Reply to Arlington ex-DA Boys parents

Forum Index » Soccer

Reply to "Arlington ex-DA Boys parents"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Parents aren’t thrilled but most realise this Fall is going to me a mess/joke anyway due to the virus and other teams aren’t really having tryouts so most will deal with it for 12 months and reassess next Spring. [/quote]

Why are parents not thrilled [/quote]

Big egos are suffering without the DA patch. [/quote]

Arlington was one of the stronger non-MLS DA clubs with three of the four DA teams reaching mid-season with very strong winning records, and even the weakest team being mid-table.  There are many players on the various rosters who have aspirations to play professionally.  Note that I'm not suggesting that these players will make it.  I'm not even suggesting that any of these kids has a realistic chance of making it - I am simply not in a position to judge.  Obviously the overwhelming majority of them almost certainly won't make it.  My point is simply that this is their goal, and it is good for kids to have goals and reach for the stars.  They know that they need a whole bunch of things to go right to achieve this goal.  They need great coaching, masses of hard work, opportunity, visibility and probably also quite a bit of luck.  And they also need to play against strong opposition in order to help their development.

The coaching at Arlington is really strong, and it will not be changing.  Opportunity and visibility will be lower in ECNL - but that can likely be worked around.  Hard work is always down to the kid and so there's no change there.  But the quality of opposition is outside our control.  Either ECNL will provide an adequate level of competition, or it won't.  We know that the DA for the most part (one or two clubs aside) did provide a good level of competition, and therefore we can reasonably assume that MLS league will continue to do so.  At the very least ECNL is an unknown, but we have some data points suggesting that the standard is quite a bit lower.  For example in the last year Loudoun played in the DA, Arlington 06 beat them three times running.  Then Loudoun went to ECNL, lost (at least) seven of their best players to DC United (3), VDA (3) and Arlington (1), and still finished 4th in ECNL.  In addition Arlington has played friendlies against another local ECNL club a couple of times over the last 18 months and all the games have been incredibly one sided.  Obviously I didn't hang around to watch every age group, but I saw four games across different age groups with an aggregate score of 21-2, and heard that the other games were similar in outcome.

Therefore the players (and their parents) are worried that the level of competition in ECNL will be substantially lower than we have been used to, and thus not provide enough of a challenge for the kids to push them to develop.  Certainly based on the (admittedly very limited number of) friendly matches we have played against local ECNL clubs over the last year or two, there is some basis for this concern.  Just so I'm clear - I am not suggesting that every game in the ECNL will be a walkover.  I'm quite sure it won't.  And I am sure that no Arlington team will run the table winning every game.  I am suggesting however that I (and we if I may be so bold as to speak for other parents) are worried that the overall level of competition will be considerably lower than in the DA and that there will be too many games which don't provide a challenge.

Hopefully we will turn out to be wrong, and the local ECNL teams will turn out to be stronger than we currently believe they are.  In which case I think everyone both in Arlington and the other ECNL clubs will be happy.

[/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