Reserve Teams

[SierraFD3soccer]

From there, it's up to the kid to make the most of their opportunity. But it is difficult to watch so many kids consume these used-car salesmen pitches and end their only college experience with a bitter taste and expensive student loan bill.

Awesome post especially the last paragraph.  While every kid would love to play (start or get minutes) for a program out there, there seem to be many programs that stockpile players whether they have a reserve/JV teams or not. 

Without even asking the coaches, you can look at the rosters and see how many go from freshman year to sophomore year and so on. Then look at the other years. The ones that don't continue their association with the team look at their minutes. Many have bottom heavy rosters (more freshman and/or sophomores than seniors). That might indicate that the program sheds players whether voluntary or through cuts. You can also do some research on their sites under the "statistics" and see "games played" or "minutes."  There you will see how coaches are substituting all year.

Also the reserve/JV structure is not like high school where, in most cases, the HS seniors and juniors get all the minutes.  Often college coaches expect freshman to be ready to play or at least be ready for some serious minutes when they arrive. Some coaches will fall in love with that freshman and he'll get more minutes his freshman year than he'll get the rest of his college career.  If they aren't getting serious min. by their sophomore year, chances are they are not going to get many their junior and senior year.

Ultimately and what GenerallyInterested point to, is that you and your kid need to focus on the academics and does that school meet that kid's needs.  People have said this before on this board, but bares repeating, if a player gets hurt, a coaching change takes place or he never/rarely sees the field, is that player in the best place as a student that will help him get to where he wants post college.  Only so many years to play and s/he has the rest of their lives to be set up for.  Way, way, way to expensive to send a kid to just play soccer.

One coach who I very much liked and my son loved, pitched his program with the statement, what he does here will affect him for the next 40 years. He obviously meant this positively.  For this school, that may have been so in many/some ways for many/some kids.

However, if my son was very good math or wanted a career in engineering, that school, which is often a top ten D3 program is/was not the right school for him.  I can go into way more detail.  The downsides for my son would have been, though he would have played for 4 years (coach told him that), barring injury, and advanced far in the NCAAs, he would have been in a math program that was not nearly close to other colleges and he/we would have been 4 or 5 times in debt compared to what he is now after he graduated last year. In our case, the 40 year promise would most likely have been negative as he would have had to chase jobs he might not want because of the salary (assuming he could get that) to pay the debt plus having to at least put his life on hold or at least seriously curtail things he is doing now.

[WUfootyfather]

From there, it's up to the kid to make the most of their opportunity. But it is difficult to watch so many kids consume these used-car salesmen pitches and end their only college experience with a bitter taste and expensive student loan bill.

Awesome post especially the last paragraph.  While every kid would love to play (start or get minutes) for a program out there, there seem to be many programs that stockpile players whether they have a reserve/JV teams or not. 


Without even asking the coaches, you can look at the rosters and see how many go from freshman year to sophomore year and so on. Then look at the other years. The ones that don't continue their association with the team look at their minutes. Many have bottom heavy rosters (more freshman and/or sophomores than seniors). That might indicate that the program sheds players whether voluntary or through cuts. You can also do some research on their sites under the "statistics" and see "games played" or "minutes."  There you will see how coaches are substituting all year.

Also the reserve/JV structure is not like high school where, in most cases, the HS seniors and juniors get all the minutes.  Often college coaches expect freshman to be ready to play or at least be ready for some serious minutes when they arrive. Some coaches will fall in love with that freshman and he'll get more minutes his freshman year than he'll get the rest of his college career.  If they aren't getting serious min. by their sophomore year, chances are they are not going to get many their junior and senior year.

Ultimately and what GenerallyInterested point to, is that you and your kid need to focus on the academics and does that school meet that kid's needs.  People have said this before on this board, but bares repeating, if a player gets hurt, a coaching change takes place or he never/rarely sees the field, is that player in the best place as a student that will help him get to where he wants post college.  Only so many years to play and s/he has the rest of their lives to be set up for.  Way, way, way to expensive to send a kid to just play soccer.

One coach who I very much liked and my son loved, pitched his program with the statement, what he does here will affect him for the next 40 years. He obviously meant this positively.  For this school, that may have been so in many/some ways for many/some kids.

However, if my son was very good math or wanted a career in engineering, that school, which is often a top ten D3 program is/was not the right school for him.  I can go into way more detail.  The downsides for my son would have been, though he would have played for 4 years (coach told him that), barring injury, and advanced far in the NCAAs, he would have been in a math program that was not nearly close to other colleges and he/we would have been 4 or 5 times in debt compared to what he is now after he graduated last year. In our case, the 40 year promise would most likely have been negative as he would have had to chase jobs he might not want because of the salary (assuming he could get that) to pay the debt plus having to at least put his life on hold or at least seriously curtail things he is doing now.

Very good stuff.  My son is currently a sophomore at a school where he loves the school and the academic program he is in.  However, he has seen his playing time decrease from 38 minutes a game to 15 minutes a game in his second season.  It's a tough situation and he is probably going to end up calling it a career at the end of this fall campaign. 
The coach is loyal to a 5th year guy who came back one week into fall camp at the winger spot my son would have stepped up at. 
The advice on going to a school for the academics and not the soccer is very sound advice.

