“Why are we even bothering to play this Nortac Sparta team? We’re a Premier Club!”
–Conversation overhead between two parents of a well-known Regional Club League team, right before Sparta beat them 9-1
“We are our club’s 3rd team, so this game (against Sparta’s 2nd team) should hopefully be pretty even for you guys….”
-Comment by the opposing coach of an RCL team seconds before our Sparta team opened the scoring with the first of many well taken goals in an easy 5-1 win.
During this past summer, 11 of our Sparta teams played in a local youth tournament called the Tyee Cup Tournament in Gig Harbor.
This tournament is by no means an elite showcase but is a well-run event featuring a lot of local clubs representing many levels of play. It turned out to be a great opportunity for our club to do something we are not allowed to in league play, which is compete against teams from Washington State Youth Soccer’s “Regional Club League”. While even Washingtonians may not be familiar with the term RCL, you may be familiar with the name of some of their clubs, like Washington Premier, Pac Northwest, Federal Way FC, Harbor FC, Crossfire Premier, Seattle United, etc.
For more than a decade, since Washington Youth Soccer did away with a well-functioning and totally open merit-based system of competition, these RCL Clubs have been the gatekeepers for the “top level of play” in our state, much in the same way MLS and its franchises control the top tier of competition at the pro level nationally. Since the first day of the RCL, a narrative has been constructed and heavily promoted that this RCL is the only place to go if you want to develop competitive soccer players. These clubs have set themselves up as the experts in youth soccer; “the trusted pros that are here to rescue your children from the blight of parent and part-time coaches and incompetent, amateurish neighborhood clubs.” Comments like the ones I shared above show you just how pervasive and persuasive that narrative can be. “We are bigger. We are better. Our coach has an A license. We are paying a lot more. We are travelling a lot farther for games. So…..we must be better!”
DISCLAIMER: I am well aware that “results” in youth soccer are not the main indicator of success. Development is the most important thing. But I’m comfortable using results as an indicator of both success and development in this conversation, because results and performances play a huge part of the narrative I am talking about. Results can also be loked at as indicator of success when taken in conjunction with other factors, such as team’s style of play and the individual quality of its players.
Of our 7 Red teams (the top Sparta teams in each age group) who participated in this particular tournament, 6 of them made the Gold Division finals in their age group. Along the way, their record against RCL teams was 6 wins, 2 Ties, and 1 Loss. Our combined goal difference against those teams was 43 goals scored and 9 conceded.
While only one of our White (2nd) teams made it to a final, the collective record of our Second Tier teams against RCL teams was a respectable 3 wins and 5 losses. Remember… these teams aren’t even supposed to be worthy of gracing the same pitch as an RCL team.
Not all the RCL opponents whom we played were the top teams in their club, but that is not the point. If a family is making the long commutes, putting in the extensive travel, subsidizing the licenses of their US Soccer Federation trained coaches, and paying club fees that are two or even three times the cost of a club like Sparta, shouldn’t those teams be able to easily get the results against us “lower level” opponents that justify the extra commitment of time and resources? Shouldn’t your Mega Club’s weakest team be able to beat any of our club’s teams, even the strongest? Or is the prevailing narrative just that… a narrative.
For the past 5 years, a quiet revolution has been taking place in North Tacoma. Our vision is that high level competitive soccer does not need to cost a fortune. That a “parent coach” can be a quality, qualified coach, and that you don’t have to commute to the ends of the earth to learn how to play quality soccer on a quality team.
Up until now, we have been content to let our player’s feet do the talking. And if you are a member of the Sparta family, then you are already aware of the strides our club has been making in the past few years. But because the narrative still persists that RCL automatically equals quality, and that local clubs like Nortac Sparta have nothing to offer the competitive soccer player, we feel that it might be time to start crafting our own narrative.
Good things are happening in North Tacoma.
Stay tuned.
(Postscript: two years later, after I had stepped down as the Tacoma Sparta director of coaching and resumed the simpler life of a mere club coach, I took my own Sparta Red team to the same tournament. We won the tournament and defeated all 3 RCL opponents we faced along the way by an aggregate score of 23-2. The prevailing conversation that weekend was still “Why are we playing this Sparta team”… but the narrative had now flipped 180 degrees. Instead of them being too good to play us, the complaint was that we were too good to even be in the tournament.
So yes, a new narrative is possible.
Hatrik Soccer 