>>[coldhardtruth] definitely a lack of players on the girls side does not help their situation [...] I think as a society that we feel girls or women are willing to accept less.<<
>>[thomaspietras] I think you are correctly describing a situation that is a result of numbers (not primarily gender). If this is a correct assessment, then I guess the question is how to get more, better coaches for "low-number" player groups.<<
It seems the conclusion that "coldhardtruth" reached, that we as a society feel girls are willing to accept less, was...well...ignored. And yet, this should raise red flags for anyone reading it that he is hypothesizing a root cause to the "numbers problem." Labeling it as a "numbers problem" is like labeling a cancerous tumor as a "bump problem" -- it indicates the symptom instead of the cause.
When I read this I can see a principal at an elementary school in rural Mississipi in the 1960's saying that there really wasn't a racial problem, there's just a numbers problem.
Clubs have to make a decision regarding whether they want to actively work to increase the penetration of soccer into underserved markets. If a club has fewer female players than the population it serves, then it can ignore that or actively try to change it.
>>[thomaspietras] Clubs have tried paying more money. My experience is that sometimes this works, sometimes it does not. I've seen great "volunteer" coaches (no pay) and lousy, highly paid coaches.<<
It's difficult to argue with anything sometimes working and sometimes not. I've never heard of a club paying girls coaches more than boys coaches. If you couple that with merit pay (you also pay more based on success -- and you can define success any way you want -- winning, girls making ODP who want to, girls making JV teams who want to, etc.) it sounds like a fascinating way of addressing the problem. I'd love to see a club who has a weak girls program reputation try it and see how it worked over time.
There's a simpler answer if you don't want to do something like this. Hire executive leadership who has a superb reputation in the girls game -- or at the very least a burning desire to earn one.
>>[thomaspietras] It helps if the parents are active in the process of finding coaches. Don't sit back and rely only on the DOC to find coaches. Help them identify and recruit good coaches. Teams with supportive (but not insane) parents tend to find good coaches.<<
This sounds like excellent advice for the majority of South Carolina clubs.
I'd hope that parents at the clubs aspiring to be "professional" and "elite" can rely on professionals to do this and do a better job than either a sane or insane parent could do. I hope that the 600K+ people in the Columbia area get a professional club in this merger led by people who lead youth soccer as a job, not a hobby.
