I’ve only seen the final scores, so I might be missing some context, but this looks like SPA’s weakest performance in years. There seems to be a clear shift in dominance toward NorCal and San Diego.
Development: PSW (1st), PAC, SPA
Cadets: CST (1st), SPA, PAC
Youth: PAC (1st), PSW, SPA
As a reference, this is the current breakdown of the Youth NT (National League):
I’ve updated this link. I’m not sure why the videos were taken down and reposted. I don’t know how many views the original versions had but the new versions don’t have many. If there were 800 kids at this event, each one of them and all of their parents should have watched this. It would go a long way in answering the inevitable questions and complaints about rosters and process.
PAC had a monster ODP. In Development, PAC’s A, B, and C team all finished in the top-10. That is insane! PAC’s youngest age group was so loaded with talent that their C team fished higher than the A team from every non-California zone except NEZ.
Are there any NorCal Head Coaches or Assistant Coaches at the Cadet through Junior levels? My observation is that NorCal has been under-represented, relative to merit, in the selection of athletes and coaches, as well as in how the Academy is being run. It is encouraging to see the development of WP outside OC.
SPA medaled in all 3 age groups and their cadet B-team only lost to the PSW cadet A-team by one goal, so I’m not sure your data supports your conclusions. That said, I can count at least a handful of top SPA athletes who opted out of odp this year, all of whom have odd-year birthdays. SPA & PSW also had several cadet kids playing in the youth division (significantly more than were pulled up in PAC or CST) all of whom would’ve certainly improved their respective cadet teams’ placement. It’s tough to draw hard conclusions about zones based simply on ODP outcomes is my only point.
Agreed @JMSSD . While certain zones did well, you can’t put much into it. Do zones even matter? Clubs matter way more, so I think it is more meaningful to win JO or Futures than a zone ODP, especially if it is about development, playing time, etc. And to your point, players opting out for various reasons. Congrats to the winners, but let’s see how the real tournaments go, San Diego area teams I believe are going to prove themselves based on the last two months.
One question i would have is whether or not a particular team had practices together and if that correlates with success. Pretty sure there was some discussion about zone practices. Maybe that played a factor here?
Are you asking about only one team in particular or all of the zones and age groups?
I guess a list of which teams had practices might answer the question. I thought there was some discussion about the San Diego kids practicing.
I heard Coastal Cadet parents talking about a practice (maybe two) at Occidental to prepare. They were the best looking “team” at Cadet, not in terms of individual players, but in terms of playing a specific way as a team with less direction needed to execute whatever their game plan was.
Other posts said PSW Dev and PAC Dev, plus CST cadet from this post. That’s two golds and a silver. Need a full data set to analyze but if practice and placement are correlated (and of course they should be) then USAWP should standardize that across zones for a level playing field.
Seems like a fair conclusion. For the record I have no horse in this race! 
I think It’s a good idea to keep ODP regionals in San Diego from now. You really just can’t beat the weather over here.
First data point to collect would be playing time per person. Would also be interesting to see if some of the coaches held to the rule regarding even playing time.
Wouldn’t that be difficult to enforce some of the outside of California zones? I’ve heard how difficult it is to get players to travel for the central California team and that is at most a 6 hr drive from the end to end. Now think about kids having to drive or fly for a practice before having to fly for national championships. There has been multiple complaints on here about how much ODP costs already….
I’m not suggesting to add ODP team training, rather to eliminate the one offs that some zones are doing to get an edge, which translates into placement and NTSC selections.
But the bigger picture is that ODP now takes up 2x+ the number of days it did 5-10 years ago. Third zone camps, regional tourneys, both of which are heavily evaluation focused. This emphasis on evaluation over development is a problem. Replace a zone camp and the regional eval tourneys with specific skill training, with a standardized curriculum. Eg this ODP season every dev zone team member needs to know how to reverse scull off the line and properly front a post up. Cadet need to know the four standard 6v5 plays. Etc. The best clubs and coaches already coach this way, but having USAWP bring that structure to ODP rather than just more time with clipboards and caps numbered 1-200 would be a good change.
The skill development you are describing is what Pipeline or Academy or whatever we are now calling it is doing…that training is for the preselected elite…the rest of the peasant children get ODP in its current iteration that provides the illusion of a merit system but is really mostly theatre. And making sure they didn’t miss anyone to include or elevate into the preselected elite.
I agree with you guys and I also want to play devils advocate. Aren’t the skills you are describing what all clubs should be doing? The development aspect, for ODP, seems to be developing kids for international play ala high level skills that translate to success when we send our teams overseas. Reverse scull should be a basic level skill that clubs are teaching emphasizing each day as well during school season. I agree that ODP or USA water polo needs to develop some sort of curriculum and pass it along in the hopes that not just zone coaches teach these skills but all coaches that have USA polo memberships and are actively coaching. Maybe something akin to what Spanish Water polo does with their coaching course? Sorry if I am off base with what y’all are saying.
The top tier clubs are generally, although even at top clubs it can be coach by coach. Some instead focus on running plays that help win but leave kids with Swiss cheese fundamentals. But for sure the kids from second tier clubs, especially outside of the hotbeds, would benefit tremendously from a proper “upper division” polo curriculum. I’m not saying to do that with every camp, just that once a cut has been made, move on to development rather than adding on more layers of selection.
Now as far as selection goes…how’s this for a data point. The first thing US Soccer does after a certain point in the pipeline is administer a bone scan to determine biological age and do growth forecasting. That’s some serious rigor. By contrast ODP administers a swim set that has historically not even been standardized on the distance. Kids self report times and often fib. That’s the only objective measurement in the process. No radar gun, passing accuracy, vertical jump, lateral movement. All 6-8 Challenege stuff would add rigor to the process, and help identify overlooked talent.
Kocur’s interview was great but it illustrates the problem with USAWP’s selection process. He said something along the lines of “we watch these kids year round in HS and club and we know who the players are”. No one doing selections is spending serious time watching anything below division 1, and medal round pools at JOs. So we wind up with a small number of clubs dominating every step of the pipeline. ODP is actually the one chance to get real data and identify longer term prospects.
Kocur makes the point that the coaches are evaluating talent all year long. Even if all the coaches are from top level schools and clubs (and I don’t think this is true), not all of their opponents are top level. Those coaches see players other than those on their own teams. And of course, they have relationships with other coaches and talk about players. These ODP events allow for players that haven’t been noticed get noticed. The top level guys didn’t gain or lose anything from playing at this event and in some cases probably didn’t play as much as other people that the coaches wanted to see. Those top guys probably aren’t getting much attention from the coaches. This is more apt for the older ages and slides as the players get younger.
