One way to evaluate the initial success of a newly merged club is to understand whether the new club lost, stayed the same, or gained players in terms of its academy and select tryouts. A few years ago, when CESA was created out of GFC and SGU, I did this in response to someone who said that CESA had lost players and was fielding signficantly fewer teams. Doing the analysis, it turns out that they had about the same number of teams but that the teams had more players so it looked like they slighty gained in their number of academy and select players.
Which leads us to the question, how did CUFC do in their tryouts in terms of losing or gaining players? The table below shows what seems to be the teams that CSC and NECSA fielded before the merger and the new CUFC teams arising from tryouts.
It appears that CUFC is fielding about the same number of teams that CSC and NECSA did last year. That is success in and of itself. However, if we dig down one level deeper and look at how many players with issued invitations to join these teams, here's what we find.
The median team is 18 players [the average is close at 17.3]. These are
huge teams. So it appears to me that CUFC gained players over CSC and NECSA last season. So at a high level it appears that CUFC was very successful in drawing players to the club's tryouts. In my opinion [and it's opinion only], that speaks to how hungry the Columbia area was for a club offering what is hoped to be better services.
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Disclaimer: I have no doubt that I made mistakes in compiling all of this. Corrections are welcome.
