Quote: High School soccer greatly interrupts the needed development process for academy players and significantly impacts their ability to maximize their full soccer potential by hindering sustained development.
BS! If you cannot be a "star" at the high school level - if you are clearly an elite player - then you can forget about "player development". I saw Cardinal Newman play this year and didn't see anything wrong with the "development" of Koty or Nestor. Same goes for a lot of others like Burkholder at Wando and Freiburger at Lexington and they are going to D1 soccer programs.
IH8KATZ I think you are missing the intended point here. Academy players are going to look good when playing high school soccer. There is a big difference between looking good on the field and actually developing your skills to the next level. Dribbling through 5-10 people who don't have the skill to stop you doesn't prepare you to beat a premier level player who matches you in both speed and skill. It is easy for anyone to throw out names of good players and claim that high school soccer has not "ruined" them because, "they can play!". What is really hard is to quantify how much better they would be as players if they continued to play in the academy system throughout the year without interruption. In my opinion it is not enough to say that a player has made it because they are going to a D1 school. I think that the right question should be. "how can we help gifted soccer players to achieve their highest potential?"