[Kuiper]

I just read this transcript of an interview on Discovercollegesoccer.com with John Carroll coach Dejan Mladenovic and a question came up JCU having a reserve squad.  I thought the coach's answer about why JCU has a reserve squad and why it does not was interesting for a variety of reasons:

Matt: Well, let's, uh, let's talk a little bit more about the, about the season. Um, and I guess we'll go back a little bit to, to the recruiting side of things, but in terms of your roster, as you mentioned reserves, is there a roster size you're trying to hit? Do you have two teams? What does that look like?

Coach: Yeah.

So we are definitely one roster that plays two schedules. I think that's a big common misconception about how we do things at JCU. Everyone trains together. Everyone's together. Pretty much all the time, uh, until game day where we roster guys in different games. So everyone is eligible to play in either game.

It's just a matter of what game they get rostered in. And that certainly changes throughout the season. Guys get moved up and down. Uh, there's, there's constant opportunity to move up. Uh, and there's definitely situations where guys get moved down, um, if they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing.

But the way we look at it is it's kind of like a, Professional soccer set up in the sense that we want to play our varsity games. You know, I'll use a real example, Wednesdays, and we'll look at who plays a lot of minutes in those games. So [00:16:30] let's say it's a Wednesday night game at 7 PM. And there's 15 guys that play in that game that play 40, 50, 60 minutes, something of that nature.

We're obviously not going to roster those guys the following day. Those guys will do a region in the morning and then a lift in the afternoon. And then we'll roster the next 18, 20, 22 guys for the reserve game on Thursday and get those guys minutes as well. And then now we're kind of doubling down on the amount of guys who are getting minutes week in and week out.

Now, um, I think a lot of people try to use this against us in recruiting, or at least I'm told that all the time, here's the reality. Um, there's two reasons why most coaches don't do this. And this is why we do this. One is you do not get a bigger salary as a head coach to do this. So I'm not getting, uh, 100 a head of every kid you bring in.

If anything, our administration doesn't understand. Why we, we bring all these players in, um, especially when they understand how much extra work that really is. We know it's right for the players, so we do it. Uh, the secondary piece is that you do not get a bigger budget as well. Um, and we need to make our budget work for all of these games.

And you're kind of adding a game a week in theory, you know, to, so that that costs money. Um, and that's where usually coaches don't do that. But they seem to love to bring that up when they're recruiting against John Carroll. And I love when they do, cause that's when I can bring up this topic. Um, but, but the reality and the bottom line is we do it cause we know it's right for our players and they have an opportunity to get game minutes week in and week out.

If they [00:18:00] don't, um, if you're not one of those 15 guys getting regular minutes, um, you know, at the varsity level, what are the other 15 guys doing on the team the rest of the week? Maybe training once or twice a week. Um, that's not a real opportunity to get better. So that's why we do it. Uh, yes, it's a lot of work.

Yes. It's a lot of extra stuff that, um, you don't plan on in a, in a normal season, but, um, this is probably year 12 or 13 that we've added this system. And I don't think it's a coincidence that we've had the kind of success we've had, especially the last decade. Because of the development for the players and, um, the opportunities provided them.

A few reactions:

1.  It's useful to note everyone trains together.  If everyone is training together, it's not much different than a travel roster, especially if it really is fluid.  That makes it feel inclusive. 

2.  It was interesting to hear the coach's response to the negative recruiting - effectively saying other coaches don't do this because they don't get paid extra for the larger rosters or extra work and the cost to the program.  Seems to me that cuts both ways.  On the one hand - good for the coach for doing it because it's the right thing to do when you have a big roster so everyone you recruit or accept for your team gets some attention and playing experience.  On the other hand - not so good for the school if they don't allocate more budget to a team with a bigger roster full of tuition-paying students.

3.  I suspect that the coach's response to the negative recruiting isn't quite right at many schools with reserve teams.  In other words, whether or not the coach of a team with a reserve squad gets extra salary or budget, I would be surprised if most soccer teams do it without the school actually requiring or incentivizing it because it means more tuition paying students.  Hard to believe JCU really asks him why are you doing it, but I think a lot of small DIII schools need all the extra students they can scrounge up these days and the coaches who have those reserve teams do so because they probably negotiate with their schools to give them extra assistants and budget to make it manageable. 

4.  I don't know whether it's better or worse from the experience of the student to be an underfunded reserve team because the coach might want to use those players to motivate the first teamers or to guard against injuries or a well-funded reserve team because the school wants more tuition-paying students, but it's worth asking that question when you are considering a school with a reserve team.

5.  Probably the best situation is to have transparency about a player's minutes for the reserve team and the senior team in a given year.  If you can see that, then you will know a lot about whether the roster is really fluid in-season and whether it is fluid from season to season (e.g., if the reserve team is likely a freshman team and people graduate to the senior team).