Just curious if you ever consider that the girls apply for these teams and attend these events for reasons other than recruiting like maybe to just play against and with good competitors
No one is questioning the legitimacy of these events or why the girls want to play them (for now). It’s a big and exciting accomplishment to get invited and every player should be proud. What’s being questioned is the impartiality and fairness of the selection processes and explaining to our kids. By now it’s apparent that they are all biased. We can debate to what degree, but in the end it’s boiling down to affiliations with 3 main tournament runners: RS, CSE, and TOTB. In the case of UA150, clubs that direct more $ to RS via the NGLL, Mid Atlantic, etc. get more favorable player weighting and slots. For UAAA, it’s the clubs that direct more registrations to CSE’s National Cup events. For AS, it’s clubs that direct more registrations to TOTB events. Our girls’ hearts and our parent $ are caught in the middle of an increasingly dilutive marketshare battle. It especially stinks because the events are now deliberately scheduled to overlap and split the fields. Guess that’s just the dynamics of supply and demand.
You’ve lost the plot. CSE is the Good Ol’ Boys club—it’s more about the relationships directors have with CSE, which allows them to get on the coaching staff to select players. There are always some poor politics and you can sneak one or two players into an event and get away with it.
What you cannot do is take your whole team then not take the various D1 commits, etc., which has happened in the past.
It isn’t about who’s paying more to CSE for the events, it’s how you’ve built the relationship with CSE which gets you on the coaching staff.
UA150 is all RS and again, it’s club connections and they rely on the coaches to be honest when providing the references—some club directors abuse this and put on bad picks because they want to scratch a back or help out the family that has a lot of money and is their big patron. If we had more scrupulous club directors this would be less of a problem.
