>>[futbol(soccer)] I "HEAR" that many parents on the challenge level teams are not happy with the premier level placed on a pedestal, when the "B" team is just as capable.<<You're using figurative terms like "placed on a pedestal"; in order to answer you at all I have to understate literally what that means. Concretely, ignoring the Premier teams altogether, CESA has more of their Challenge teams playing in the semifinals than any other club has of any teams in South Carolina.
>>A monopoly is good if your standing within the group, a monopoly is bad if you are outside the group. Being outside I see it differently.<<CESA isn't a monopoly...even in the GSA (Greenville, Spartanburg, Anderson) metropolitan area. I believe that Greenville area soccer offers much more choice than Columbia area soccer because different clubs exist that specifically differentiate themselves. Foothills Premier, for example, has since CESA was created cast themselves in the mold almost as the "anti-CESA". For example, where CESA focuses on a complete reassessment of the players on a team each year at tryouts, Foothills Premier literature leads you to believe that they focus more on team consistency. Other clubs in the area include USA, Carolina FC (formerly Spartanburg), Clemson (which had a select team based in Greenville), etc.
Certainly CESA offering a youth soccer program in the Columbia metropolitan area doesn't constitute a monopoly. CRSA, CSC, LCSC, and NECSA continue to exist. In fact, CESA could merge with a Columbia club and it still wouldn't result in anything close to a monopoly with respect to providing services to youth soccer players.
>>Superior services locally remains to be seen,<<Absolutely true; when there is a new service/product on the market it's impossible to judge the quality before it's actually sold and often you can't judge it unless you buy it. You have to make decisions based on what we used to call "incomplete experience". I tried to indicate my subjectivity when I used variations of the term "Why I think" in the post -- it's based on my kid's experience only.
>>not practicing with your squad is, in my opinion a problem (I agree with Bdad11).<<I don't know of any players at this time that don't practice with their team at least once a week. The majority of non-local players that I know of practice with their teams twice a week. And some practice with their teams three times a week.
However, the following is something from another post I wrote a few days ago which gets to the root of this:
quote:
Here's what confuses me the most about those that doubt the "some training remotely" concept -- you've seen it in action for years -- those I know specifically about are the older GFC teams and last year's CESA's teams. It's not like you have to accept anything on faith; the proof is already there.
What I strongly suspect is that there are a lot of people who don't like the "sometimes training remotely" paradigm. I completely understand that. As a parent only training locally is a much simpler concept with which to deal. But it seems strange to confuse what you don't like versus what has been shown to be effective.
>>practice fields? where do they do it today? How will they do it in the future? <<
For specific questions, please use the contact information in the press release. I'm not blowing you off -- I'm letting you know that I don't have the details of the new program and if anyone does, it's the folks who operationally run CESA.
To summarize all of this; other than posting the press release, all I've done here is answered your question about what I personally think is the rationale for this being "good." Do I have any biases? Of course, I volunteer at CESA and I have a kid that not only plays there but gets a level of training she wanted that we could not find in Columbia [which circularly comes back to why I volunteer there.]
