SC Soccer Forums SCSoccer.com Forums Club Soccer & ODP State Cup Final Fours

Here is the break down of each club who has representatives in next weekends State Final Four.

Boys Girls Total

CESA 6 7 13
Bridge 3 2 5
CUFC 3 3 6
Mount Pleasant 1 2 3
DSC 1 0 1
Lexington 1 0 1
Clemson 1 0 1
Carolina FC 0 1 1
NASC 0 1 1


Looks to like when it really came down to crunch time the "Big 3" clubs came thru. There has been much chatter on this website about winning % and how Bridge and CUFC don't fare to well. I think these results show a different story. If winning % of clubs was a true indicator of how good a club is i would expect to see more represenatives from Lexington and DSC for example.

>>[gamecock44] Looks to like when it really came down to crunch time the "Big 3" clubs came thru.<<

First, congratulations to all of the teams that made it through the opening round.

Second, it would appear that there is a strong correlation between the size of a club as measured by the number of select teams and its success over lower seeded and smaller clubs. Not much of a surprise there.

Third, it would appear that there were very few upsets in terms of seeding. Off the top of my head, there were two such upsets -- both "B" teams of a very large club.

>>There has been much chatter on this website about winning % and how Bridge and CUFC don't fare to well.<

Sigh. There has been a lot of "chatter" about how CUFC did poorly in SC Challenge League play. Bridge did quite well.

>>I think these results show a different story.<<

Do you? If so, that's perhaps because of confusion as to what the "story" actually is.

No one that I've read on this message board has said that the best teams from CUFC aren't on average better than the best teams from Lexington and CRSA. CUFC was and is good for the top 15-20 players in each age bracket in that it offered superior services to those players.

The question was why was it that CUFC had such dismal results in Challenge League play, i.e., why is it that so many of CUFC's "challenge" teams did so poorly. These teams overwhelmed the more positive results of the non-RIIIPL-East playing "elite" teams from CUFC and resulted in quite poor performance overall.

To put this another way...if the only goal of CUFC was to create a club that fielded "A" teams that were better than existed in Columbia previously, then CUFC met that goal quite well. More on that in a moment.

>>If winning % of clubs was a true indicator of how good a club is i would expect to see more represenatives from Lexington and DSC for example.<<

If the definition of a "good club" is the ability to field "A" teams that are competitive in South Carolina challenge level soccer, then CUFC is a very good club.

If the definition of a "good club" is the ability to field teams that are competitive in the leagues in which they play, then CUFC has had a disastrous first year. Can the club do better? Of course. But the first step is to recognize what's wrong and fix it.

Or to put it another way, if as a parent I had a kid that was ambitious and talented and made a CUFC "A" team and I didn't want to drive very far then I think I'd be very happy with CUFC. If as a parent I had a kid that made a CUFC "B" team then I don't think I'd be very happy with CUFC.

To put this yet another way...do you believe that the board and operational management at CESA sit around and worry about whether their "Premier" teams as a whole did better than CASC, Foothills, or even a very good mid-sized club like CFC? I don't think so. I think that they sit around and worry about how to make sure that they are offering a better "B" and "C" team experience than CASC, Foothills, etc. I'm pretty darned sure that was the belief system from day #1 at CESA.

I can't speak to the motives of others in why they raise these issues. My motives are pretty clear-cut. I want CUFC to succeed because at this point they represent the only major short-term change in COlumbia-area soccer for quite a while. But I'm concerned that they are enacting a short-term strategy on how to succeed by trying to "spin" things to their advantage (i.e., having higher level teams compete for lower-level state cup results, etc.) rather than looking at whatever root-level issues there might be in terms of first-year lessons.

Last year at this time I got on this message board and talked about how proud I was that one very large club had several of their "B" teams make it past the first round. It feels like you're trying to sell me on how proud one very large club should be on having their "A" teams make it past the first round. I think our expectations are just a bit different.

I guess you can also argue that CESA entered 5 teams into the final 4 that were not playing R3PL, whereas CUFC only managed 2 (both boys teams and both responsible for the majority of their Elite team wins).
And you can also argue that many quaterfinal games were tight and could have, should have, etc...Or the fact that players from the older challenge team that did not qualify were moved to the younger challenge team that did qualify to try to gain an advantage.

At the end of the day, the record for the regular season stands as written. CUFC only won 31% of their games in the challenge level.

This playof season begins anew and every game is a must.

Good luck to all who made it this far. They are disserving of the honor.

futbol,

"Or the fact that players from the older challenge team that did not qualify were moved to the younger challenge team that did qualify to try to gain an advantage."

Certainly a luxury that larger clubs have over smaller clubs, but it is what it is.....legal as long as player movement is done before State Cup rosters are frozen.

Hurst
Never said it was illegal or that anyone did anything illegal... As a matter of fact I know it was done above board.

Now imagine Johnny working his tail off all season to get the team to the playoffs and then not play because they drop someone down. Why wasn't the other player selected to begin with?

I have not had to experienced this, I do not know as a parent how I would react to this issue.

Chico

If your whole A team B team issue is to satnd then surely Bridge have had a below par year being that they have less final four teams the CUFC. Isn't it Bridge that are bringing together all the Elite players from the low country? Surely with that mission their numbers would seem like a failure.

