The Dominant 11-Year-Old Is Often Not the Dominant 16-Year-Old
Somewhere this fall a 10- or 11-year-old is being moved to the B team, or not making the A team, and a family is quietly recalculating what is possible. Here is what the person running operations at U.S. Soccer said about that on our show.
My Kid Got Cut at 11. Is It Over?
Dan Helfrich, Chief Operating Officer of U.S. Soccer, said the federation wants to "keep the funnel for potential players way wider for way longer." His reason: "right now, deselection happens way too early." Kids are being cut before adolescence, "when, as we know, people develop physically in extraordinarily different ways." And then the line parents should keep: "Show me the dominant 11-year-old. Fast-forward to age 16. The percentage of dominant 11-year-olds who are dominant 16-year-olds is nowhere near 100%."
He also named the other reason kids drop out of the funnel: not ability, but cost and time. Families who cannot afford the travel or the schedule get deselected without anyone ever evaluating the player.
Chris Mueller is the case study. He joined the Sockers FC Academy at nine and was on the B team until 14. He was, in his words, 4'11" until high school. Every step of his career was a bet nobody would have placed at 11. His message to families now is: "You are not that far behind. You're a youth soccer player. You have time to get this right. You don't have to be 12 years old as A team starter."
Research on maturation in youth sport points the same direction. Studies of the relative age effect and of early versus late developers consistently find that selection before puberty favors the physically early kid, and that the advantage tends to wash out by late adolescence. A cut at 11 measures where a body is that year. It does not measure where the player will be at 16.
What parents can do
Treat a cut before puberty as information about this season, not a verdict
Keep them somewhere they play and enjoy it, whatever letter the team has
Do not let cost or travel be the reason a late developer leaves the game
Adapted from Episode 39. What U.S. Soccer Says Must Change in Youth Soccer (Dan Helfrich) and Episode 41. Chris Mueller on What the Soccer Dream Demands.
Watch the episodes: https://youtu.be/HNi8DzFdXDA and https://youtu.be/PLiDKaPs5OA