Regarding NTSC for the most part I would agree with one major exception. Last year they moved up Girls Cadet National Championships because Pan Am Games were in May. USAWP took everybody’s money, but the NTSC selections were already made. Coaches weren’t paying attention and none of them took notes on anything. That was criminal. There were numerous girls who played the previous summer on the DEV National Team that finished 2nd in the Hawaii Invitational who were not even invited to NTSC. It was a stain on the ODP program.
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That does suck. Which brings me back to advising all parents and players that most of the ODP process is about the social experience. Only a fraction of the players are going to move on. If your only reason to have your kid do ODP is to make the national team, then the entire experience may not be right for you.
If your goal is for your zone team to win this year then absolutely take the current biggest and best.
If your goal is to identify and train the best long term prospects then screening on eg early puberty is exceedingly foolish.
I get missing this before Gladwell made it common knowledge in Outliers, but to still be making this mistake is not good.
ODP is definitely a flawed system.
My experience with two kids going thru the process (one making NTSC) is that the teams are mostly formed before the three camps / and definitely before the evaluation camp. This year kids only attending one camp and not the evaluation camp made a zone team. You need to have the “right” last name, your club coach on deck , made a previous team and the correct birthday ect. It’s not an “open” tryout.
There isn’t enough transparency in the process.
If you are ok with knowing this and want extra pool time ODP might be for you.
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@NLM, From my limited experience with USAWP, I would be stunned if they are doing any analytics whatsoever on the ODP level. I hope I’m wrong…
Also, puberty is the great equalizer. I would also hope they take that into account in trying to identify future prospects but from everything I’ve read in this thread, I doubt they do.
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I agree. The ODP system has significant flaws and often appears to function more as a revenue stream for USA Water Polo rather than a genuine program for identifying and developing talented players for the future.
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Yes and No. they are also providing an experience. There are kids they are very talented and may come from less competitive clubs. It gives them a chance to see water polo with a different lens and invigorate their love for the sport and make it fun. Nonetheless, it’s also social.
For those commenting on selection flaws, I agree in a theoretical sense but my comment in the end would be the cream tends to rise to the top. If you are truly the best, you are selected time and again.
If you are just as good as the person from the big club with the big last name…then yes the familiarity will come into play.
While I commented earlier about most senior team players not making a team at some point, I’m not sure we have seen too many who never made an ODP zone team.
Cool!
Could you also refine the data by the y.o.b.?
The future Olympians will make a zone team and NTSC at some point, so the system works in this sense.
As for “ordinary” folks, I am not sure how much ODP is valuable, say for college recruitment purposes. If a kid from a big zone can play, coaches will find them regardless. And a truly talented kid from a smaller zone is almost assured to make a team, right? One can look at the whole process as just another useful water polo camp followed by another useful water polo tournament. And the social aspect is also nice.
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I believe a good number of the most recent Olympic team were on a zone team. Hooper was cut from the development national team so the lore goes.
They are very clear that you only have to attend one camp. Kids already in the pipeline aren’t required to do as many steps. It’s better that the coaches are focusing on the new players at those camps and not on established players.
The zone coaches already know most of the best players in the zone simply from playing against them year after year. If coaches aren’t game planning for your kid at Kap 7, your kid may not be on the radar for a zone team and really needs to shine at a camp. It does happen that way sometimes. I completely disagree that “You need to have the ‘right’ last name, your club coach on deck , made a previous team and the correct birthday ect” I’ve seen plenty of kids make teams that don’t fit those criteria.
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I think Johnny was JO mvp at 10u, so there’s that.
Thanks for doing this analysis. So, each quarter contains two years of data for the period? I wonder if the younger year gets more skewed to Q1 then the older year at the same level.
Now I must know if the trend continues and the percentages even out at Youth where the 11 extra months are a smaller percentage of total development time. I really am curious. I think Q3 is the most common birth quarter, by a little.
See below for disaggregated by year. The data gets sparser and noisier but - the Q1 vs Q4 bias holds within every year. So it appears coaches somewhat stratify by birth year, but that actually exacerbates the quarter problem. The typical ratio of Q1 vs Q4 is 3:1.
2025 PSW Zone Teams (A+B) Quarter of Birth
Development
2011 Q1 15%
2011 Q2 15%
2011 Q3 11%
2011 Q4 7%
2012 Q1 19%
2012 Q2 7%
2012 Q3 0%
2012 Q4 7%
2013 Q1 15%
2013 Q2 0%
2013 Q3 0%
2013 Q4 0%
2014 Q1 4%
Cadet
2009 Q1 15%
2009 Q2 13%
2009 Q3 20%
2009 Q4 5%
2010 Q1 18%
2010 Q2 5%
2010 Q3 9%
2010 Q4 5%
Development+Cadet pooled
Up year Q1 15%
Up year Q2 13%
Up year Q3 20%
Up year Q4 5%
Down year Q1 18%
Down year Q2 5%
Down year Q3 9%
Down year Q4 5%
Down^2 year Q1 7%
Down^3 year Q1 2%
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ODP is one of the most expensive flawed programs I have seen across a couple of sports.You can look at the design and see that it is about revenue disguised as an attempt to make a national team. There is also no development whatsoever in some of the zones. Having two weekends before NTSC is not necessary in most zones, or having 2 teams during the regional weekend. The Zone coaches already know who in their zone will make the team for the second weekend. So why have that amount of families shell out such a high amount of money, especially for areas with no development happening in ODP. Some even have zone representatives that are not club or high school coaches. Why would you expect players of any level to be developed by someone that has not coached water polo in over a decade, and why would USAWP allow that. Those are the same coaches that alert USAWP who to take from their zones for academy or NTSC. It is incompetence at best, a money grab at worst. The amount people then pay when selected to NTSC after already spending thousands the first two weekends and you have a recipe for skepticism.
