On a chilly, gusty soccer pitch in Ingleside on a recent Saturday afternoon, Beau Wilson, 11, was mentally preparing for his first tryout for one of San Francisco’s competitive club teams.
Though he had agreed to allow me to track him through the process, I left Beau alone for the time being — resuming our conversation after the tryout, and later, after he got the results. To me, he looked relaxed, but his dad, Erin, knew otherwise.
“He’s a little bit nervous, that’s for sure,” Erin told me privately. Beau is an outgoing, social kid, his dad explained. Beau was in a deep state of calm before the tryout, a sure sign, his dad said, that he was “feeling it at the moment.”
While Beau sat calmly, dozens of kids in red or blue pinnies were running around before they were organized into groups and called into drills and scrimmages by the club coaches evaluating them.
Club tryouts play out across San Francisco’s soccer fields over a single weekend, usually in May, and come heavily laden with anticipation by the young players and their adults. For would-be junior soccer stars, this is the premier local league.
This morning, Beau was trying out for SF United, one of nine private soccer clubs operating in San Francisco. With rosters of hundreds of kids each (at least one has more than 1,000), the clubs are a much more expensive, and controversial, alternative to the mostly public school-based teams organized under San Francisco’s Recreation and Park Department.
Beau’s foray into club soccer began because his public school-based recreational team dissolved. Here’s where the controversy comes in: Many parents blame the private clubs for pressuring them with a message that if their kid doesn’t join, they’ll be left behind. Some club coaches criticize other clubs for baiting families with false promises of a “pathway” to play collegiate or even professional soccer. (It’s worth noting that these players are, in some cases, eight years old.)
The clubs, which can cost $3,000 to join, “cherry pick all the rec kids out of the rec league, so that if you just want to stay on a team with your friends, that becomes impossible,” one parent told me. “The school teams get cannibalized by these clubs.” (The parent, who identified herself as “no-name angry mom,” spoke on condition of anonymity because she feared retribution against her kid from the clubs.)
“It becomes this mindless march towards a club,” she added. “I honestly don’t know what the end game is, but some parents get really serious about it, their kids end up playing five days a week, and often burn out or develop injuries,” she said. “It doesn’t always end well for the kids.”
Full disclosure: I am one of those parents. Both of my kids have played club soccer for years. I’ve pushed both of them hard, sometimes too hard, to play for top teams. And I have been reprimanded by their coaches for instructing them from the sidelines, generally considered a no-no for parents attending games. Both kids have implored me to restrain myself to modest cheering only, and set sharp limits on how many comments I can make each game. I try.
Worse, maybe, is the fact that I am one of the parents who took my kid out of a strong recreational team, creating the first fissure that, after other desertions, caused that team to crumble. That was a difficult decision. Recreational squads tend to be more free-spirited and depend on cooperative family involvement. They’re often parent-coached, with unique, colorful jerseys and names with nods to the schools they grow from.
Club teams, by comparison, can feel like soccer factories churning out duplicate players. On any given weeknight, every pitch across the city — Beach Chalet, Crocker Amazon, Minnie & Lovie — is swarmed with armies of club players in practice uniforms. Getting players to those locations three days a week is a parental commitment that can test even the strongest marriage or relationship.
Club teams are also called “travel teams,” something you’ve probably heard more than enough about from friends or colleagues with kids between the ages of eight and 18. The traveling part of the name is no joke: On a recent Sunday, one of my kids had a morning game in Davis, and the other an afternoon match in Aromas (25 miles south of Santa Cruz). This coming weekend, I’m taking one of them to a team tournament in Temecula. Estimated cost, all in: $2,500.
That amount of concentrated travel is unusual, but even when games are confined to the Bay Area, there are many weekends when my kids play two to four matches. All that chauffering, chaperoning, and cheering (respectfully, of course) leaves little time for anything else.
At this time last year, Beau was playing in the rec league for the Grattan Gecko Scorpions when it suddenly fell apart. “I didn’t want it to break up,” Beau said solemnly, “but it just did.”
Its dissolution sent his family scrambling to find him a team. For the last year, the San Francisco Vikings, a club, agreed to take him for one of its recreational league teams. But the Vikings team proved to be weaker than the Gecko Scorpions, and left Beau wanting more competition, hence his presence at the tryout.
“I feel like the team I’m on right now can’t really, like, push me up, and help me get better,” Beau told me. “Some of the kids don’t really care about this sport.”
