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Message: [QUOTE="Forza Azzurri, post: 2968268, member: 1452"] Ok...thanks for your perspective...and your experience with your son. You lived it with your son. A couple differences. My daughter played extremely high level soccer in 5th and 6th grade - think a very high level club team that was nationally ranked and travelled to tournaments up and down the east coast. BTW, if you had told me on the day my daughter was born that I would be driving 10 hours to watch my 10 year old daughter play a soccer game, I would have told you that you were a stark, raving lunatic... Yet, there I ended up driving 10 hours to watch her play lacrosse in Richmond, Virginia, soccer at Jefferson Cup and, worst of all, driving 14 hours to watch my son play in a baseball tournament in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina at the tender age of 13... Going into 7th grade, the club soccer coach told her that she had to choose between soccer and her other sports (she also played basketball and lacrosse). She chose her other sports and left the high level team to drop down to a much lower club team that would allow her to continue to play both hoops and lax. The problem was that our high school girl's soccer team is consistently nationally ranked and churns out All-Americans and All-State players like IMG. The coach runs the team like a college team and not a high school team. When my daughter was going into high school, the team had won the state championship either 3 or 4 years in a row. Freshman year, she gets to tryouts and she ran the two miles in 14-something. Coach doesn't even look at her as she crosses the finish line. She just says, "Go play with the freshmen." She could not have cared less about her soccer skills. All that mattered was fitness since the team played a 4-3-3 and pressed high up the field - for all 80 minutes every game. The outside backs (my daughter played left back) had to be able to go endline to endline since they were constantly expected to make overlapping runs down the flanks to allow the three center mids to stay central and provide width and deliver crosses and then sprint back after a turnover. That requires an incredible amount of stamina. Like Nolan Richardson's 94 feet of hell - except a soccer field is 120 yards long...360 feet of hell... My daughter was easily skilled enough to play varsity as a freshman, even on that good a team, but her fitness prevented her from even having a chance. To give you a basis for comparison. Phillymoose's kid just signed to play for SU. His kid and my kid both played against some of the same teams in various tournaments back when they were U-11 and U-12. Therefore, she was hell-bent on making the time because she knew she was skilled enough to make varsity as a soph. Many high school coaches do throw out a lot of crappola about fitness but our high school girls varsity soccer coach was not one of them. She knew how good my daughter was coming into tryouts. She didn't care. Don't make the time? Go play with the freshmen. Ouch. Tough life lesson for a 14 year old that life isn't always fair. And tryouts were in mid-August and we started in late June so that is the equivalent to a baseball player starting in early jan, about six weeks before tryouts.. [/QUOTE]

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