Reply to How far will you travel for ECNL/DA

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You are neglecting that pesky little tidbit that there are many funded MLS DAs for males.  IF and when they have the same for females, of course the best players will attend funded GDAs.  Until then, i see it as a regional thing.  But it will be be what it will be.

The customers do not really care which one ultimately prevails (except for the HS issue which is significant in some areas).  The folks making money form all this will continue to do battle about it.  It is Coke vs, Pepsi. Starbucks vs dunkin.....of a little bit of consequence but not too much unless you make a liviing at one or the other.[/quote]

When ECNL was teh only game in town clubs and coaches heavily discouraged HS play. They allowed it but with little talent dilution at the time only the team Studs or Duds dared play HS. If you were a in between kid you did what your club coach suggested you do for fear of losing minutes or being replaced outright.

And now with GDA on the scene ECNL is marketing their league as the league you don't actually have to play in. "Join ECNL, the league you can miss three months of ECNL to play High School. Yes, we are still charging you for a full 10 months of ECNL training even though you will only train 6 months with the highest quality kids."[/quote]

When ECNL was the only game in town most of the ECNL teams did not have an issue with high school play. There were clubs that discouraged or forbid it but those were strongly discouraged by the league. Of course there are clubs like FCV who didn't care about the kids and did it anyway. My daughter played for McLean back then and was never discouraged from playing HS. They still trained 3 nights a week during the HS season though they were allowed to miss for games, are the ECNL clubs really only training 6 months now??? That sounds bad--we would probably have left ECNL earlier if it had been like that.

Leaving ECNL/DA after U16 does not necessarily mean you will find a team close to home either unless you really don't care at all what level the other players are. The soccer dropout rate at high-school ages in this county is the highest in the world. Our youth system is the worlds worst in player retention (arguably in player development as well--maybe those are related) and teams struggle to hold onto players and stay together. They survive by merging and consolidating and with every merger the number of choices goes down. This is more true for girls than boys where the dropout rate after age 14 is well over 50%.
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This is pretty much straight up fiction.

ECNL coaches hated High School soccer and still do. [/quote]

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