Reply to Pro/rel, club-centric -- how should youth leagues be organized?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=RantingSoccerDad][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don’t think this is the case, but do any leagues actively try to seed teams into divisions at the beginning of the year through a period of inter-squad scrimmages?  It seems like there is enough of a difference in team performance year to year to keep the pro/rel mechanism from actually working.  I think this is at least part of the problem. [/quote]

While the stated sample size in the previous U15 examples is small the reality is pro/rel versus a closed league alone will not fix blowouts.

Hell, right now Fulham is sitting in last place in the Premier League with a GA Avg/game of 2.53. On a per game basis they are only doing better than 9 of the 12 U15 teams sampled in this thread. The only reason pro leagues even have Pro/Rel is to provide incentive to keep teams playing competitively through as close to the completion of the season as possible. When a championship is decided on league points and not a playoff system it is crucial that all teams remain as competitive as possible for as long into the season as possible in order to ensure that a championship or a Champions League birth is not unfairly earned because a team is tanking late in the season.

There are no such motivations for youth soccer for Pro/Rel to mean a thing. There is no incentive to tank, or to fight either. It is just kids playing soccer and no matter how it is rigged there will always be a team in last place and they will likely have lost by a lot over the course of the season. [/quote]

But what would happen if Torquay United were playing in the Premier League?

You need tiers of some kind. You wouldn't put Bethesda's U15 DA team against Small Club United's C team.

What we have now are tiers decided as much by club politics as by any sort of standard. The DA *generally* has the best clubs in the country because the standards are so stringent, and ECNL also has done well selecting its clubs. But is VPL significantly better than the top NCSL teams? For that matter, is CCL better than the top EDP division, which is now the US Youth Soccer regional league? 
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I would say that the top teams in VPL and CCL are significantly better than the top teams in NCSL. Beyond the top 4 teams or so in CCL or VPL no, there is no real difference between the teams in the different leagues. And that is why if you rolled them all together into NCSL it wouldn't fundamentally change the competitive nature or the overall outcomes in NCSL now. This is assuming only the top division of NCSL though.

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