RSS
ATOM
advertisement
McCarthy's Musings: The Friday Five Previews the MLS Player Combine
The MLS Player Combine starts tomorrow, so the Friday Five is here to take a brief look at what to expect from the proceedings.
Jan 8, 2010 3:28:15 AM
By Kyle McCarthy
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – For a selected group of MLS hopefuls, the time to impress has arrived.
A host of college stars, plus a handful of U.S. youth internationals who have inked Generation adidas deals, will filter into South Florida today to take physicals and undergo testing prior to the start of the MLS Player Combine tomorrow. Four teams will take the field tomorrow afternoon for the first of three doubleheaders in four days at Central Broward Regional Park. MLS coaches and executives will run the rule over the professional aspirants tomorrow, Sunday and Tuesday and evaluate the prospects one last time before the MLS SuperDraft next Thursday in Philadelphia.
There will be plenty of coverage of the events over the next few days – monitor the Twitter feed (@kylejmccarthy) for instant updates and check back for notebooks over the weekend and the Monday MLS Breakdown for in-depth analysis – so the Friday Five is going to keep it general as it casts its eye over what is to come over the next four days.
1. Forget about the Beautiful Game...at least on the opening day. The conditions aren't ripe for eye-catching fare. Players battle their nerves and ponder how the influential spectators are assessing their play. Coaches field a team with little collective preparation and manage deployments carefully to showcase every player, often in different positions from game-to-game and half-to-half. Add in the compressed schedule and the result is a complement of games that doesn't always correlate with the quality one might expect from a congregation of the top college talent in the U.S.
2. Fitness matters. The college season ended over a month ago for players from the four teams who made it to the Final Four. Others have cooled their heels for eight or nine weeks, depending on team performance. The onus falls on each player to keep fit without high-level match practice during the lengthy lag time. Most players take that task seriously and work through the kinks of returning to a decent standard of play sooner rather than later, while others are left to rue the skipped workouts and the holiday buffets in the second or third match of the combine. Coaches can fix poor fitness, but players won't perform to the best of their abilities without it and could see their draft status slip in some circumstances.
3. Stocks will rise and fall, particularly if the player is a relative unknown. Careers might not be made and broken in three doubleheaders in Fort Lauderdale, but they can certainly be impacted. A good performance can send a player shooting up the draft board, while the inverse would have the opposite effect. One look at last year's SuperDraft shows the influence a good camp (Ryan Maxwell from off the charts to the first round) or a bad weekend (Yohance Marshall from first-round buzz to undrafted) can have on a prospect.
4. Weigh the words carefully...and then discard them. Subterfuge works best in war and professional sports drafts. Many coaches and executives will say nothing, few will say something without saying anything and next to no one will say something that means something. The pre-SuperDraft buzz is about entertainment and misdirection, not hard information.
5. Remember the Combine is just one piece of the SuperDraft puzzle. As mentioned in Wednesday's column, the Combine may be an important part of evaluating players prior to the SuperDraft, but it is not the only factor. Scouting takes place during the regular season, the major conference tournaments and the NCAA tournament. While lesser-known players may feel more pressure to perform on this stage, players with a strong body of work in an accessible geographical area or a often-scouted major conference can rest easy knowing that a so-so showing at the Combine may not submarine their draft standing.
Kyle McCarthy writes the Monday MLS Breakdown and frequently writes opinion pieces during the week forGoal.com . He also covers the New
England Revolution for the Boston Herald and MLSnet.com. Contact him
with your questions or comments at kyle.mccarthy@goal.com and follow him on Twitter by clicking here.
For more onMajor League Soccer , visit Goal.com 's MLS page.
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – For a selected group of MLS hopefuls, the time to impress has arrived.
A host of college stars, plus a handful of U.S. youth internationals who have inked Generation adidas deals, will filter into South Florida today to take physicals and undergo testing prior to the start of the MLS Player Combine tomorrow. Four teams will take the field tomorrow afternoon for the first of three doubleheaders in four days at Central Broward Regional Park. MLS coaches and executives will run the rule over the professional aspirants tomorrow, Sunday and Tuesday and evaluate the prospects one last time before the MLS SuperDraft next Thursday in Philadelphia.
There will be plenty of coverage of the events over the next few days – monitor the Twitter feed (@kylejmccarthy) for instant updates and check back for notebooks over the weekend and the Monday MLS Breakdown for in-depth analysis – so the Friday Five is going to keep it general as it casts its eye over what is to come over the next four days.
1. Forget about the Beautiful Game...at least on the opening day. The conditions aren't ripe for eye-catching fare. Players battle their nerves and ponder how the influential spectators are assessing their play. Coaches field a team with little collective preparation and manage deployments carefully to showcase every player, often in different positions from game-to-game and half-to-half. Add in the compressed schedule and the result is a complement of games that doesn't always correlate with the quality one might expect from a congregation of the top college talent in the U.S.
2. Fitness matters. The college season ended over a month ago for players from the four teams who made it to the Final Four. Others have cooled their heels for eight or nine weeks, depending on team performance. The onus falls on each player to keep fit without high-level match practice during the lengthy lag time. Most players take that task seriously and work through the kinks of returning to a decent standard of play sooner rather than later, while others are left to rue the skipped workouts and the holiday buffets in the second or third match of the combine. Coaches can fix poor fitness, but players won't perform to the best of their abilities without it and could see their draft status slip in some circumstances.
3. Stocks will rise and fall, particularly if the player is a relative unknown. Careers might not be made and broken in three doubleheaders in Fort Lauderdale, but they can certainly be impacted. A good performance can send a player shooting up the draft board, while the inverse would have the opposite effect. One look at last year's SuperDraft shows the influence a good camp (Ryan Maxwell from off the charts to the first round) or a bad weekend (Yohance Marshall from first-round buzz to undrafted) can have on a prospect.
4. Weigh the words carefully...and then discard them. Subterfuge works best in war and professional sports drafts. Many coaches and executives will say nothing, few will say something without saying anything and next to no one will say something that means something. The pre-SuperDraft buzz is about entertainment and misdirection, not hard information.
5. Remember the Combine is just one piece of the SuperDraft puzzle. As mentioned in Wednesday's column, the Combine may be an important part of evaluating players prior to the SuperDraft, but it is not the only factor. Scouting takes place during the regular season, the major conference tournaments and the NCAA tournament. While lesser-known players may feel more pressure to perform on this stage, players with a strong body of work in an accessible geographical area or a often-scouted major conference can rest easy knowing that a so-so showing at the Combine may not submarine their draft standing.
Kyle McCarthy writes the Monday MLS Breakdown and frequently writes opinion pieces during the week for
For more on
Advertisement
Inside Goal.Com
-
RIGG: Milan striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic is certainly no Mr. February
The Swedish striker traditionally struggles in February. Facing a three-match ban this month, the jinx looks set to continue.
-
DEMPSEY'S DIARY: Playing in the World Cup was the ultimate dream
In his latest diary entry for Goal.com, the U.S. international and Fulham midfielder talks about playing in his first World Cup despite a back injury and what it meant to score.
-
ROGERS: Capello resigns as coach, but the villain is FA chairman Bernstein
Capello and John Terry are far from blameless in the England saga, but the real culprit is the FA chairman.
-
LABIDOU: Is MLS falling behind? The league's new younger direction
With high-profile players like Nicolas Anelka and Luca Toni rejecting MLS for other developing leagues, is the league falling behind its competition?
-
ROSANO: Mexican soccer needs to address referee treatment
Nick Rosano argues that Mexico's continued officiating problems may have less to do with referees themselves and more to do with how they are treated by the federation.
Advertisement
Advertisement