Reply to USMNT vs Ecuador Game Thread

Forum Index » Soccer

Reply to "USMNT vs Ecuador Game Thread"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]I believe that the decline of high school ball has significantly hurt the men’s game. Why?  Because it is free. The US youth system is missing the influx of talent from poorer and often urban or rural areas. This is often where the kid that not only wants to succeed but feels like they [i]have[/i] to succeed comes from. In the pay to play model these kids are left behind and eventual turn to other sports, quit all together, or worse, are never found. Add to that, typically, the better coaches don’t coach HS ball any longer.  So, even if a raw talent makes the HS team they don’t get the best coaching to improve their game.

Solution. Since club ball is here to stay, the USSF should allocate significant scholarship and development funds for economically challenged or underserved community raw talent players. Players qualify to compete for the scholarships by either being financially underprivileged or by living in an underserved community. Then there are a series of free camps, including structured, officiated matches that identify the best raw talent to receive the voucher. That one year voucher can then be used at an accredited soccer club to pay for club fees, team fees and unis as well as commuting costs to the practices and games. The next year the qualification process starts again. This can start at the pre-teen age (say 10 or 11 yrs old) to allow for some growth and learning and continue thru HS. A ussf rep helps the family and kid navigate to a solid club / coach.

Vouchers are controlled independent of clubs so that clubs can’t give money to suburban kids that are less well off than their suburban counterparts but not truly underserved or poor. Clubs can still offer their own free rides to those kids of course.

Marketing of the ussf program would need to be heaviest in poor and underserved communities. USSF can also pay for outdoor concrete futsal soccer courts in urban settings to sit alongside the hundreds of b-ball courts and market the raw talent program using those venues. Identifying the underserved communities would be easy by having clubs and state registrar databases send their anonymous players zip code records to ussf who then does a simply query to ID the underserved areas. Anyhow, just some thoughts on how to get the grittier part of our nation’s youth involved in competitive youth soccer. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics