>>[gamecock44] After being away for a while it seems nothing has changed. Chico has way to much time on his hands and is developing stats that mean nothing.
Whenever the leagues in Italy England or anywhere else start using winning% as a marker for how good a team is or even a club then is charts will be meaningful. Until then remember youth soccer is about development.<<
This is actually the type of thing I was thinking about when I created this thread. I was talking to some people a few weeks ago and they talked about winning, losing, and development -- but they did it as a way to convince themselves that as long as you used the term "development" you could ignore everything else.
Unfortunately [actually, fortunately], the world is a much richer place than that. Certainly, there are cases in which development has a higher priority than winning -- just as there are cases in which winning has a higher priority than development.
However, it's got to be -- well, stupid -- of people to try to use the term "development" to avoid holding accountable the club offering their children services.
Intellectual honesty is a tough thing. It's okay to say "I don't care about a club's winning and losing record, I just want my kid to be with his friends" -- that's an extremely defensible position. It's okay to say "I care more about coach-to-player ratio than I do about the quality of the other players with whom my child trains" -- while I may or may not agree, it's a defensible position.
But to attempt to deny reality by trying to justify poor performance and results by using a buzzword -- well, it's not just stupid, it's sad. Because in the end, while it may take a long time, reality eventually always wins in the end.
