Castro Valley Soccer Club

We've been in the league for four years and have noticed a marked decline in quality of experience in comparison to the cost to participate. Four years ago, practices always had a professional coach on hand to help teach drills and reinforce the expectations of the league as far as skills developmen…

We've been in the league for four years and have noticed a marked decline in quality of experience in comparison to the cost to participate. Four years ago, practices always had a professional coach on hand to help teach drills and reinforce the expectations of the league as far as skills development and focus on kids having fun and all getting a chance to play. As is the case in any volunteer league the quality of your experience will be driven by the coach you get. Fortunately, in years past the risk of ending up with a disaster of a coach would be counter-balanced by knowing a professional coach would be on hand to support the inexperienced coaches. This is no longer the case. We have three children participating at various levels and I have yet to see a drill much less a practice-led or even supervised by a professional coach. There's a general sense of disorganization and disregard for the needs of families in the league. Schedules come out at the very last minute and are constantly in flux at the start of the season. Requests from parents to make adjustments to teams/schedules to accommodate working parents with multiple children are routinely ignored. This year we have been having problems with coaches screaming at kids, promoting a hostile and unwelcoming environment, and generally not following the principles espoused by the league's website. The league's impulse was first to ignore our concerns, then to shift the blame onto us as parents for not helping the coaches enough. If the league were free, or extremely low cost this might be excusable--but given the cost of uniforms and all the fees, our family has made a not insignificant financial investment into this league and are not getting anything close to what we expected in return at this point. Enter the league at your own risk, as the league will not give you a refund or work with you when you encounter problems. My best advice is to have a parent who doesn't work full time outside of the home who can take on the burden of coaching or make friends with someone who can. If you are a working family trying to provide a quality learning experience for multiple kids, just know you're rolling the dice. Most of the coaches and teams we've been on have been excellent, but there's zero recourse if you kids end up with a screamer who only cares about winning.