I am not sure about the "political mess" in the SC ODP selection. I think limited tryouts always make it hard to pick the best. First impressions are everything with the SC ODP selection. If you have a bad first impression then you are in trouble and if you have a good first impression then you can almost do no wrong. But that is life and why it is so important to have a great first impression. I also find that when a player doesn't make the team then it wasn't the player's fault but it has to be a conspiracy against that child by the ODP staff.
But in the region pool it is completely different. Unless you are just dominate then finding the better players during region camp is almost impossible in a few days. They really need an entire summer to find the best players. A lot of the players picked are based on their regional play. And if you get no region play then you don't stand a chance, sorry. If you are on a bad team in region play then it could be worse for you, again unless you just dominate on the team. Region players are selected by word of mouth between the coaches and a lot of the time those coaches saw those players during region play, so in a week they will focus in on those players to concentrate their efforts. I do not blame them, because they have hundreds of girls to scout and only a few days to figure it out. And to be honest we don't help our cause when we don't have our absolute best players tryout for ODP. So if the team doesn't have SCs best at every position then why should a region coach waste their valuable time scouting our teams. In the 4 years that my daughter played ODP, we where able to field a very good SC team, except in goal keeper and outside backs. We could not get a goal keeper to save our lives. And 2 of our 4 backs where not the best in the state or injuries would set in and we would have to pull a great player in position to be a good player in another position because we had limited subs. And do you know why we had limited sub? Because if a parent thought their child was going to be a sub then they pulled the player from program just before the payment deadline. I have no doubt that if we had been able to get a team that had all of our best players for that age group, including subs, then we would have had a few players held over from that team. Instead we had zero every year because the team as a whole struggled against the larger states, but still managed to beat a lot of the smaller states.
