Anonymous wrote:Our top team for 2014 and 2015 held tryouts (U12 & U11), but it was a sham. The coaches pre-picked kids to come join the team in practices ahead of tryouts. A few kids who got offers for the top team never even came to tryouts.
That was some shady back-door stuff.
I have a question for ECNL and GA @ U13. Are the ID sessions a sham too and do kids essentially get on those team ahead of time at secret practices also?
Yeah, that's always frustrating. My DS would experience that same sort of thing for a few years and he stopped going to the higher level team tryouts because they weren't really tryouts. I get it, the coaches received feedback on players throughout the year from the current team coaches and they knew who they would be bringing on to the next level teams.
For my DD, the ENCL club that she plays for had two primary feeder clubs. Her U13 "tryout" for ECNL was moreso a formality of getting the player pool together and getting the two groups of girls to have an intro to each other. Again, it was pretty well defined ahead of time who was going to be joining the ECNL team. Her team hasn't had a ton of movement as she has gotten older. There's been 1 or 2 players dropped or added each year. Going in to U16, they added one development player and dropped 1 player. Going into next year, U17, her team has zero changes. She's played with most of the girls either at outdoor or futsal since U9. Nice for continuity...