Limiting the pool?

Scouting players in a nation as large as the USA has always been a challenge. And predicting which 15-year-olds will turn into stars is extremely difficult, because, well, teenagers are unpredictable.

Steve Nichols has coached Baltimore's Casa Mia Bays teams to four USYS National Championship titles in five years and the club is part of the Academy league.

"I think all in all Bradenton is good for the country," says Nichols.  "But I do question it. They invest a lot of money in the kids, but are we putting our best players on the field or are we committing to the kids who are in there?"

D.C. United president Kevin Payne, also head of U.S. Soccer's Technical Committee, has had a number of Bradenton alums come to his club, such as Convey, Adu and Santino Quaranta.

"I've always felt if you leave out the extraordinary kid like Landon or Freddy, DaMarcus or Convey," Payne says, "for the bulk of the kids that are in the U-17 program, I believe there are multiples of other kids in this country who are just as good, and maybe better.  For whatever reason, they didn't get identified the same way."

It's a different process in nations that have the luxury of depending on their professional clubs' youth programs or have a smaller geographic range to view talent.

"My only criticism of Bradenton has always been that it almost by definition limits the number of players we look at," says Payne. "The whole educational component makes it a challenge to really churn through kids.

"Argentina, in a U-17 cycle, they'll on average bring 170 kids through their program. We're nowhere near that number, but that's because of the constraints that come with that kind of setup."

In a traditional national team program, players come in and out of the pool. But Bradenton attendees have been uprooted from their homes and can't very well be sent back after a month or two, just as they've entered the school semester.

"We scout them from their clubs and bring them into residency," says Hackworth. "We keep them for a semester whether they're good enough or not, and sometimes it would be much better for the player and for us if we didn't invest a semester or a year. If we could tell them, 'You're not a national team player right now. You got some work to do. Go back and prove that you belong."'