Buyer Beware – the current state of STA girls
I've seen a number of topics recently on STA so I wanted to write from a true insider's perspective to level set things. To clear the plate on this I will tell you that I am not a disgruntled parent. My daughter is on a GA team, gets plenty of playing time and we have been here long enough to see STA before their journey into DA/GA and now after, so please don't tell me, you are just angry when in fact I am just here being honest whether you believe it or not.
The bottom line is that STA is not the place it used to be where actual development mattered and investing in kids so that they eventually reached their potential mattered. Those days are long gone and you can put blinders on and deny that or realize it is true and understand why. STA is now in a win at all costs model from U13 and up where the results are really all that matters because of the pressures they have to perform at the club level within the GA. It is just a fact. Now everything is about “champions league” and “national ID camps” and “GA playoffs” and “scouts are at your games” and “college recruiting”: pushing all of these talking points down everyone’s throat is now what is top of the priority board.
As a result, STA is now focused more on recruiting from the outside than taking their core player base, which is of course very good, and developing them to be great players. In their current model, if you are at U13 and God forbid hit a growth spurt and your body changes, or hit a mental development phase and your mind changes, or you are just hitting your stride with soccer IQ, nope STA doesn’t have time for you because they will just attempt to find another player who fits into their box, operates like the robot that Kelly and Tom want them to be and plug them in. I can site countless examples of it but will not for sake of talking about individual or groups of players at certain age groups, I’m not going to go there, but all of this is fact and you can witness it at the tryouts that are currently happening with Tom and Kelly fawning over new players from the outside who are realistically in many cases, about the same or marginally better than their core base. It is very sad to watch them marginalize current players and churn through the age base like they are doing. They are so terrified of losing the few really top players per team they have to PDA and other clubs that they allow those parents to drive unhealthy and toxic situations within the team.
Truth be told, I completely understand why STA is doing this. They went all in with DA which of course was a giant fail. Now it is all GA and they want to as a club be at the top of the GA pyramid with success at things like champions league and playoffs. This is understandable and why not strive for those things? However, in an area where most of the actual top players in the region area at ECNL clubs, STA is left with a few great players, lots of good to very good players, and some that are more or less top EDP level players. That model does not get you to top GA status on its own and you need to instead invest in the players and develop them to the level you can, across the entire age group. In the current model, the second teams are an afterthought and just a place to move rejected players from the GA team down without really worrying about their long term development or if they go and quit because they hate soccer now. Other clubs in the GA (say the top 16-20) are are putting teams on the field who would rival top ECNL clubs and STA is constantly chasing their shadow. So, instead of just accepting their place and their identity and working from the bottom up to first develop players, which then builds good teams, which results in a great club, STA wants to just skip over the first two, bring in recruited guns to get results. Again, I understand why they want to do this, but DO NOT go to STA as a mid-tier player expecting to go and get developed into a GA level talent, STA will not do this for you and do not get sucked into believing it for one second.
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