Soccer: American system diminishes pro prospects

With the Summer Olympics quickly approaching, the United States will have the opportunity to put… With the Summer Olympics quickly approaching, the United States will have the opportunity to put the development of its soccer players on display for a worldwide audience.

At least, that was the plan.

The under-23 men’s national team lost to El Salvador two weeks ago, erasing any possibility of its qualifying for the Games in London. However, the women’s national team qualified last month by finishing first in The Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football.

Looking at these two results, what role does college soccer play in developing our country’s players on both the men’s and the women’s side?

The way college soccer operates has received criticism from many for its condensed season, style of play and overall business model, all of which critics say stunt America’s growth as a soccer power. But Pitt men’s soccer head coach Joe Luxbacher said that much of that opposition has roots in misunderstanding of the mission of collegiate sports.

“[The] system is designed to get kids participating and teach them soccer and maybe get them a good education and enjoy it,” Luxbacher said.

Collegiate soccer is the most competitive level about 99 percent of players will reach, Luxbacher said. One percent or fewer of athletes might go on to play at the professional level.

“College soccer, on the pyramid, is the pinnacle,” Luxbacher said.

That said, the head coach acknowledges that certain rules, such as a 25-player roster and close to unlimited substitutions, give the game a different feel from the professional game.

In professional soccer, teams are limited to three substitutions a game and, once a player leaves the game, he cannot reenter, while at the college level a player just can’t reenter in the same half. Also in pro soccer, teams can only dress 18 players for a game. In college soccer, overtime is sudden death; in the pros, overtime consists of two 15-minute periods.

“The pace of the game gets a bit hectic at times. In the pros, you get into a rhythm. You don’t learn as much of that in the college game at most schools,” Luxbacher said. It’s not as pretty a game at most schools. The high level of Division I schools can play [attractively] with that [high] level of play. If you try and play that way one level down, it’s not going to work.

This structure in America differs from how the rest of the world goes about developing players.

In professional soccer powerhouse countries like Spain, Italy and Germany, professional clubs have youth academies that they can recruit or sign players to at a young age. In these academies, development is the main purpose. Wins and losses are de-emphasized. The separation of sport and school in other countries means that people aren’t looking at high-level youth sports as the golden ticket to a college education, but rather as building blocks for a professional career.

Not only that, but pickup soccer is much more common in other places than in the United States. Luxbacher talked about how pickup teaches players how to play creatively and improvise. The play of Americans, according to Luxbacher, becomes vanilla and lacks imagination because most don’t play in these environments.

“The goals are different,” Luxbacher added.

According to usyouthsoccer.org, the United States isn’t looking at the registered athletes playing youth soccer and trying to determine who is destined for glory.

In Europe, adolescents have to choose between going to college and pursuing a professional career. Luxbacher doesn’t agree with such an approach, but as he points out, the aims of each setup are different.

J.R. Eskilson, a staff reporter and editor for topdrawersoccer.com, expressed similar thoughts about the level and style of play in college, citing a number of Division I programs that “will just kick the ball and chase the ball.”

This “kickball” style of play has kept college soccer from progressing at certain schools.

Pro soccer focuses more on technical ability, while college soccer generally relies more on the sheer athletic ability of players and, while wins and losses are obviously still important at the pro level, there is a greater level of skill across the board that allows teams to possess the ball and improvise in ways that you often don’t see at the college level.

Some college teams, such as the University of Akron’s, have a style of play that differs from this traditional college style.

“For the teams that want to play long ball and kick the ball, I don’t think much has changed from the last decade or two from where we used to be at a college soccer level,” Eskilson said.

Eskilson went on to add that it will be interesting to see how, on the men’s side, the importance of college soccer as a means of developing players diminishes in the coming years.

“The way U.S. soccer’s structure is going, college soccer’s significance is decreasing … The point that you’re not going to see the top top players in college is true,” Eskilson said. “The [national team’s] door’s not completely closed, but there’s not much room to squeeze through anymore.”

Eleven of the 20 players on the men’s Olympic qualifying roster played college soccer, but just three of those did so for more than two years.

Part of the reason Eskilson foresees the pro game moving away from the college ranks as a feeding ground is because Major League Soccer teams have begun to increase their role in communities through youth academies.

The shift is by no means complete. As it stands now, college soccer still provides many of the MLS’s players — all 38 of the players selected in the 2012 SuperDraft came from Division I colleges.

But according to Eskilson, the top players have started choosing professional contracts over a college education. Luxbacher himself said that a couple of players he recruited in the past year chose to pursue careers in Europe instead of playing in college.

“For developing top players, the European system is better,” Luxbacher said. “They’re trying from the get-go to prepare players [in order] to get that select group that’s going to be their national team.”

Caleb Porter coached the men’s team during its unsuccessful Olympic qualifying campaign this past March. He is the head coach of Akron’s men’s soccer team, which he has developed into a national powerhouse, winning the 2010 national championship and finishing as the national runner-up in 2009. He has sent 14 players on to the MLS. His hiring by U.S. Soccer to lead the Olympic campaign sends a definite message, according to Eskilson.

“Basically what they’re saying is, ‘Look, this is the way we want teams to play … We’re encouraged by this,’” Eskilson said. “You can read the writing on the wall now.”

Prior to his appointment as U-23 head coach, Porter served as an assistant coach on the U-18 national team for the last three years.

Luxbacher, who has coached at Pitt for 28 years, stressed that he doesn’t see his job first and foremost as developing professionals.

“It’s not like [Pitt women’s soccer head coach] Greg Miller or I make a professional player,” Luxbacher said. “You can’t make a professional. You can guide him there if he has the tools.”

With the recent folding of Women’s Professional Soccer, the top level for women aspiring to turn professional, the college game is now, arguably, that much more important.

College has been a necessity for the top American women’s players. The instability of a professional league in the United States has made the act of bypassing college incredibly rare.

Each of the players on the women’s national team played college soccer and used all four years of their eligibility.

“There continues to be, year after year, more and more talented kids coming up through the youth ranks,” Miller said. “Once they get to college game, it is imperative for the development of our national team and to remain a world power that we continue to develop them in the college game.”

On the men’s side, it is a detriment because the best players can just bypass that level if they want, which leaves college soccer, many times, with a lower quality player. Even those players that do go to college can choose to go pro after a couple years and still have structure (in lower-level pro leagues) that allows them to continue to develop.

With the women, the best college players are the best players, period. Since there isn’t a stable pro option for women, college coaches have more developmental responsibilities. If women’s college coaches don’t put development as one of their main goals, our women’s national team won’t be as successful as it has been. The men’s game doesn’t have that much pressure on it because players, if they want, have ways in which to further their game at a professional level. Consequently, many college programs just focus on wins and losses at whatever the cost aesthetically.

On both the men’s and the women’s sides, the scheduling layout of collegiate soccer is seen as negatively affecting the development of players. The season is condensed into two to three months’ worth of games, which makes it hard to focus on development when you are metaphorically sprinting from day one.

There is a noticeable gap in talent between the top tier and the rest of women’s collegiate soccer. This gap forces teams to adjust how they play to a greater extent than usual.

“If you look at the women’s game, there’s a discrepancy between the athletes. Certain coaches compensate for that by packing the box or putting more people behind the ball,” Eskilson said.

Miller, hired just two months ago, acknowledges that his team will have to bridge the gap in the fall by being more fit and disciplined, as even the successful teams he helped coach at Ohio State had to do.

With development not the main goal at the college level, at least on the men’s side, new questions arise. Whose job is it to correct the developmental inefficiencies that have plagued our country’s youth system, and why haven’t they yet?