Ouch to College Soccer

NCAA Soccer a dead end for MLS talent, by Paul Gardner.

So we now have the Beckham Rule. MLS has decided that its sport needs livening up, it needs a buzz of superstar excitement, it needs some better players. Each team will be allowed to sign one player outside the league's miserly salary cap restrictions. And David Beckham gets his name on the rule because he is the prime — and no doubt the most expensive — example of a player who could bring in both publicity and soccer skill.

The move is to be praised. MLS is trying to move with the times, it is willing to alter its rigid single-entity structure as circumstances dictate. It is also aware that the current level of play in MLS is no more than adequate. Better, more imaginative, more exciting players are urgently needed.

Which brings us to a highly public secret that bedevils the sport in this country: the role of college soccer. While college sport feeds a regular supply of basketball and football stars into the pros, it does very little for pro soccer.
Quite the opposite in fact. What needs to be said is that college soccer is the biggest obstacle to progress in the area of developing future pro players. Everyone, apart from a few college diehards, knows this to be the truth. But it is a truth that is rarely spelled out.

The reasoning has always been that this is the American way — the laudable scheme of using athletic ability to acquire an education. It works for football and basketball, sports that flourish within the college structure as crypto-professional activities. Soccer operates at a much lower level — it is a nonrevenue sport by the NCAA's classification. Its season is short, its level of play is weak, ditto its attendances.

This is a scenario that is unlikely to produce top players. And it does not. The reason that the Beckham rule is necessary is that the college products who fill most of the playing spots on MLS teams are simply not top-class pro material.
I need to stress again that this state of affairs is well known to everyone.

When MLS started in 1996, it quickly introduced a program called Project-40. The idea was to identify the 40 best young players in the country and have them train with MLS clubs while giving them scholarship money for an education. In short, the idea was to keep them out of college soccer.

But such is the stigma of offering any criticism of the college system that the real aim of Project-40 was never stated. It was, in fact, repeatedly denied. Project-40, we were told, was merely an alternative to college soccer.
Understandably, no one wanted to be seen as anti-education.

One coach who was not fooled by any of this guff was Bruce Arena, the most successful college coach of his era. After he joined the pros, Arena spoke out on the difference between college and pro soccer: "Clearly, it's night and day."

The huge gap remains. Those who argue that the college game is improving are deluding themselves. A recent telecast of a game between Duke and Wake Forest (currently the no. 1 and no. 2 ranked teams in the country) presented little beyond the banality of hectic, highspeed physical effort. That is college soccer. It is first and foremost about hustle. There is rarely any time or space in the college game for soccer brains to mature, for pure soccer skills to develop.

To imagine that playing for four years in that ambience can produce soccer superstars is patently absurd. So MLS is forced to continue its efforts to reduce the influence of the college game. Two weeks ago it came up with another youth development scheme, one that requires all its teams to create teams in up to five age groups, from under-14 to under-20.