Reply to Potomac and PPA to GA Aspire

Forum Index » Soccer

Reply to "Potomac and PPA to GA Aspire"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]PPA older teams are falling apart, best coaches are leaving and best players are moving on. PPA is just a rec team that aspire to be a big team, unsuccessfully. BLUE teams are essentially subsidizing GREEN teams, quite unprofessionally. It has been an unfortunate experience for us. [/quote]

Agree with this sentiment in general. As PPA teams get older, many of the best players leave for other clubs. The top teams then backfill with second team players, but for the most part fail to attract quality new players to tryouts. So the second teams gradually whither away and many of the top teams get weaker relative to the competition over time. There are exceptions in some age groups, where the top teams is strong and they might even attract unhappy but good players from stronger clubs like Bethesda. But overall the club is mostly a good introduction to travel soccer for young ages and then by older ages many of the teams are essentially rec+ teams at travel team prices. Quality of coaching really varies. And club management seemingly “gives up” on some of the weaker teams as they get older, focusing attention on the stronger teams instead.

So this move to GA Aspire could be a real test for the club. Is it going to get stronger, attracting better players and coaches, is it going to flounder and prove to be inadequate to the task. On some PPA teams you have kids who do other sports. (PPA itself has basketball teams, for instance.) Their families stick with PPA because in recent years the club has shown flexibility and enabled kids to play multiple sports. If the club drops that flexibility, these families will leave. That could clear the way for the club to become stronger in soccer — but only if PPA demonstrates that it can attract high-level players at older ages groups and keep good, younger players from leaving for clubs like Bethesda, McLean and Potomac. It hasn’t been able to do that in the past. So this really could be a moment of truth for PPA and determine what kind of club it’s going to be — a strong travel club vs. a travel-lite club for kids with second-tier talent or interests in other sports, or both.[/quote]

You must be the parent of a boy because you are misinformed about a few things, though you are right that good players leave eventually. The boys side is comparably weaker than the girls.

No strong girls are leaving to Potomac which has one of the weaker set of girls teams around. And several of the current girls teams already outpace GA and many ECNL teams (national, not regional) in the area. That the club was only able to get into GA-Aspire is likely the reason there may be an exodus this year.

PPA has the potential to become a top soccer club, but its leadership needs to get out of its own way. GA-Aspire is a good step forward I guess, but now they need to get their boys side together and operate the business professionally in order to get to the next level. [/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