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Several of the most prominent youth and professional coaches in the country are trying to sound an alarm about the state of girls’ soccer in the United States, and a youth landscape which they describe as “dire” and “broken.”
At the top of their list of complaints is U.S. Soccer and, in their eyes, the federation’s attempt to take over the youth game in America.
Back in 2009, 40 of the top girls’ clubs in the U.S. formed the
ECNL, which stands for Elite Clubs National League. Their purpose was simple, to bring together the country’s most elite clubs and pit them against each other in one combined competition.
Then, in 2017, U.S. Soccer
launched the Girls’ Development Academy, which was modeled on the federation’s boys’ academy first started in 2007.
The move by U.S. Soccer split the youth landscape in two, with some top teams moving to the DA and others staying in the ECNL. The end result, according to these coaches, has been a lower level of competition in both leagues and a weakening of the youth game across the United States.
“It’s in complete shambles,” said Paul Riley, head coach of the
National Women’s Soccer League’s North Carolina Courage and the director of coaching for Long Island-based youth outfit Albertson Soccer Club — which has teams in both the ECNL and the DA.
“I don’t understand the whole DA thing,” he told
The Equalizer. “I was excited when [U.S. Soccer] said they were going to do the DA. I thought at the time the ECNL had lost their elite status and they started bringing in [too many] clubs and once you dilute it, you dilute the player pool. And when you dilute the player pool, you dilute the quality of the practices. When you take away that, then the quality of the games is not as high.”
But Riley explained that despite his initial hopefulness, the DA actually ended up making the problem worse. While some of the top clubs entered the DA, many stayed in the ECNL — wanting to avoid what he and others see as an excess of regulation from U.S. Soccer. Girls DA director Miriam Hickey
said in 2017 that the launch of the DA “simplifies the landscape.” But now, instead of one top competition, there are two “elite” platforms operating side-by-side.
Charlie Naimo — who has worked for two decades in the youth ranks and in the pro game as a technical adviser for the Western New York Flash, the Chicago Red Stars, and North Carolina, and won multiple championships coaching in the now-defunct USL W-League — agrees.
“Why did U.S. Soccer have to do a DA?” asked Naimo. “There was absolutely no need to create another layer. That was, ‘The men have it, so the women have to have it,’ even if it hurts the women. It wasn’t well thought out, it wasn’t rolled out properly, and right away you split the talent pool down the middle.
“The biggest reason, in my opinion, why the [U.S.] youth national teams don’t excel at all anymore is not because we don’t have great players or because the clubs aren’t developing players anymore. It’s because the platform is so segmented.”
U.S. Soccer did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the subject.
Rory Dames — who has led the Red Stars to five straight playoff appearances in the NWSL and runs the highly successful youth club, Eclipse Select — also believes the addition of the DA weakened the level of competition and has made it tougher to develop truly elite players.
“The DA was supposed to be for the top five percent — the players who could realistically one day represent the country on a national stage,” Dames said. “Then Chicago should have had one DA and all the best players should’ve been siphoned to that DA because the way you make players is to get good players together and create a culture and an environment.”
But that’s not what happened, according to Dames.
“There were three DAs the first year in Chicago at four different ages,” he added. “There’s no way that there were 80 U-14 kids, 80 U-15 kids, 80 U-16-17s, and 80 U-18-19 kids in this area that are good enough to represent their country one day. It’s just not realistic. It’s just not.”
“What [they] basically did is recreate the ECNL.”
Riley explained that the exact same thing happened in the New York area.
“We’ve got three ECNL clubs and two DA clubs on Long Island,” he said. “There’s room for literally one club on Long Island. [It’s] a perfect example of dilution.”
Riley and Dames have experience coaching in both the DA and ECNL and both believe that U.S. Soccer has created a series of rules that make playing in the DA unpalatable for many of the country’s top club teams.
“I’m amazed they call it the Development Academy because all they talk about is, ‘Do you have a psychologist, do you have a nutritionist, do you have a trainer on the weekends, do you have a video of the game, do you have X, Y, Z?’ They just go on and on with all these rules,” said Riley.
“They do a routine every year; they ask you for all your thoughts on all these things. Do you have this, do you have that? And I’m looking down the list of things and not one question in the 14 questions — and they’re detailed questions — was about player development. Not one question.”
“They’re more worried about if you’re breaking the rules or not,” he later added. “That’s what they’re more worried about. They’re not actually worried about the player development part of it. And that’s a shame.”
Dames calls the DA’s rules “mechanisms for control” and thinks they came about as a result of former U.S. technical director April Heinrichs wanting authority over the American youth system.
“I believe the reason the DA came on the girls’ side was because April Heinrichs and the people who she had on her side on the U.S. youth staff wanted more control of what the kids were doing,” he said. “And in order to get control of that they had to get control of the clubs.”
Heinrichs, who stepped down from her role at the end of 2018, could not be reached for comment.
In 2016, she touted U.S. Soccer resources as one reason the DA would be superior, noting that it would be the preferred path to Division I soccer (over the established ECNL).
Among other restrictions imposed on DA clubs, players themselves are prohibited from participating in high school soccer, college ID camps, the ODP (Olympic Development Program), and other outside activities. Coaches think those restrictions are a big part of what’s weakening the club landscape and splitting it in two.
“Kids have to [be able to] play high school soccer if they want to,” argues Naimo. “If the biggest reason why they’re leaving our league is because they want to play high school soccer, you’ve got to change it. The only way to have the best team, the best league, is to have the best players.
“We have to get out of this false mindset that, ‘I’ll just take whoever I get and we’ll put a developmental plan together and we’ll turn them into the best players in the country.’ That’s not the way it works, unfortunately. It’s just not. The best players need to be playing in the best leagues. The best league is going to be determined by where all the better players are — period. Right now, it’s split down the middle, so neither league can call themselves the best, in my opinion.”
Riley agrees that the prohibition on high school soccer is helping cause the division in talent in the youth player pool.
“We lost a lot of top kids that wanted to play high school,” said Riley. “So now, our top team is diluted. I look at the players and I think, for those seven weeks, does it really matter that much? I get it. For sure, the training is better where we are than the high school [team]. I get it. There’s no question about that in my mind. But what do you lose by letting the player leave the club and not play with the top players?”
“To me it makes no sense,” he added. “Maybe if we give a little bit, we can get more by getting these players back together.”
Huw Williams — who has worked in the youth game for decades in the Kansas City area and was the general manager and assistant coach of the FCK Kansas City team that won two NWSL championships — disagrees with the idea that the U.S. youth landscape is broken. He thinks that the youth game today offers players and coaches more opportunities than it did in the past. However, Williams does see a problem with the DA’s prohibition on high school soccer. Most of his top players wanted to play for their high schools, which made the ECNL a better fit for his club.
“I think [the DA] is a great league,” said Williams. “It just wasn’t the right league for us and our players where we’re at today. I don’t know if not having high school youth soccer is the right thing for this culture.”
Dames also believes that the fragmentation of the youth game — where U.S. Soccer is running one league and independent clubs another — has caused the federation to favor the DA when selecting youth national teams. He thinks that has helped cause those teams to be less competitive than they were in the past.
“U.S. Soccer has a league and they put a lot of their resources both financially and time-wise into that league. So their scouts go to that league; they pick their teams out of that league,” he said.