Actually, Gamecock, if you look at the information from the club perspective, Bridge has had a better state cup season so far than CUFC. Bridge has actually increased their number of semi-finalists, where CUFC has maintained the status quo, no growth, so far.

Look at your numbers. Bridge is designed to bring together the Elite players, however, not all clubs/players are involved. MPSC must still have some players, since they have 3 teams still playing.

>>[gamecock44] If your whole A team B team issue is to satnd<<

Do you really not understand something as basic as this or are you simply trying to debate? If a club fields a team, and that team enters a league, then you judge the team and to some extent the club ["extent" in this case is the combined aggregate of the teams of the club] by how they did in league play. Thus, you judge an "elite" team by how it did in RIIIPL-East, a "challenge" team by how it did in Challenge League, etc.

Now...there are a lot of caveats here. Let's say a team starts out doing poorly and does much better as the year goes on. To me, that's an example of learning and doing better. Likewise, let's say a team does poorly in league play but wins their championship. What you hope is that this is evidence of the team getting better and not just getting lucky.

Let's put it another way. The New England Patriots would in my opinion win any football state high school championship. But that really wouldn't impress me -- because I judge the Patriots against the league in which they compete.

>>then surely Bridge have had a below par year being that they have less final four teams the CUFC.<<

It depends on how you judge Bridge. In its first year, Bridge fielded teams that competed well in the challenge league and Bridge broke CESA's lock on state challenge titles. At the same time, if you judge Bridge based on "completeness", i.e., the number of competitive teams it offers across all age groups, then it did less well -- particularly on the girls side. All of this was discussed at great length last year in Bridge's first year.

But Bridge exists to attempt to field elite teams at all age groups from its alliance members. They have not yet succeeded in doing that; thus, the low grade on completeness.

>>Isn't it Bridge that are bringing together all the Elite players from the low country?<<

Every time I've asked, I'm told that Bridge is trying to field regionally and nationally competitive teams regardless of where they players live. I know that's what CESA is trying to do. It's only CUFC that has the "one community" focus. I say this so that we don't get confused -- it's not that what CUFC is trying to do is wrong, it's just that it's just that the idea of monopolizing the area and shutting other clubs out of "their territory", while central to CUFC, isn't central to the idea of Bridge or CESA. For proof, go take a look at the club's description of itself.

>>Surely with that mission their numbers would seem like a failure<<

Motivation is a funny thing, huh? You started this thread accusing others of bashing Bridge and CUFC when in fact no one but you has bashed Bridge and your motivation is to praise CUFC. In any case...

Bridge is absolutely a club that gets low marks on completeness. But if my child plays for a team at Bridge, then from the numbers I believe that my child will play on a competitive team in the league in which they play.

CESA is a club that gets average to below average marks on regional competitiveness. Yes, they had a team that won RIIIPL-East and had better than average South Carolina numbers -- but overall they were slightly below average compared to the average RIIIPL-East team.

CUFC is a club that had a poor first year in terms of being competitive in RIIIPL-East and Challenge League. Does that mean that CUFC can't and won't come through and win as many state championships as Bridge did in its first year of existence? I don't know.

Here's the question I ask of any organization: what are your goals and how did you do in achieving those goals? This is where the term "expectations" comes into play. Again...if the goal of CUFC is to field better "A" teams than other Columbia area clubs, then that goal has been met. If the goal of CUFC is to win as many state championships in its first year as Bridge [or CESA, or whatever], then we have another week to determine if that goal has been met.

The only thing I'm saying that seems to rankle you is that if CUFC had a goal of being competitive with the teams playing in the challenge league, then on aggregate at the club level the club was less successful whether compared on an absolute basis or compared with Bridge or CESA in their first year.

Of course, that lack of success might lay the foundation for learning and increasing the quality of services -- but only if it's recognized for what it is.

After reading the CUFC web site this morning, and re-reading "gamecock44", I thought just the smallest amount of mathematics was in order regarding results and completeness.

The probability that a club will have some number of teams competing in the challenge league make it to the final four is a simple function of the number of teams playing challenge for the club, the total number of teams playing challenge, the 32 final-four slots available, and how many teams actually made it to the final four. This can be expressed as a variance, with positive being better and negative being worse. Here are the numbers [excluding seeding, intra-club competition, and the like] for the clubs making it through to the final 4:

CESA 30%
CUFC -40%
Bridge 9%
LCSC -205%
MPSC 24%
DSC -52%
CASC 24%
CFC -52%
NASC 62%

In other words, Bridge had a positive 9% variance (9% more teams made it to the finals that you'd predict given the number participating in challenge/premier), DSC had a -52% variance, and so on.

Regarding completeness (strongly, strongly correlated to club size), this is an even simpler function of the number of teams competing in premier/challenge and is given by

CESA 24
CUFC 22
Bridge 12
LCSC 8
MPSC 6
DSC 4
CASC 2
CFC 4
NASC 1

Bottom line: Bridge did better than would be expected for the number of teams it had competing in challenge/premier league; Bridge had just over half the number competing that CUFC had. This is the reason for my qualitative judgment that Bridge did well based on expectations. If CUFC is to compare its winning against Bridge, then it must assume an average team effectivity of about half that of Bridge.

Any questions?

First time I have seen 'effectivity' used in a sentence. Can I use that word to say that me and my Red Neck buddies sho gits a lot of 'effectivity' when we drink our 'shine?