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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Paramount almost lost their CHRVA certfication as a club b/c of the owner's son losing his absolute mind on the court and the parents of a certain team being absolutely nasty, getting a yellow or purple card (can't recall which color exactly).   There are favorites and the coaches pit the favorites against the rest of the team.  The coaching is nuts... and they think that results in the girls improving but they play scared.  The favorites stay and the girls that suck up the environment to play for good teams stay.  [b]The marketing is cringe and half their claims are completely blown out of proportion.  They agressively recruit and your dd is on the team without being agressively recruited be prepared to not play or be the proverbial punching bag.  Rumors also swirl that the parents nickname the other girls and make fun of them- core mean girls and that perpetuates down to their dd's.[/b]  If you are considering paramount be sure to look under the hood and jump in with two feet. Some people love it, most don't. [/quote]

Paramount (and a few other top clubs) are very good at marketing now. Statements like "the only club to qualify XXXX teams", "100% recruitment success", "the only team to attend XXX", "we have an exclusive training relationship," "look at our alumni meetup at college XXX", and "there's no difference between our 1s and 2s team - both compete at the same level", etc. are all examples of very real marketing by those clubs. The marketing clearly works because you see both club staff and parents on these boards parroting the same talking points. Discussions about other good teams or clubs are inevitably steered towards on those clubs as well, usually with the same talking points. And you hear it in conversations at tournaments all the time.

The clubs are businesses who have to live up to those marketing claims in order to keep their model working and revenue coming.  As a result, they treat players more like cogs in the wheel of the club's success. They made a choice about the type of business they want to be. It can sometimes work out if your player is a vital cog, but if they aren't it can be very painful. A very good player leaving a club mid-season is the worst example of the wheel grinding up its cogs, but it manifests in many other ways too.

For example, players that are vitally important to a club's success often know how important they are (and so do their parents). Some players take advantage of that and treat their teammates poorly and/or get special treatment from the team coach. Coaches know that they can't lose those players and you'll often see markedly different treatment between "important" and "replaceable" players.  The most visible version of this is playing time at tournaments, where coaches will play those important players because any time they aren't playing the parents and their player get upset and they [i]will[/i] complain. But it manifests in many other ways, including their focus in practice on key players, their willingness to forgive errors those players make while aggressively calling out the exact error by a less-favored player, and the amount of time they spend helping one player in recruiting vs. another. There are even instances of teammates working with each other to make another player look bad by making sure she doesn't get set, doesn't get on the court during practices, isn't told the play being run, etc. Blatant violations of team rules are overlooked if the consequence of enforcement is that team could lose an important match and/or not have a player available on the first day of the tournament, risking that the team gets knocked out of contention for a bid or high finish. All of those are decisions made for the benefit of the club, not for the player.

If you are one of the favored players, be prepared for the consequences of playing for a club more focused on the club than on you. Expect to be berated and told by coaches "if you can't deliver for [b]me[/b], I don't want you here. Don't bother coming to practice" which is an exact quote made to a top player during an important tournament when the team was losing. Expect to be asked to play through injuries. Expect negative energy from the top, driven by the belief that great players are born in a "crucible" and that you can justify virtually any action as good for the player because it "challenged" them. And then you have to deal with the parents constantly working behind your back to figure out a way to make sure they're DD gets more playing time, because they are spending $10K+ and they want they're return on investment.

If you aren't one of the favored players you'll generally receive less focus from coaches, less playing time in matches, limited opportunity to make the same mistakes another player makes all the time, and face many other issues. You won't see any of this during open gyms or fall clinics if you have a chance to make the team, it usually only manifests once the season starts. Your DD may come out of the clinics saying they loved the intensity, the quality of play, and the coaching -- but you find out once you make the team the coach and the players behave completely differently. [/quote]

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