The most common question I’ve received is “how do you find players?”. My answer before our first season was that players were the least of my worries, which turned out to be correct. There was so many unknowns when it came to everything outside the field. Before our second season my answer to that same question changed somewhat.
They find us, I answered sounding somewhat arrogant. But it was true. What most people who haven’t worked in the game don’t understand is that there is millions of players around the world. Soccer is the global game, not one of these sports that are only played in the US. Everyone wants to play and most of them want to live in Paradise.
Now, recruiting the right players is not an easy task. But it’s not a complicated one either. True, if you are a top team playing in the Champions League, your player pool is not huge. But when you are playing at a level that is several levels of dogshit beneath the worlds best, you have a lot of players to choose from.
The level of play in our league is pretty decent, but it’s still shit compared to the absolute top. What that means is that any player who has general talent, some tactical understanding and really wants to work their ass off can play. Which seems to leave out the majority of all players…
However, it does mean that we have a player pool of tens of thousands of players to choose from just domestically. So finding players isn’t difficult. Finding the right ones is. You do need some principles to narrow down the player pool. Aimless search for players works as well as saying you want to be a millionaire without working a day in your life. You might win the lottery, but the odds are not in your favor.
For Sarasota Paradise we have had a rule that drastically cut the available players to our team. I wanted 80% of all players in the first two seasons to have a local connection. That means that they either live in our region, have grown up here, gone to school here or have visited their grandma on Siesta Key every winter. We accomplished having a roster comprised of 80% locals both of the first two seasons.
Why have local players? There’s two reasons that come to mind. First, and this was the real reason why I wanted this rule - if I go around talking about building a community based club without having players who are actually from this community, I’m bullshitting. I’m not a bullshitter. To build a club that represents our city and area we need players and staff who are from here. Hopefully they also bring their friends to games.
The second reason for you to have local players is an old saying (can’t remember from whom): “If you’re going to lose, do it with local players”. The theory is that fans will give you more time if you are losing with their neighbors on the field than hired mercenaries. Which is correct. But at the end of the day, you still need to win.
On that earlier note of building a community club, and as I often refer to Paradise, a family - we invited all of the first year players back for our second season. Even those we knew didn’t quite have the level in them yet. Because we’re a family. Family gets to come back. That gave us a starting point of 50% of the roster for last season. How did we find the rest?
Well, they found us. Either through the tryouts we held in the winter, or by reaching out to us. I’m not exaggerating when I say we receive hundreds, maybe even thousands of requests from players who want to play for us. Our coaches did a phenomenal job of scouring through hundreds of kids who reached out. Personally I don’t look at any player who reaches out to me directly since my old coaching hunch says that they’re not good enough.
When I coached in Scandinavia, every single player who contacted any club I was at, regardless of level, and talked their way into a training session to show their skill sucked. They talked like they were the best, usually their coaches were allegedly assholes for not playing them etc blah blah. Every player I’ve ever met who blamed someone else for them not playing has been shit. Stay away from those types of players.
Did we recruit any of the players who reached out to us directly? Yes. The ones that were on top college teams and had shown they could perform at our level. But we did our due diligence through video and multiple conversations. Very few did we recruit without seeing them in the tryout. Most of them turned out to be great for us, a few not so much and left after a week or two.
We learn from our recruitment mistakes and try to remember the successes while improving our process for next year.
MW
