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Anonymous wrote:I'm hoping for a consolidation of talent..instead of half decent teams with talent spread out in a small geographical area.
Isn't that pretty much the sentiment that, in part at least, drove the creation of CCL, EDP, ECNL, and now DA? i.e. soccer people seeking to capture what they are convinced is elite talent under a common format that they can control?
Seems like youth soccer would be healthier under a much larger platform with multiple levels, and promotion/relegation. We kind of have that now except it's less formal. Top level is GDA, teams that can't cut that or don't like the format, do ECNL, then CCL, EDP, NPL, NCSL, and so on. Clubs move between leagues on their own accord. Very good for creating pissing matches like this thread.
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:
I think you missed CESA (current Mid Atlantic team) and the Wilmington Hammerheads (recently added as a Mid Atlantic team)............. and I would not be surprised to see 1 more team added to make this a 12 team conference.
They can add however many teams they want. They are not going to play more games.. Mid atlantic ECNL already has more teams then mid Atlantic DA and they play half the games.
Let't try to get the facts right. Just looking at the 2017 Atlantic division fall GDA schedule for U-15, it looks to me like teams played 11 in-conference games, and 5 additional games against out of conference teams in a showcase environment. GDA has one stop shopping for stats to make this easy to see. ECNL is harder to track since tournament games do not appear or count in league play and some teams are more active than others. I would venture a guess that most ECNL clubs played in two fall tournaments, so figure 6 more games for a total of 13. There is some fuzz on this of course and clearly GDA plays more games, but its not double.
Anonymous wrote:Riddle me this
How in the world can Loudoun field ECNL teams?
I think Loudoun's top girls are mostly still there probably. FCV did not peel off more than a handful of girls at U14/15. They will also draw some of the second tier girls from FCV, and maybe one or two GDA girls from the bottom of the roster.
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:And to add, Potomac Soccer Wire had hosted a forum that was very very active but the level of snark is what I believe led to them pulling the plug.
I think we actually interacted with the guy who runs Potomac Soccer Wire early on in the VA travel soccer thread. Many of us loved the discussion forum they had there years ago, and the move to allow only commenting on the articles they infrequently post probably helped a lot to drive the popularity of the soccer threads here on DCUM. He was pretty defensive about the whole thing as I recall.
I think people could use talking-soccer for VA, DC and MD if they wanted. For a long time the only active posts there were in the MA, FLA, CT and Oregon forums, but a bunch of people from NY and NJ who got sick of backofthenet moved over and started a decent NY thread. I'm still not sure any of those offer a better platform than DCUM though. If you like the SoCal boards (and you are welcome to talk about SoCal all you want as far as I'm concerned--that part of the country is a model we should pay attention to), I'd recommend that you just try posting topics that interest you here, and then just ignore anyone who wants to drag the discussion down to pedestrian levels. There are more than a handful of serious and knowledgeable people here who you'd probably like interacting with.
Apologies for resurrecting this thread... but the noise level in the soccer threads has reached an epidemic. In the faint hope that this might take hold, you can increase your chances of your post being read by using a username here. It's the anonymity that drives the noise level up.