Reply to Boys DA, ECNL, ODP, CCL, EDP, NCSL, ODP

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=RantingSoccerDad][quote=Anonymous]Further evidence Boys ECNL is dying.  Baltimore Celtic has pulled its top boys team (U14) from ECNL.   They'll be playing EDP instead.  The club will enter its B team in ECNL.  Clubs with both DA and ECNL already do this.  If non-DA clubs start doing it as well, the end is near.

Reason given was lack of competition.  Last fall they beat the NE teams by over 10 goals (1 game was 17-1).  In the spring the parents and coach refused to travel all the way to CT & MA for non-competitive games.  The NE teams actually agreed to forfeit the games themselves, rather than insist the Baltimore teams make the trip to blow them out.

It's time for all involved to admit the Boys ECNL was just a really bad idea.

[/quote]

Typical Baltimore.

Steve Nichols was on stage at NSCAA a few years ago explaining that he left the Baltimore Bays' DA operation because the games weren't competitive. Guess who's back in the DA?

I'm hardly a defender of having multiple "national" leagues. Maybe boys' ECNL is a really bad idea. The travel last year was ridiculous, and it's only slightly better this year now that the VA teams are going south rather than north.

But it's just a little funny to see people in Year 1 give up and say it's not competitive enough.

And if a game is 17-1, you're probably doing something wrong. Have your goalkeeper play forward -- it'll help develop foot skills he'll need at a higher level. Move everyone to a different position -- also helpful for development. You don't have to do the rec-league "only score with your weak foot" or "pass the ball 20 times before you shoot" rules, but if you're THAT much better than the opposition, you're going to have to get creative to get any developmental lesson from the game.[/quote]

Different poster, but I always thought it was odd that people just took Nichols' comments/interviews about why he left the DA and formed Celtic at face value.  The main reason they left DA was because a lot of the DA players and the majority of promising players on top younger teams in the area attended Baltimore area private schools, many of them recruited there, and many with scholarships.  Before the no-high school soccer rule, Nichols was coaching at McDonogh, his son attended there, and that's where most of the Bays' DA practice fields were.  Staying with the DA was not a sustainable situation if he and his son wanted to stay at McDonogh.  Once he got the Loyola job, he was happy to return to the DA fold.

Boys' ECNL is entirely a bad idea, for the same reasons given with respect to CCL and VPL in your thread on those leagues.  It causes more families to spend more money for no good development reason.  It exists because clubs want to be able to claim they have an "elite" product to help with their market share, and also so that the ECNL leadership can save face having created an ill-advised war over girls' DA.[/quote]

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