On the tryout field, I felt myself rooting for Beau, a boy who I’d only met briefly the day before. (Journalistic decorum and years of being chastised by my kids in mind, I cheered internally, not verbally). At the same time, I was impressed that his parents, Erin and Kaella, seemed relaxed and even somewhat removed from the process.
“I’m here for him, to support him,” Erin said. “I’m excited for him. But I don’t care so much about the outcome that I’m nervous.”
I tried to imagine what the coaches were seeing, wanting Beau to get the ball more often. One of his shots deflected off a goalpost, a near miss. In a scrimmage, his team was beaten badly. I was excited in a two-on-two drill when he managed a nutmeg, but it looked like a lucky accident, which he confirmed afterwards.
At the end of the tryout, Beau said, the coaches told the players that they’d like everyone to get a spot but that there aren’t enough for all of them.
“I hope I make the team,” Beau told me.
On Sunday, the day after Beau’s SF United tryout, Lindsay Kauffman was overseeing tryouts at the South Sunset fields. The founder and executive director of Girls Unite, a soccer club for girls, non-binary, and trans kids, Kauffman thinks there are too many clubs in the city, transforming the competitive league into a “capitalist adventure.”
As many clubs have grown in pursuit of revenue — for instruction, field time, equipment, and tournaments — their coaches are spread too thin, covering five or more teams, Kauffman said. Girls Unite coaches are capped at two teams each, she said. Her advice to parents is that if a child is happy, learning, and playing with friends, they should stay on the team they’re with.
“In San Francisco, I think, more than most places, people are just always looking for what’s, you know, greener on the other side,” Kauffman said. “There’s some bizarre dissatisfaction in the city, looking for some kind of perfection.”
According to Kauffman, San Francisco soccer clubs pushing kids to be single-sport athletes too young has resulted in more injuries. She supports the pursuit of a primary sport, but encourages her players to leave room for other interests. “Take up art, do dance classes,” she said. “We want to help them become well-rounded people, and have an identity outside of one thing.”
Shani Simpson, the director of coaching for the San Francisco Seals, thinks there’s a more insidious way in which clubs are misleading players and families. He points to some clubs, including the San Francisco Glens and San Francisco Elite, selling a “false dream,” he said, of their programs leading to college teams or professional sports careers.
Simpson, who played Division 1 soccer for the University of San Francisco, and professionally for three different Major League Soccer teams including the San Jose Earthquakes, estimates that about one percent of kids playing club soccer in the city will go on to play in college. (Kauffman offered the same low guesstimate.)
“They have these catchphrases, saying, ‘We’re gonna get college eyes on you,’” Simpson said. “They’re not providing the environment where they’re developing these high-level college players and pro players, but that's what they sell, hard.”
Joe Dugan, president and executive director of SF Elite, said in an email that 100 of the club’s players “have gone on to play college soccer since 2015,” and that the club is “very proud of these accomplishments.” A representative of the Glens did not respond to a request for comment.
Where the cannibalization of recreational players is concerned, Simpson believes the responsibility is a “two-way street,” with parents sharing some of the blame for breaking up viable rec teams too early.
“They get really stressed out, and deluded, about what it is that they should be thinking about for their kid,” Simpson said. He’s seen a pattern of parents covertly moving to clubs, without telling the other rec families, leaving those teams in a lurch.
“Parents aren’t always honest with their parent group that they’re going to leave, or that they’re looking for something else,” Simpson said. “And yeah, of course, clubs are looking for players.”
I was struck by something else Simpson said: that recreational teams “naturally” break up when kids get to be nine or ten years old. Some players are ready to invest more time in the game, and are hungry for a bigger challenge; some parents are also ready to invest more money and drive time.
Soccer is called “the beautiful game” for many reasons. One of them, speaking as a longtime sideline habitué, is the player’s ability to control and possess a ball at their feet while simultaneously knowing the best place for it to go next, and the dexterity to put it there. To see children as young as eight doing that, creatively, freely, and under pressure, can be remarkable. As with anything special, it requires time and commitment.
The problem is that adults’ expectations, or even hopes, for that kind of talent too early can rob the sport of its joy, which is essential to making it truly beautiful — and may be lost amid the big time hustling by parents and clubs.
I caught up with Beau about a week after his tryouts and the results were in. He was rejected by the Glens but got an offer from SF United, which he declined because a compromise presented itself. He had decided to rejoin the Vikings to play alongside four friends from his Gecko Scorpions squad. The team is transitioning from the recreational league to the big time: a competitive travel team.
Beau was hopeful yet pragmatic about his decision. “The Vikings offer was at a higher level,” he said, but with that team, he’ll be playing with friends. Seems like a win to me.
