So for me, the question now is: What we should do to start fixing the problems? By problems I mean the things that are preventing this country, which has such a massive base of players to develop, from producing on a regular basis more “special” players as we defined previously.

One thing is very clear to me; the status quo is not working and desperately needs to be changed. We have been doing the same thing for the past three decades and that simply must not be tolerated anymore because it does not work. We must change our way of thinking.

There are many areas that I would address for the betterment of player development. We must understand that our young players are not the issue, our country’s best U-11 to U-14 players are on par with the rest of the world. This is not the problem. The gap begins at the age of 15 and grows wider and wider with each passing year and for me, that is where I would begin to implement changes. It is at the age of 15 that our elite players begin to play high school soccer, thus basically in many parts of the country taking three and half months off of playing quality soccer.

In addition, the number of serious, competitive daily training sessions these players are participating in are zero during the high school season. While our 15 – 18 elite players are basically taking a three month holiday from competitive daily soccer, the rest of the world is going in the complete opposite direction. They are training five days a week, many times with one or two double sessions thrown in along with “positional specialty training” added for all their players.

Their weekend games remain very competitive as they continue to work hard and do whatever is necessary in order to reach their goal and dream of making the first team.

Am I the only one who thinks that high school soccer is one of the biggest negatives for our elite players whose goals are to play for our National team and play professional soccer either domestically or internationally? How in the world do our 17 and 18 year old players benefit from training and playing games against 14, 15 and 16 year olds for three and a half months? How are these players motivated and pushed to perform to their maximum potential? How does this environment improve their speed of play and quality of decision-making when they are playing with young boys that provide no real challenges technically, tactically or physically? Do you know anywhere else in the world where their best players play down in age and down in competition for over 25% of the year! And we wonder why the gap begins to get wider and wider…are you serious?

First solution for me for all our truly elite players to get on the road to becoming “special” is quality alternatives to playing high school soccer…it is not an option, it is a must.