Talking with a parent recently has provided some food for thought on the rules for playing time with the US Soccer Federation’s Development Academy.

There are rules I’m thinking about here. One says that the matches will utilize the same no-reentry substitution pattern we see in professional and international matches. I’m all for that rule.

The other requires every player on the squad to start 30 percent of the team’s 30 league matches. The more I think about it, the less I’m in favor of this rule.

On the substitutions, one of the first things you’ll notice on most non-Academy matches is the way coaches substitute en masse. Unlike the rest of the world’s practices, these substitutions are aimed at two things: 1) keeping the freshest team on the field to allow the squad to employ high-pressure tactics and; 2) Keeping players and parents who are paying to play, happy.

The high-pressure part I’m willing to argue with anyone, anywhere, about. When the Academy games started, teams were playing the same old way and then realized you can’t sustain that sort of effort over a 90-minute match. The rest of the world refrains from embracing that kind of tactic for more than a few minutes at a time. This allows players from both sides a little more freedom on the ball and thus they have opportunities to be creative and skillful. So then, technical ability and imagination become at least equal value to physical ability and hard work. I’m not saying there isn’t room for all of these attributes, but for too long our game has favored everything athletic at the expense of skill development. After two years of the Academy we are seeing a marked improvement in this area and the games are most definitely better to watch.

The other reason we have historically allowed unlimited subbing is that youth soccer has been first and foremost a business, and for clubs to keep the parents of 18 or 22 players happy, they had to give them a certain amount of playing time. There are some exceptions to this I know (although in many of those cases players 16-22 on a roster would tend to revolve  over 2-3 years), but mostly the most challenging part of a coach’s duties were to keep the paying customers happy while still being a competitively viable team. As a result, player development would again take a back seat, no matter how good the coach’s intentions.

It’s the same reason the tournament-heavy format of our youth schedule, including 4 to 6 full-length games in a given weekend, was considered acceptable. I once asked a director of a girls youth club if they would consider playing 50-minute matches at tournaments to make it less overwhelming on the physical side, and she responded that full-length matches gave the team the opportunity “to show who we really are.” Watch boys and girls plodding around on a given weekend from matche 3 onward and you’ll know what I’m talking about. There’s a reason all the college coaches leave as the weekend goes on (and I know that the Academy playoffs and national finals have the same problem).

So getting back to the 30 percent rule, ostensibly there’s an idea of protecting the squad players, to make sure that ALL of the players are getting developed. I sympathize with the goal, because I think we do tend to focus too much on winning the next game, and therefore exclude a player whose potential may be greater than his present ability to contribute. This is especially true for the undersized player. But having limited match play to 30 league matches plus a few other outside events (and rightly so), I think it is consistent with the rest of the world’s practices to allow a coach to put his best lineup in each match. What I notice a lot of clubs doing is frontloading their quota, where they will start a 2nd-choice player and then sub him at the earliest-allowed opportunity under the rules.

When the Development Academy league started I advocated an A and a B team, to give almost every squad player in a 30-man squad the chance to play a regular game. I understand that this doubles the cost of administering the league for USSF, but perhaps there is another way.

I’m hearing from both Texas and the Midwest that a sort of side tier league is being contemplated, that would allow an additional team to take part in regular matches alongside the Academy schedule. I’m not sure of all the particulars, but basically the players would still operate under the same training-to-match ratio as the “regular” Academy players even though their matches wouldn’t be in either the official U16 or U18 divisions.

Now, the impetus for these efforts may actually have more to do with keeping people happy than it does getting players a regular game under the Academy training setup. Part of the Academy’s benefit was supposed to be getting us away from single-year age groupings. The U18 age group was supposed to include the best players from two birth years, and the U16s were supposed to do the same. Instead what we’re getting with a lot of clubs is basically old-school U18s playing Academy U18, and old-school U17s playing U16, which USSF has allowed.

More development-minded clubs have had true U16s playing U16 at a distinct physical disadvantage, but more importantly, the practice of using U17s at U16 serves to perpetuate the old system, and hold back some of our top players because of club politics and business, namely keeping parents of squad players happy at the expense of playing time for more talented younger players.

If you had a B level you could accomplish both. Coaches would still have to muster up the courage to tell a U18 player from a previous team that they are playing with the B side at the expense of a more talented U17 team, but once again, it would move us toward a purer, merit-based team structure while maintaining the developmental benefits of the Academy system. It would be an important step toward clubs and coaches telling the really are. The drawback would be if it just a means having U17 players and teams playing in tournament after tournament and winning State and Regional cups under the old format. That would not be a step forward.

So here’s hoping that these efforts bear some fruit for the sake of including more players in the right kind of setup, and take club development another step-forward toward merit and development-based policies.