Joe Rodriguez practicing with his Match Fit Academy tea,m last year as a high school junior Christopher Gregory/The New York Times
A year ago, I wrote a long piece in the New York Times http://nyti.ms/QQJpYP about how elite teenage soccer players were newly involved in a tug-of-war between their high school teams and academies sanctioned by the United States Soccer Federation. U.S. Soccer's strategy is to develop players for national programs and/or potential college scholarships by training them year-round the way the rest of the world does -- in rigorous programs that eschew the high school model of cramming several games a week during a relatively short fall scholastic season.