Do you really think zones outside of CA need two weekends? I have seen it so many times and can confidently say that most of the time they do not.
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Thank you for the data.
It is great that PSW zone has a talented kid born in 2014 with a significant potential. The very name Development suggests that the programs should look for such kids, choose them over some older kids, and give them an opportunity to flourish!
The aspect I find interesting is the Q1 issue being more pronounced in the down year. This is a small dataset and what is there could all be attributed to noise, but it appears the upper year ‘must win right now’ kids benefit less from a Q1 birthday than the amount a Q1 birthday benefits down year ‘in the pipeline’ kids. By the time you get to the 2009 kids, the Q1 advantage evaporates.
The Q1 advantage may dissipate a bit, but the Q4 disadvantage is alive and well throughout.
Q3 is an interesting subset to consider. Taking into consideration Gladwell’s hypothesis in “Outliers,” water polo is a unique animal in that kids with fall birthdays enjoy an advantage out of the gate due to the JO cutoff. Being “old” in their 10u and 12u years may allow them to make a club’s A-teams, be coached by better coaches, have more playing opportunities, more playtime within those opportunities, and generally be more likely to develop within the youth water polo environment. Then they get to ODP and it’s suddenly a January 1 cutoff date. But Gladwell would contend, I believe, that the positives gained by having a “good” birthday by JO standards would carry over into the skill and confidence they are able to demonstrate at ODP. This could even carry over to coaches and evaluators who know who the “good” players are more within the context of their JO birthdays than they do their once-a-year ODP birthdays. That may be why there are a solid number of August/September athletes who do very well within ODP.
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I’ve been following the ODP discussion for the past few days and wanted to provide an additional viewpoint which supports the value of the ODP pipeline process.
First of all, I want to acknowledge that all of the criticisms of the ODP pipeline process are reasonably sustained through observation and that parent (and coach) frustrations are absolutely valid.
That being said, the flaws in the process are symptoms of the much broader problem – that the sport of water polo is expensive. Those costs can be traced back to the community size, pool availability, the costs of heating pools, etc.
This means that polo clubs, USA WP, and ultimately ODP rely heavily on volunteers to execute the process which results in limited player tracking “through time” from within the ODP process itself. I suspect that this gives rise to a not-unreasonable amount of selection bias since the ODP coaches (essentially ODP volunteers) have a greater degree of objective performance data and subjective performance evaluation to those players within their sphere of interaction during the year. When the time to select player arrives, it’s not hard to assume that some decisions have already been made which then leads to the question - Why have the ODP process at all?
Finally, we arrive to where I feel like I can add value to the conversation through my personal experience with the process. I think that ODP offers two absolutely significant benefits for players:
- Extra Play
I have been a 10u coach for nearly a decade now and I firmly believe (read that as I am 100% convinced) that integrated game minutes and competition exposure are nearly, if not directly as important, as fundamental skills training in this sport. Specifically, competition in a format that consists of different players, different coaches and different venues combined with the national team pipeline selection narrative creates an environment where players can suddenly “level up” and advance in confidence and skill. While this is certainly more evident in the younger Development bracket, I suspect that it remains applicable in the Cadet and Youth brackets.
Essentially, the ODP process is “throwing the kids into the river” which enhances their learning and skill development. On a side note, this is why playing teams as often as possible and playing those teams in higher age brackets in club season is so important for player development. Here is a paper from the National Center for Biotech Information that discusses the process:
Making lasting memories: Remembering the significant
Yes ODP is expensive but any play is better than no play and perceived important play (emotional play) is vastly superior to any other type. Many times this is referred to as Championship Game Experience.
- Club to Club Relationships
Parents make a mess of things.
It’s observationally evident that some clubs have friction with other clubs. This originates from parents unintentionally biasing their children that “this team is dirty” or “that team cheats”, etc. This is especially true for those parents that have little experience with the rules of positional advantage and little experience with how aggressive the game will become at later ages. This inputs back into gameplay and eventually effects coaches and players like in a nasty feedback loop.
ODP introduces players to an environment where they are exposed to each other and places them in positions where they are required to trust and value one another. This simple process makes great strides towards mending club v club strife and generates lasting friendships and enhances player value within the minds of players and parents alike. Anecdotally, my son is a happier and more confident player though his experience with ODP and my family’s water polo experience and mental health has been enhanced over the years because of this program. I understand that this may not reflect every players experience with the process but the local value that I have observed has been worth every penny spent.
In a perfect world, there would be a legion of paid national team staffers that would keep objective evaluations and playstyle assessments on players year round who’s purpose was to attend every quarterfinal, semifinal and final game and make selections based on that aggregated data. However, we are not Greece, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, etc., and USAWP is not state funded so we have to work with what we have. Is the process flawed? Yes. Is it better than nothing? Absolutely not, ODP provides real value to the community.
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