Awoke, 5:12a
Listened to Against the Rules podcast, 8a-10a
Our club's first game of the 2024-2025 season was our oldest boys' team's college showcase game in Lancaster, Massachusetts.
The game was played at a sprawling complex, and our pilot season of combining our three oldest age groups into one team to maximize the resources we can provide our pre-23U players got off to a good start with positive play and a 2-1 win over a franchise program that has a New England footprint.
Hosted Rosevelt SC meeting, 1p-3:30p
As mentioned above, this is one of the first times we're combining our 17U, 18U, and 19U players onto a single team, and the rollout for this roster was less than ideal for this year's group.
I knew we had some much-needed conversations as a club about this potential change in age structures ahead of our 2025-2026 roster process, but a 35-player pool for one team snuck up on me this spring and we were scrambling in June after many of those players represented our club in a competition in West Virginia.
The player pool for this team is not 30+ players, but it's still a few players larger than we usually carry on our teams' rosters so this meeting was a good opportunity for the team's coaches, manager, and me to iron out some of the details of how we plan to manage the roster and pilot some templates for future years when our 17U/18U/19U player pool will likely be much larger.
The balancing act is providing as many playing opportunities for as many players as possible, while also ensuring we efficiently maximize our limited resources and continue focusing on developing our youth players as future men's and women's players for our club's 23U teams.
Attended RSC Boys Academy game, 6p-8:45p
After killing a few hours at another local Italian restaurant, I attended our team's second game of the day. We were scheduled for a 6:30p start, but as the last game on the schedule we inherited all the little delays that accrued throughout the day and didn't actually kick off until about 7p.
Game time temperatures were in the low 30s, and the stadium lights abruptly turned off about 30 seconds after the ref blew the final whistle. Both teams played pretty well, each goalkeeper made numerous quality saves on numerous scoring opportunities, and the result was 1-1.
One anecdotal observation: The three cameras that were deployed on the sidelines for the five games I watched (including our club's two games) were each provided by clubs that have strong ties to the communities they serve and clubs with relatively low participation fees.
All the franchise teams (i.e., teams with sprawling geographical footprints and multiple teams per age group) charge at least 3x or 4x more for participation fees, but in my experience they don't prioritize their teams outside the top level for each age group.
Providing a camera on-site for games, so that the raw footage can be recorded and shared with players is just one small example of how community-based clubs with about 300 players can provide more resources for all their players.
Anyway, got home in Maine at about 11p.
Asleep, 11:36p
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