Soccer’s Shifting Sands
November 27, 2012
US Soccer has created “Development Academies” for high school age soccer players that prohibit those players from competing on their high school teams. This has created a nationwide gnashing of teeth to which I contributed in this space on March 9, 2012 – “US Soccer Gets a Red Card.”
It now appears that the effects of US Soccer’s exclusionary policy have been felt in Michigan, as a new cast of characters played leading roles in the MHSAA’s recently completed Lower Peninsula Boys Soccer Tournament and the Michigan High School Soccer Coaches Association’s team rankings tilted from the southeast, home of the state’s two US Soccer Development Academy programs, and toward the west and north.
Divisions 1, 2 and 3 of the MHSAA boys tournament lacked a southeast team in the Finals; and the soccer coaches association did not rank a southeast team in the top two of Divisions 1 and 4, in the top four of Division 3, and in the top eight of Division 2.
Certainly, one year's results is not a trend; there could be other factors at play here. And it’s also true that some folks are not alarmed, saying any student lost to the US Soccer Development Academy opens up a spot for another student to play for his high school team.
Perhaps that’s so. Still, it is disconcerting that US Soccer now plans to descend to an even younger level of athlete for its boys development academy and to start a similar program for girls soccer.
Transfer Culture
March 14, 2017
It is rare when a problem of major college athletics doesn’t eventually become a pollutant of high school athletics. A current issue demonstrates the point.
In 2015, NCAA research reported that about 40 percent of Division I men’s basketball players who had entered an NCAA institution directly from high school as freshmen had departed that institution by the end of their sophomore year.
Approximately 44 percent of the transfers were to other Division I programs, 33 percent to Division II programs, one percent to Division III, and 23 percent to non-NCAA colleges. Nearly 90 percent of all transfers said they changed schools for athletic reasons.
At the 2016 Men’s Final Four, NCAA President Mark Emmert stated that the issue of transfers is one of the most hotly debated in NCAA men’s basketball and football.
The culture that contributes to this is created in youth programs, starting even before students reach high school. There are no rules that govern players’ change from one non-school team to another, year after year. Players, parents and handlers talk with each other about where players can find the coach or team that will give them the best shot for a college scholarship or to fulfill their dreams of a professional career; and they will drive any distance from their homes to connect with that non-school team or coach.
This culture has infected high school sports, as witnessed by what appears to be increasing numbers of students who change schools for reasons more related to their non-school contacts and their college dreams than their high school experience, either athletic or academic.
These pressures will only increase under the current model of major college sports that treats superior athletes as if they were superior human beings and lavishes publicity and perks upon them. Until the major college sports experience is disincentivised, those colleges will have transfer troubles. And so will we.