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[quote=Anonymous][quote=RantingSoccerDad][quote=Anonymous][quote=RantingSoccerDad]
So do we want to get rid of that? Well, let's consider this ...

1. How many scholarships are funded by the people paying $3,000?

2. Many of you complain about teams coached by "parent volunteers." OK. How are you going to pay for pro coaching if each player is chipping in $150 and you have fixed costs like fields ($$$), insurance ($$) and referees (pennies)?

3. You know where you have sports in which the players pay very little, if at all? And it's where every football, basketball and baseball player who can make a team plays?

You guessed it. High school.

So for U15 and above, should we simply disband "travel" soccer? If you're in a pro or otherwise subsidized academy, fine -- we're seeing more kids in MLS making their pro debuts at 15 and 16. Maybe the kids at the next level play high school soccer for part of the year and something akin to American Legion baseball for another season. The kids at this level aren't going pro in their teens -- their aspiration is college, and there's always a chance they'll blossom in college and move on to the pros.

And if you don't make a high school team, there's always rec, as opposed to the multitude of travel teams in this area with kids who don't make the high school teams but still consider it necessary to drive all over creation to play games at some supposedly elite level.

What would we do with all the displaced coaches? Here's where the USSF surplus can actually make a difference. In Germany, you can't go far without hitting a federation program that trains players from various clubs, developing and identifying talent. USSF has something like this now, but it's nowhere near the level we see elsewhere. (You could argue that it *used* to be ODP.)

Solidarity pay and training compensation, which may have taken a big step forward with yesterday's verdict in the Crossfire case, will help. So will the surplus.

But I've run the numbers. You're not going to subsidize every travel player's escapades with solidarity pay and the USSF surplus. If you have 1 million travel players paying $2,000 each, that's $2 billion. Good luck with that.

So we have a choice. We can quit paying for EDP, CCL, VPL and whatever the next "elite" league is, and we can do something closer to what we see overseas, buttressed by existing scholastic infrastructure and targeted spending on training centers and pickup facilities.

But then how would we brag about our kids on DCUM?[/quote]

So college programs will come recruit from rec teams in this model?[/quote]

And high school, like they do in other sports.

You may say I'm a dreamer, etc. ...[/quote]

It’s somewhat ironic that many of the high school coaches also coach high cost travel teams on the side. [/quote]

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