How does American Youth Soccer Work?

How does American Youth soccer work?

Introduction

    While Soccer/Football (I am just going to call it soccer for this article), is not as popular in America as it is in the rest of the world, youth soccer still has around three million players across the country. With this, there are many different youth leagues that can become very confusing to understand. Especially since all these things vary whether they are recreational teams, travel teams, and school teams.

Leagues

Recreational Leagues

    Recreational teams are made just for fun and are often not competitive at all. This means that there are many different leagues, as the organizations, or townships that host these leagues have no point in combining them. Public recreational facilities such as YSC, or any recreational facilities, often host these events as the organizers of the league can buy time and space on their fields.

Travel Leagues

    Travel Leagues on the other hand, can be some of the most competitive youth soccer available. Due to this, the higher ends of travel have somewhat of unification as there are multiple levels. On the lower end, there are some casual travel leagues, but most travel teams are competitive. The first national competitive league is EDP, EDP-1 being the highest. This is the league where travel teams start to participate in tournaments, which supply the team with points that go to their overall, national ranking. It is also important to note that this league is mainly in the Northeast but exist across the country. The next is USYS (US Youth Soccer) is built the same as EDP-1, but the competition is a step up. There are also thirteen leagues across the country, which is more than EDP and the tournaments held in this league give more points for the team’s state and national ranking than the ones in EDP. ECNL is the next level. This is the lowest level you could be to try and play for a professional/Amateur team. These teams are hard to be apart of and require serious dedication to be apart of. The highest stage is MLS Next. These youth teams are run by the professional MLS teams, as they are essentially academy teams. Players here are naturally gifted, but also put tons of time into their training. This can be extremely complicated because there are so many leagues that also have different levels so what I wrote here is just the basic understanding of these leagues. There are some that I did not list that are still competitive, but are just region based, so to make this as easy to understand as possible, I excluded them.

School Leagues

    School leagues are significantly simpler. Schools supply players with a Varsity (highest level), Junior Varsity (second highest), and sometimes school have a freshman team (freshman who did not make JV or V). Depending on state for Varsity, there can be multiple leagues based off geographical location (ex. Central League). Also, each state has their own organization that runs the league; for example, Pennsylvania has PIAA as their soccer, and other school sports organizers. One thing that I found bewildering is that MLS next players cannot play for their school team. My guess for this is that these organizations want school ball to be inclusive of all skill levels.

    This means that if you want your child to just have fun and am not wanting them to play professionally, they should play recreational soccer. If you want your child to have fun, while being pushed skill wise, then they should play school ball. And if you want your child to play competitively with the hopes of making professional or semi professional teams, then they should play travel soccer. Despite the vats majority of leagues being this way, it is important to realize that these are just generalizations, and recreational leagues can be competitive, while travel teams can be uncompetitive.

      Benjamin Saylor