Beezer: I think that your overall point is that South Carolina's "elite" club [I love your use of "scare" quotes!] isn't sufficiently regionally or nationally competitive to win many/any regional finalists positions. No offense -- but you could have looked at RIIIPL-East results and discovered this quite a few number of months ago -- we don't tend to place in the top two in RIIIPL-East. Or you could look at the history of regional champions from SC -- the list is two deep -- and deduced this.
It might be interesting to tackle a more interesting question -- what is the current course, speed, and acceleration of SC soccer with respect to the rest of the region. Are we moving toward achieving more regional finalists and champions faster than the other states or are we falling further and further behind?
What I saw yesterday before I left Little Rock was a SC team that played the #1 ranked nationally ranked team [NTX - Dallas Texans] and lost 1-0 in a heartbreaker that many thought was actually a 1-1 game [literally, the video is being reviewed concerning whether a ball crossed a line.] The Dallas players/parents were estatic and quite poor sports about it all -- I'm pretty sure that they didn't expect an SC team to be quite that competitive.
I read your post and on one hand I'm actually kind of pleased that people's expectations are starting to rise to the point where getting out of bracket with #2 ranked Oklahoma [but not CASL] is considered "not a big deal." I think this is the kind of expectations we should have regarding SC soccer and our "elite" clubs [hey...I used the quotes as well!].
On the other hand, I read your post and wonder what your agenda must be to disregard the improvement that SC appears to be making [ask the NASA/Silverback parents who didn't get out of bracket in another age group against SC, for example].
So, taking your "argument" at face value -- and I agree with your premise that SC wasn't good enough in June to be in the national pool and has never been with only a few incredibly rare exceptions -- what is your prescription for improving the performance of SC in future "June's"?
