[Anonymous]

It's not my intent to give someone a bad reputation, whether it's a coach, club, a player, or tournament. If you truly don't think that sandbagging happens, all I can tell you is that you're obviously turning a blind eye. And the blame doesn't fully lie with the clubs either. It's the rules and loopholes that allow for this. So you can just bring ringers to win you a trophy under the pretense of "trying out/filling in because of injury." The actual players on my roster, the ones who put in the work, are the ones who need to get the first looks when a starter goes down. You've got to trust your own players, for better or worse. I love to win as much as the next guy, but some people will do anything to get an edge. It's youth soccer, not the World Cup.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's not my intent to give someone a bad reputation, whether it's a coach, club, a player, or tournament. If you truly don't think that sandbagging happens, all I can tell you is that you're obviously turning a blind eye. And the blame doesn't fully lie with the clubs either. It's the rules and loopholes that allow for this. So you can just bring ringers to win you a trophy under the pretense of "trying out/filling in because of injury." The actual players on my roster, the ones who put in the work, are the ones who need to get the first looks when a starter goes down. You've got to trust your own players, for better or worse. I love to win as much as the next guy, but some people will do anything to get an edge. It's youth soccer, not the World Cup.

I guess I've just never seen a team, kid or parent that felt the need to win the third/fourth bracket of "Shit Field Tourney" that the club "studs" needed to be their instead of their WAGS, Jeff Cup, Bethesda, Disney Showcase etc just to sandbag. But ok.

[Anonymous]

There*

[Anonymous]

I'm going to call one of you a selfish idiot, but I'm not going to specify the post to which I'm referring. So there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Sandbagging definitely goes on at the travel level all over the DMV. My U16s were in D5 of NCSL last year, and were finalists at all 4 of our tournaments. Unfortunately, 2 of the tournaments were cancelled due to weather, and we lost the other 2 finals in penalty kicks. For one of them, an NPL team was put into our bracket for some reason, and of course they romped to the final. We had a lead on them, but 3 of our starters were injured during the game and they eventually tied. For the other final that we lost on PKs, the other team was a D6 team, but they brought a bunch of guests from their elite team, and over half their starters were D1 players. Again we had a lead, but it proved to be too much and they took a lead in the last minute off a bogus penalty decision, only for us to tie it up once more with the last kick of the game, only to miss what would have been the 5th and final penalty, and then lose in sudden death. Truly some rollercoaster stuff. But my point is, those teams shouldn't have been in our bracket in the first place. A lot of the scheduling is biased to favor the bigger clubs staying on top, and the guest player rules allow for lower division teams to just bring the elite players from their top team whenever they have a tough game. Thankfully we're moving up a couple divisions at least this fall. Since all these bigger clubs like to bring their elite players to lower division games, we might as well skip the formalities and play the elite teams. Any team can rise up through the ranks if you have hard-working players who buy into what the coach is selling and play as a team.

So lets deconstruct this then, shall we?

Lets pretend that we are talking about the U16 FPYC (State rank of 49) Boys team for example.

They played in 4 tournaments during the 2016-17 season:
http://home.gotsoccer.com/rankings/team.aspx?TeamID=779650&History=yes&compact=

NVSC Battlefield Oct 8th -- Cancelled due to weather.
Hunt Country Classic -- Nov 20th (same weekend as Bethesda Showcase) Lost in Finals to 43rd ranked NPL team VYS. Even though VYS is an NPL team their State ranking of 43 would have not allowed them to be accepted into Bethesda and they likely chose Hunt Country as a better competitive match. And winning in the finals by a close score of 3-2 would indicate that as an accurate assessment.
St. Patricks Day Tournament -- March 18th (Cancelled due to weather)
The Virginia Canon Cup-- May 27th-28th. Lost in finals to a combined team called DFC Wreckers/Sterling FC Elite White. Sterling is indeed a Division 6th NCSL team. But what of this team bringing in their elite players? Who are the Wreckers?

The DFC Wreckers are in fact a ODSL Club: http://www.odsl.org/teams/83965439/81972762-84470053/TEAM.html

Now, of course I am not implying that the club in question is in fact FPYC but their strong 2nd place finish in NCSL Div 5 would make this team eligible for NCSL Division promotion simply demonstrates that they fit the described profile enough to explore how sandbagging might occur. (http://www.ncsl-soccer.com/schedules/Spring2017/86424886.html) But a look at even just FPYC would demonstrate complaints of premeditated "sandbagging" on such a scale for admittedly smaller tournaments is far fetched and really nothing more than sour grapes.

[Anonymous]

Would you not say that an NPL team should have been put in the upper bracket of the Hunt Tournament, with the D1 and D2 teams, rather than in the lower bracket, with the D5 and D6 teams? As to your argument about the Wreckers, that club has a team in D1, that did not have a good season, but is still in the top 20 on the rankings. That's not sour grapes, it's sandbagging. I'm not upset about it, I thought my boys did an amazing job, gave their best, and lost both games in penalties, which could go either way. I was just corroborating what someone said earlier about sandbagging, which can happen even at our level. Now if you think it's perfectly fine to have an NPL team be out with a bunch of D5-6 teams, or a team bringing 5 guest players from their D1 team to the lower bracket of a midlevel tournament, then do you. Like I said, my boys had no trouble keeping up, but I can't say the same for the other teams in our bracket. I'm not discrediting the teams that won, they earned it and they play great soccer, but they were also heavily favored by the way the tournaments were structured.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Would you not say that an NPL team should have been put in the upper bracket of the Hunt Tournament, with the D1 and D2 teams, rather than in the lower bracket, with the D5 and D6 teams? As to your argument about the Wreckers, that club has a team in D1, that did not have a good season, but is still in the top 20 on the rankings. That's not sour grapes, it's sandbagging. I'm not upset about it, I thought my boys did an amazing job, gave their best, and lost both games in penalties, which could go either way. I was just corroborating what someone said earlier about sandbagging, which can happen even at our level. Now if you think it's perfectly fine to have an NPL team be out with a bunch of D5-6 teams, or a team bringing 5 guest players from their D1 team to the lower bracket of a midlevel tournament, then do you. Like I said, my boys had no trouble keeping up, but I can't say the same for the other teams in our bracket. I'm not discrediting the teams that won, they earned it and they play great soccer, but they were also heavily favored by the way the tournaments were structured.

No, VYS was ranked 43 versus FPYC's ranking of 49. VYS went 0-8-1 in league play. They were placed appropriately in the Hunt Country Classic. But if you want to accuse a 0-8-1, 43rd ranked team of sandbagging I can't call it anything but sour grapes.

[Anonymous]

Sorry I know this was discussed in the past, but can someone provide a crystal clear answer to whether or not 2006, 2005 DA full DA kids can do supplemental training and/or play games outside their DA during the season? I was talking to a parent whose kid is planning on doing supplemental training and he said he talked to the DA coach about it and the DA coach is fine with it. He said the club's DA program isn't too strict.