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21 thoughts on “The End of College Soccer As We Know It”
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Behind the Scenes: https://www.instagram.com/studentathlete.ai/
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While this is all well and good. It doesn't actually address one of the main points you bring up.
Foreign players are dominating. The same foreign players are in the same development system in the US college system.
The problem starts before.
In the US, youth soccer is a lot like AAU basketball. It's all about pay to play travel teams, and the emphasis isn't on developing fundamental skills, it's on playing games and winning games. AAU is basically a curse to sport development in the US.
I was born in Canada, and Canada and the US both suffer from similar problems, some things are different, like the US is all about AAU while Canada last I checked is still just regular old youth leagues. I grew up playing youth soccer in Canada in the 80s and 90s, which itself was absolutely dire, and suffered from the same issues. I was a tall kid, and very athletic. At no point in my entire time playing youth ball did I ever really learn fundamentals. I was the epitome of a donkey. I was taller than almost everyone. I was faster than almost everyone. I had great ball instincts, anticipation, and hyper aggression. Naturally I ended up as a forward, and for most of my youth career post puberty, I averaged like 2 goals a game. The problem was, I was playing with and against kids who had a similar development. We were ALL donkeys, I was just the biggest one. Had a European team come over to play us, even if they were a year or two younger, and half as athletic, I have no doubt they would have destroyed us.
American youth soccer today, is even worse off in many respects, because 1) it's largely gate kept by money. You might find the odd good player that comes out of La Jolla, but if you want to find the REAL athletes, you need to cast a wider net. You need to be digging kids out of Alabama and West Virginia from dirt poor towns. 2) The youth system isn't tooled for player development. It's tooled to play games.
My understanding of, England, for example is this. You start playing school boy soccer or the equivalent. There is obviously going to be a more developed and institutionalized development system there, but, if you get identified as a potential talent, you get invited to an academy, where you begin to be trained in the fundamentals YEARS and YEARS before you reach college age.
This is why, foreign players coming over are miles ahead of US players. They have the same level of athleticism broadly speaking, but they are years ahead in development, 4 or more minimum.
I've got another anecdotal story about how this sort of thing works. I was born in '79, my main sports in high school were football and basketball. At that time, 92-> Canada was in its infancy in terms of being a basketball nation. It's not that we didn't produce the occasional good player, or we didn't have good coaches. It was about WHEN WE STARTED. I remember during a summer camp one year, I think we were 10th grade, we played a group of 8th graders from a 'A' school in the US. Now, this was no typical group of 8th graders, from what I recall, they went on to win multiple state championships. They were competitive with us, and we had 2 years on them. In fact, the first game we played them, they beat us.
I remember how shocking it was, because these were 8th graders. The idea of having our 9-10 team play our 8th grade team was comical, we'd destroy them, and here we are, losing a game.
Then the eye opening thing happened. Their coach while shooting the shit with us, when we were down on ourselves for losing to them, mentioned that we had in all likelihood only been playing organized basketball since 8th grade. So we were going into our 3rd year of organized basketball. They had been playing together, in organized structured play, for like 8 years. They started at 4-5. We started at 12. The second game we beat them in, we had adapted, but only because we were basically all young men, and they were a team that was straddling the puberty line. In every fundamental measurement you could make, they were better. They shot better. Ran a better offense. Dribbled better. Passed better. We were just bigger, faster and stronger because we were 2-3 years older.
7:22, EXACTLY… yeah… Stanford Stadium, and if ya look over there to the East ya see the Atlantic Oce… … … what do you mean that's the Bay of San Francisco… nah mate that's the… wait… WHAT??? 100% the problem with a lot of the conferences nowadays… and sadly we all know it's driven by 1 thing $$$ (and TV Ratings) but considering that College Soccer isn't(for the most part) MAYBE this is where it'll work and prove that you CAN fix it at College Football level too
also to add on to the travel thing, teams should have a MAX of 1 cross country game a Regular Season and then once playoff time comes(if they keep the NCAA Playoffs) ya keep the games regionalized as much as possible until ya get to say the semis and then ya pick a neutral location at that point(maybe even the quarters); Sub Rules changes 100% agree, the time wasting subs is just dumb and shouldn't be allowed at that point; i'm a BIT Hesitant on Golden Goal but i get why it'd be a good option if we're wanting games to not last 2+ hours if possible + Travel; as to number of games a week, i'd say max of TWO per week(if they're somewhat local games[ie no more than a 300 mile round trip]) and definately be like a Monday/Friday or Tuesday/Saturday window and be reserved for "Pocket" games(ie Conference Games in the new system)
the issue i have with Pro-rel at the College Level is the D3 teams that move up won't be allowed to do NIL stuff as it'd be against the NCAA's bylaws at that level, especially with Scholarships, unless we restructure say… D1 into 2-3 levels and have 2-3 levels of D2 below that and some NAIA teams sprinkled in, dunno what it'd look like though
The real question is why can't the USA developed world-class talents when we have the most number of people playing soccer than any other nation?
