Ryan Thompson

[SimpleCoachTV @SC149249]

A couple days ago I posted this:

https://t.co/K7KvR87enw

America has spent years trying to reverse-engineer the European top five instead of building a soccer culture around what this country actually is. High school and college are not bugs in the system. They are the part Europe cannot copy.

That post got a real conversation going. This is the next piece of it.

Part II of #HighSchoolSoccer is the ugly part. Why that messy Friday night still makes a more complete player — and a more complete fan — than the clean academy path.

There will be a III. Maybe a IV. I tend to keep going when I am stress-testing an idea.... Anyhow, here it is.

High school soccer is ugly.

Sometimes bad fields. Bad weather. A kid at center back who is also trying to pass chemistry. A ref who missed the last three fouls. A packed house on a Friday because the football team is on the road and this is what the school has left.

I am not going to sit here and tell you that is a better technical environment than @MLSNEXT. It usually isn’t. The academy has the coaches, the surfaces, the weekly level, the 10-month calendar. If the only question is “who looks sharper in a closed gym in December,” the academy wins a lot of those nights.

However, that is not the only question the game asks of players.

What high school does, even when it is sloppy, is put a kid in front of problems the academy spends a lot of money trying to remove. Different opponents every week. A team that will park the bus because that is how they stay in the game. A surface that punishes a heavy touch. A schedule that does not care about your load-management plan because there is a midterm on Thursday. You learn to play when the game will not cooperate. That is closer to college soccer than another polished showcase against the same five clubs you have already seen twice.

Most of these boys are not signing Homegrown deals. Most of them are going to walk onto a college roster — #D1 if they are lucky, #D2, #D3, #NAIA if they are honest about the numbers ... and that environment looks a lot more like a high school week than it looks like @MLSNEXT Fest. Travel. Midweek games. Teammates who are not all future pros. A coach who has to win this fall, not just develop the brand. If you spent four years only in the bubble, the first ugly college game is not development.

It is culture shock.

And then there is the part we pretend does not count.

High school soccer still makes you a person in a place. You play with kids you sit next to in class. You lose in front of people who know you when the jersey comes off. You represent a school, a town, a set of teachers who do not care about your homegrown timeline. The academy path is narrow on purpose. Same coaches. Same language. Same kids chasing the same contracts or college scholarship. That can produce a very good soccer player. It can also produce a 17-year-old who has never had to lead anyone who is not also in the program, and who has no identity if the pathway tightens — which it does, for almost everybody.

I am not romanticizing a 2-1 loss on a chewed-up field in November. I am saying that game teaches things a sanitized weekly schedule does not.

None of that is the academy’s job. But that does not mean it does not matter

High school soccer also does something the academy almost never does … it attaches a kid to the game as a culture, not just as a job interview.

When you play for your school, soccer is not sealed off in a training center. It lives next to the football crowd, the band, the kids who only come to the one playoff game, the local paper, the rival down the road you have hated since freshman year. You learn the sport inside a community that will still be there when you are done playing. That is how you get a lifelong fan. Not from another ID camp. From belonging to a place that treated the game as ours.

Academy soccer can produce excellent players and strangely thin citizens of the sport. You grow up around the same pathway kids, the same language, the same events. When the contract or scholarship does not come ... and for most of them it will not ... a lot of them drift. No Friday nights. No old teammates in the stands ten years later. No habit of watching the local side, the college side, the ugly high school final because it used to be their world. High school wires you into the ecosystem: youth, school, college, the town club, the kid coming up behind you. That is a fan and a teammate for life, not just a résumé line that ended at U17.

The forced choice is the part that does not hold up. The Homegrown still treats high school like contamination unless you can get a waiver that, in practice, leans toward private school and financial aid tied to soccer. Public school kid who just wants to play for his school? Pick one. We have been running that logic since the old Development Academy. The new Academy Division allowing high school play and building the calendar around it is the quiet tell: even the people who built the closed system know the closed system is not the only way to develop a player.

I am not asking anyone to pretend high school is the higher level. I am asking why a 16-year-old has to surrender the school, the peers, and the messy games that look like the next stage of his actual life in order to stay on the “right” roster.

Let them do both. The top end will still be the top end. High school gets better players back on the field. The academy kid gets some chaos in his diet. And the American game stops treating the school year like an obstacle instead of part of how we actually raise players in this country.

Ugly soccer is still soccer. And sometimes it is the more complete education.

[Ryan Thompson @RyanThompson54]

@ndBru @MenInBlazers North London and Montana is Red!

[Cernovich @Cernovich]

Climate change was one of those cute make believe fears you get to have when times are too good and you need to find something to make you feel something. Them days are gone.

