Another of those posts that I’ve been meaning to do for some time but just haven’t gotten around to it….and the saga, as it goes, only came to an end today.
DA, as I’ve mentioned here before, is a new program by the governing body for soccer here in Michigan. Before this program, the youngest age that kids could compete during the regular season at a state-wide level was U13…with this, it is now U11 and U12 for the next season. The state will pick the 16 teams that will compete in each division. How will they do that you ask?
“When reviewing club applications, the DA Advisory Panel will be looking at the club’s player development programs and coaching education initiatives, as well as prior DA history, prior league play history, team composition (ODP players), prior tournament history, and adherence to submission/payment deadlines.”
You would think this would be a straight-forward process….how hard could it be to pick the 16 best teams in age group in the state and move forward? Well….
The first time ( T ) mentions DA to our team is in the ill-fated soccer drama meeting in early March…..it struck me as wrong then how quickly the president of the club went from talking about the disaster of winter session programming to the promise of being in DA next year. Thought it was odd at the time how the guy talked about it, that ( T ) would be the only team in mid-Michigan in DA and that he was on the DA Advisory Panel and so that was the way it was going to be. But didn’t think too much of it then…..still irked about the winter sessions shenanigans and, hey, DA was months away.
So May comes around and the DA teams are announced. It goes about as expected (as discussed in the ‘switch’ post), ( T ) gets teams in all 4 divisions. We still hadn’t made up our mind at that point on what we were doing, but, ( C ) did not get in at Matthew’s age group.
If you go back and read that italicized quote above, you can see that there is a ton of wiggle room for the DA board to be as subjective as they want during this process….and take teams that may not deserve to be there and exclude teams that might deserve it.
We had come to the decision (I had come to the decision…let me be clear, I drove this part of the choice for next year….but I think Suzanne has come to agree with me) that while what DA is what we think Matthew needs the idea of the current ( T ) team playing in DA is not what Matthew needs. The team has struggled, we ended up finishing sixth in the 2nd division in our league (there are four main leagues in the state). ( T ); in the talk in March, and the parent meeting in May, was ‘selling’ the pitch that with a new coach and a focus on training everything would be fine….they would back-load the schedule to give the new coach a chance to catch up. After thinking about that (and I don’t believe it; I expect improvement but the whole premise is that the other teams aren’t improving at the same time) and thinking about what is going to happen when the ( T ) team, with or without Matthew, plays those DA teams, well, I’d say that was 50% of the decision to switch. ( T ), over the last three years with Matthew, has only ever beaten one of those DA teams and more often that not, games against those teams have been crushing defeats. I’m just not sure how ( T ) can think that is going to work next year as a positive developmentally for that team. There has been a lot of ( T ) talk about new kids, bringing kids down from other teams…..but in the end, there was only one new kid added to the ( T ) team as it heads into their DA season next year.
( C )’s team in this age group had a much stronger record against the DA teams; they had beaten 6 of them and even when playing the best of the teams could compete, only lose by one or two goals instead of being down by four goals in five minutes in the one example I’m thinking of. If you can compete with these teams you can utilize what you hopefully have learned at practice and it is a good experience.
So ( C ) is rightly pissed that they didn’t get in at this age group (many of our friends on the ( T ) don’t understand it either…they seem to have the better team, not club, qualifications); they have heard rumors that the ( T ) president said in March that ( T ) would be in and ( C ) would not….which to them (and in hindsight, to a lot of people) seems like the whole process was biased to begin with. ( C ) chooses the-not-often utilized option of appealing the decision.
Right after the decision, right after the last tournament where we lost to ( C ), I set up a lunch with the ( C ) coach to answer a few unanswered questions I had as we/I tried to figure out what to do…..one of the topics was the DA appeal. They didn’t expect much, but, were doing it, and their first meeting with the state seemed pretty positive…the staff members who sat down with them were also befuddled that they didn’t get in, how they could have the level of success they have had against some of the teams selected for DA and not be in?
It’s a good lunch, I learn what ( C ) is going to do if they are not in DA…and that is about it. I send the coach an email late that afternoon, politely thanking him for having lunch with me. The last thing I say is to let me know how the DA appeal goes. Oh, if I could take back one thing over the last 3 months, it would be that email and that last sentence…..
A day later I’m at the last lacrosse game of the season and I get a call from a number I don’t recognize….answer it and it is the president of ( C )! Asks me what I know about the appeal (and it takes a moment to break through that I know nothing more than what his coach told me…and apparently relayed to him) and then proceeds to tell me more about the appeal, that it has turned into this big deal with the president of the state association and well, it is much too mundane to go in to here. The more relevant part is that he asks me if I had heard about ( T ) saying in March that ( T ) would be the only club in the region in DA…and I reply, yeah, I was there.
So he asks me if I would send him an email stating that……
I tell him I’ll think about it, we hang up, and that’s that…..
Thinking about was quite an exercise. I know one parent who outright told me he wouldn’t do something like that because it would damage any chance of his son playing with ( T ) in the future. I’m not even sure ( T ) did anything wrong here….that’s not for me to decide. But simply passing along a statement of fact, well, that’s all that it is. It could have some very negative ramifications. In the end, I fall back on a few things…1) I’m not judge or jury here, I’m just providing a fact and 2) the ethics part of my Engineer license kind of says I have to do the right thing here.
I send the email. Ask one other parent who was at the meeting to help me remember what was said; his recollection is the same as mine.
I ask to be cc’d if he does anything with the email.
( C )’s DA appeal goes on….they are told at one point they are 100% in and there has been a mistake made. They are told at one point that they were denied because 20 pages of their application was missing. They are told their appeal has been denied but that the whole thing will be reconsidered after tryouts. And as of today, they are told that at least in Matthew’s age group, they are officially out (they did get an additional team, the boys team that is a year younger, in….another team withdrew). So that part of the saga is officially over….
( C )’s owner used my email to bolster their appeal….and did sent it along to most of the executive board. Not a big fan of this, but, can’t say I didn’t expect it. Wouldn’t have done it if I wasn’t willing to stand behind it (and I’ll again say here that unlike the ( C ) owner who looks at the facts as an admission of guilt I don’t know that….my email is simply the facts as I know it). I understand that there is a hearing in a week to straighten that part of it out.
Summary:
1) Especially playing in the tournament’s the last few weeks Suzanne I think has a better understanding of what really was the deciding part in our switch….( T ) had to add players to play 11 v 11 that have no business playing at that level….and we think next year is going to be ugly ugly ugly.
2) Soccer, like everything else, has it’s ugly politics. If you wallow in the mud with pigs, they like it and you get dirty.
3) Matthew’s new team, because of the DA decision, now can’t play at the ‘highest level’, for two years (he is U12, the only path to the highest level at U13 is reserved for DA teams). The top 8 teams in DA move up to that level at U13 (you can read in #1 above what I think ( T )’s chances of making that step is). So, each team will most likely be in the same place in two years….but I think the developmental path that ( C ) offers is better than what we left…
4) It will be awkward/ugly when I see the ( T ) president again. Given that Kevin and Cpher are in the same grade as his kids, and Matthew plays, well, soccer, this will happen at some point.
5) I would do the same thing again. With the DA email. And with the decision for Matthew.
Next post (one of these days)….things I wouldn’t do the same way again!
