Roster size

Just a quick survey:

Florida - 30 players - 3 coaches (plus a "volunteer coach")
USD - 29 - 3
Penn State - 29 - 3 ( and a volunteer)
UNC - 33 - 4 (plus a volunteer and st./cond coach)
Notre Dame - 28 - 3 (1 volunteer)

And for comparison's sake, UP has 5 coaches.... But our coaches (and one's at a lot of other schools) have to spend time with the men's programs as well.

So for the most part the bigger schools don't necessarily have more coaches. (and speaking from experiences, too many coaches can get pretty confusing)

Another thing that's difficult to quantify is how often former players come back and play with the team. I can't speak for other teams, but having players like Tiff and Christine come back and practice with players and whatnot is an asset UP can definitely be proud of

I'm not sure how you would judge that. UP has a tradition that the men's and women's coaches coach both teams. Right now, with Lisa making her WPS bid, you'll see Garrett, Baarts, and McNeil on the field.

You are right about the combination of the men's and women's programs and the same number of coaches for each. What you get are coaches working twice as hard as at another University. I don't think Garrett or Bill's workload will change much but you are right about Baarts and McNeil. Even with Lisa coming back one of them will have to take up the slack left by Lauren. I know Bill is the ultimate guru of keeper training but I would like to see them hire someone again to focus on the goal keeper training.

The defense is usually so good keeping is not an issue until tournament time. But that is when it really matters. Next year we will have two, so Kelsey won't be forced to play with injuries like she was last year. That should help up us down the stretch also. But for this it might have been 2 for Stanford.

It's interesting that the coaching question came up... as far as I know, UP has a unique set-up that has been grandfathered in. I don't think a school would be allowed to set up a similar "Director of Soccer" situation if it were starting from scratch. I could be wrong on that, but does anyone know any other school with a similar set up?

An interesting note on that... because Garrett isn't technically the head coach of the women's team, I believe the NCAA has yet to recognize his wins or his championships. What I mean by that is, when you see a list from the NCAA of winningest coaches or whatever, it would not include Garrett. But it would include Bill Irwin. Again, not 100% sure on that, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Finally, I do know that some schools have complained about the fact that Portland's set-up allows more individual coaches to work with players than under the normal NCAA strictures.

EDIT: Just checked the NCAA site, and I was right about the Smith/Irwin thing. No mention of Garrett anywhere, but Bill Irwin is listed as active coach with the second-best winning percentage (behind Anson Dorrance). See for yourself here.

Stonehouse, there are other schools that operate with a Director of Soccer, but I can't think of one with as high a profile as Portland's. Many of the ones I know of are NAIA, D-3 or D-2 schools...

Stonehouse wrote:
An interesting note on that... because Garrett isn't technically the head coach of the women's team, I believe the NCAA has yet to recognize his wins or his championships. What I mean by that is, when you see a list from the NCAA of winningest coaches or whatever, it would not include Garrett. But it would include Bill Irwin. Again, not 100% sure on that, but it's interesting nonetheless.

what the NCAA thinks is in
http://web1.ncaa.org/web_files/stats/w_soccer_RB/2008/wsoc%20coaches%202008.pdf

The NCAA manual doesn't mention the "director of Soccer" position, but it does recognize the "Associate Head Coach" position. It decrees that wins and losses are to be attributed to both coaches in that situation and that an asterisk acknowledging the other coach be put in each coach's record.

For some reason, the NCAA doesn't recognize Garrett as associate director of soccer, head coach, or even associate head coach. Records do indicate that Garrett was the Head coach in the UP Bio, the Box Scores (including the championship box), and in the NCAA literature about the championship season.

Right now, Bill Irwin is listed as second for active coaches - 5 yr minimum (next to "the man watching) in wins percentage at .843,
Clive is listed as second in percentage all time (to the same fellow) at .799. Neither Bill nor Garrett is in the winningest all time coach category because the NCAA says they only recognizes coaches who have coached for 10 years or more.

gnarly - (hey, how's goin', man?) - You mention in the first post of this thread that Korie N. graduated early. I believe she will graduate with her real class this spring.

Remember, Korie was given an extra year, a medical redshirt for missing her real junior year. She has decided to forgo her 5th year of elegibility for reasons I am not aware of.

Just a small detail. Great job with the post, however, gnarly!

gnarly, you should post your updated spreadsheet on Big Soccer when you get a chance.

FANatic wrote:Remember, Korie was given an extra year, a medical redshirt for missing her real junior year. She has decided to forgo her 5th year of elegibility for reasons I am not aware of.

The impression I have gotten from her mother is that one of the factors in her decision was that the four years of playing UP-level soccer has been very wearing on her body.

Fanatic,

On Korie, I just know she was out there with the twins on Senior day before the game.

FSU fan: I'll post on B.S. once a few more colleges post their recruiting class size and I need to register there.

One other thing I thought about was looking at next years roster to see how many upper classwomen fall off or what. You would almost have to copy every roster out there now (2008) and compare to (2009) Few teams keep old roster out on the web.

What a great topic-- thanks, Gnarly. Before we leave the topic of how athletic scholarships are handed out and to whom, I'd like to note that the Ivy League does without athletic scholarships altogether. Any Ivy scholarship is for just that -- scholarship -- and is not dependent on how a student's athletic career may play out over time or who is coaching. Radical, eh?

purple haze wrote:What a great topic-- thanks, Gnarly. Before we leave the topic of how athletic scholarships are handed out and to whom, I'd like to note that the Ivy League does without athletic scholarships altogether. Any Ivy scholarship is for just that -- scholarship -- and is not dependent on how a student's athletic career may play out over time or who is coaching. Radical, eh?

Well, OK, but most of the Ivy's provide scholarships for everyone, and you can jump the que a bit if your grades aren't the absolute top. It CAN help with admissions.

At Harvard, for example, there were more applications from people with perfect board scores than there were slots, and not all people admitted have perfect scores.
So it's your athletics and other talents that makes the difference.

On the other hand, a player on academic scholarship can just quit, if the athletics don't work out and still keep the scholarship.

I highly recommend a book entitled "The Price of Admission," by Daniel Golden, a WSJ writer. It documents the roles that non-academic work has in elite college admissions. The stories he reports vary from school to school (Brown recruits the children of celebrities, half the Harvard class is legacies, Duke actively recruits children of potential large donors, etc.), but are invariably interesting and well documented. The bottom line is that there are very few schools that play strictly by the academic high road. (He cites Cal Tech, but there are other examples.)

Another highly recommended book is Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which discusses among other things, how things like random chance and birthdate can affect both the opportunity to attend certain schools, and discusses just how important an education from one of those places is to achieve excellence (not very).

Also your last name. There was a study a few years back about a highly selective school in the Czech Republic at which the probability of admission, controlling for all the credentials in the file, was 2% higher for applicants at the beginning of the alphabet (when the admission officers were fresh) than those at the end.

Maybe you should be Aapurplegeezer!