3:45, i've been asking for that for YEARS at MOST levels of college Sports, abolish these money grabs of Conferences that are like 1500+ mile trips for the extremes of the teams and group teams into like 1 time zone worth of travel at most(if possible) hopefully that idea works out well
Don't forget that players who don't make it, also become parents of future players.
for someone who is not familiar with the US sports, this is a great video with exceptional break down about football in the US
Sasho Cirovski has pushed for this reform for a very long time, and what U.S. Soccer is proposing is great.
If the organization wants to push this through, it should present the case study of Japan. Over here, Japan's college soccer system has made reforms to boost the sport. It has built up regional leagues in multiple tiers that incorporate promotion/relegation, thus bringing in a higher level of play. The regional leagues then carry over to a national championship. It has also focused on player development, which allows players to balance between the sport and education. The player pathway has led to some thriving at the professional level. The best example is Kaoru Mitoma, who plays for Brighton in the Premier League. This guy went from writing a thesis on dribbling to becoming an elite player both at club and international level (not to say any aspiring players have to write a thesis).
While U.S. Soccer has some good ideas to reform the sport, there have got to be a few tweaks to improve it, and this comes from Japan. One idea is to give the college teams an incentive. For example, open some slots in the U.S. Open Cup for teams that win the regional leagues or the national championship. That would be a huge motivation for them to face professional teams in a cup competition.
Great content, just confused by the English accent but American nationality 😂
If your child has the potential to be a pro soccer player, why waste the ages 18-24 at college when they could be trying out at different pro events and tryouts? Then when he's older he can always get his degree.
Great news!
The Crack Baby Athletic Association will never allow for these changes. There aren’t enough crack babies playing soccer to make it profitable for them…
I would have LOVED promotion/Relegation when I played in the early 2000s
Why is this only for the mens game, the women go through the same schedule!
Is it the same for women’s college soccer? Is this proposal also for women?
So many quality players in my era pursued other careers due to lack of opportunities with soccer/football.. this will be a good upgrade, however it won't fix everything.. other issue is an 18 year old in Europe gets paid to play, not pay to play.. no where in the world does anyone give a rats ass about college/university sport.. Nowhere else in the world does anyone go to play college soccer to make it pro.. Youth leagues as feeders for pro teams would be better.. Youth players make an earning and have a chance to get promoted to senior teams, just like the rest of the world.. just let college soccer be what it is, a crappy league for students… the long and short of it all is, it's much more complicated than we think.. Big Universities are sports programs 1st, indoctrination centers 2nd, social experiments 3rd, and lastly institutions of education..
I"m also so sick and tired of all you pussys complaining about the schedule. Jesus christ, we all played high school soccer where we had practice and or games 5 days a way…then club soccer on the weekends. The Fall was always harsh. Add school on top of that. When I was in high school I would play my game after school then go to my fucking job and get home at 930pm…have dinner…do some homework and go to bed. When I got to the Big East to play D1 ball, it was fucking cake!
When was the last time the NCAA did anything to benefit the student athlete ?
stop blaming foreigners taking your spot. The best place to develop is Europe, no need to stay in America
This couldn’t be farther from the truth. 1. Regional college soccer isn’t going to work for D1 soccer because schools have multiple different sports. Most of the time those college teams are joining a conference due to money deals with football and basketball which are more dominant college sports than soccer. It’s why Cal,SMU joined the ACC because the PAC-12 lost its tv deal which thus lost money for the schools. Soccer doesn’t have as much say when it comes to the business part of the school as well as basketball or football. 2. Promotion and relegation is not gonna work at college. Some colleges invest a lot of money into their sports(Duke,UNC,USC,UCLA etc.). Most of these teams are playing in division 1 competition due to the whole school playing division 1 competition with their other sports. Your not gonna see promotion or relegation at that level because it is gonna be a big gap between an USC team vs a division 2 or 3 team that doesn’t have the facilities, food, staff,equipment, etc. compared to the D1 team. Look for soccer to be a thing in America especially at the collegiate level you have to do 3 things. 1. Make youth players and parents worship soccer like football and basketball. You need it to be like football in the south and basketball in the north. Have kids from impoverished areas play soccer because they have nothing outside of it and want their families to live a better life. Have kids play it because they wanna get their families out the hood or the poor crime ridden area and into something better. Kinda like basketball and football in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Pay to play soccer is killing it because your not getting the best player or the hungry player, your getting the player that mommy and daddy can pay for him to be apart of the best teams and not work for it. 2. Limit the amount of international kids can play on a college team. If you limit the amount of international kids on a college team that coach has to recruit in house which means in America. This is then gonna sharpen the skills of American born players to grind and work harder every day to get those scholarships compared to a coach taking a trip out to England and recruiting players that aren’t good enough for their academy team. You have to have Americans play against Americans, not international kids playing against other international kids because that’s not making American better that’s just make other nations better. And then 3 which is probably a hurdle that may never get over. You gotta make it something bigger than football and basketball. You have to make soccer something kids dream of playing in America. That takes a whole lot of things to work on than just college. Also when it comes to the schedule of games just have a typical football schedule. 1 game a week with like 20-16 game week schedule because you really only need pre-season, couple out of conference games, couple of conference games, conference post season and then NCAA post season. That can easily be condensed into a 20 maybe a 25 game season if it goes from August to like February or March.