[Jeremy Wayne Tate @JeremyTate41]

“The fact that we don’t know deep in our bones about the 60 million that were killed in the Soviet Union, “is a testament to the absolute rot of our education system.”

- Dr. Jordan Peterson (Teaching on the Gulag Archipelago)

[MLS Buzz @MLS_Buzz]

Charlie Davies says that due to the equity regulations within US Soccer, the men’s team couldn’t hire someone like Pep Guardiola if they had the chance because they would have to pay the women’s coach a similar amount.

He essentially said that limits their options.

[Five Times August @FiveTimesAugust]

Nobody is afraid of gay people. Have you considered the possibility, though, that the vast majority of America is just exhausted of an obnoxious, self absorbed, entitled, narcissistic, confused and angry rainbow cult religion being shoved down our families throats every single day? And that none of you are actually victims but extremely privileged brats? And that maybe you've been programmed by mainstream media to regurgitate words like "hate" or "afraid" as a knee-jerk response to anyone who's just not putting up with your insane crap perspective on life? Because maybe we have certain values we're trying to teach our kids without rainbow barf interfering every time we leave the house? Like the idea they're actually perfect just as God made them the day they were born, and maybe they don't need to cut up their body and irreversibly hurt themselves to be happy, especially before they're old enough to drive? Or that they have more to offer the world than dressing in drag and dancing for cash tips in front of five year olds? Have you considered the world doesn't actually revolve around you and what your pronouns are? I understand this is a hard concept to grasp because the world, quite literally right now, *is* revolving around the Pride cult in every way possible... from TV and movies, books and children's entertainment, corporate brands and commercials, up to the highest levels of government down to the public elementary school system... but guess what? It's all a show, buddy. It doesn't represent reality. It's an agenda designed to divide and conquer, confuse kids, sexualize them and separate families. It's perverse. And if you're going to stand there and tell me all of this is in the name of progress or that my perspective is "outdated" as your friends in the movement enjoy doing, you tell me what we're progressing to then. Once drag queen story hours and kink parades are truly accepted by society as "kid friendly" and appropriate "family entertainment" where do you "progress" from there? When are those things going to be looked back on as "outdated" and what comes next? 🤔I think you know. We all know. And that's why so many are putting their foot down here. It goes no further.

[Daniel Buck, “Youngest Old Man in Ed Reform” @MrDanielBuck]

Can we not allow childless Gen Z / millennial lefties to determine education policy and practice for the nation’s children?

[American Experiment @MNThinkTank]

There are 5,717,184 people in Minnesota.

If our $17 billion surplus was handed back to residents, everyone would get a roughly $3,000 check.

Instead, even with $3 billion (17%) planned for "tax relief," the state is trying to raise its budget by 29%.
https://t.co/m5Bi0thQLf

[Jonathan Haidt @JonHaidt]

6. In our latest post at the After Babel Substack, @ZachMRausch and I lay out the data from all five countries and ask what could have caused this to happen, at the same time, in 5 countries. It ain't the global financial crisis.

https://t.co/510Gt70fdX

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

No it is not our job as grownups to simply believe whatever our children say. In fact our job very often is to do exactly the opposite.

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

Trump supporters are trying to label DeSantis "establishment" but the problem they'll run into is that 1) Trump endorsed every establishment figure, and 2) Trump hired the establishment and put them in his White House, and 3) Trump never drained the swamp or even tried to.

[Rod Dreher @roddreher]

The banality of evil.

[Clay Travis @ClayTravis]

The Atlantic argued separating men’s and women’s sports was necessary and that women’s athletes are just as good as men’s at sports. It may be the dumbest sports article I’ve seen this year. Which is saying something.

[Clay Travis @ClayTravis]

The Atlantic is arguing that men’s and women’s sports shouldn’t be separate. Really. This is where transgender athletics leads, one unisex sports leagues where women’s athletes don’t exist.

[Rod Dreher @roddreher]

#LiveNotByLies https://t.co/Npqzldmvqd

[PragerU @prageru]

Watch:

[Mike Baker @MBCompanyMan]

1st, hats off to whoever in the WH had the massive balls to call this bill the Inflation Reduction Act. 2nd, blowing this amount of smoke up the collective ass of the public… telling them that the cure for high inflation is to throw some fat stacks at it, is DC at its finest.

[Samuel Sey @SlowToWrite]

@MattWalshBlog This is a historical fact.

Most people are completely ignorant about the Arab slave trade.

The Arab slave trade had enslaved millions more Africans than the Atlantic slave trade—including the enslavement of over a million Europeans.

Inconvenient facts for public schools today.

[Vinay Prasad MD MPH @VPrasadMDMPH]

3 years into this and 3 vaccine doses later, we should wear a mask outside?

It's hard to be against evidence, logic, public sentiment and common sense--all at the same time!