Sporting Iowa

In recent years of youth soccer there has been a huge uprising of a new type of club soccer. Before there was always all the regular soccer clubs. These are pretty much in every city and town in the United States and its just a local team that you play with from kids around the area. The next big thing to happen in youth soccer was the establishment of a program called ODP. This stands for Olympic Development Program, and basically it is a soccer program in every state of the country, and kids from within that state try out for their respective ODP teams. At the state level you can make your ODP state team, and from there go play against other states from within your region. From that state ODP team you can make a Regional ODP team comprised of the best players from the Midwest region for example. Then from the Regional team the players have the chance to make a National ODP team which, as you can probably guess, is the best players in the country. Now after the ODP fad faded, youth soccer ushered in a new era of the game. This new era is known as the Academy Programs. These have been introduced into states across the country recently, and they are an elite level of soccer. They are club soccer teams on steroids, where the tryouts are extremely selective and the teams are prestigious. They play in their very own league and they only take the best of the best players.

The reason this is important, is because since the start of the academy system there hasn't been a single academy in the state of Iowa. But that has just recently changed. The club that I play at, in Des Moines, just recently signed a partnership deal with an academy team from Kansas City, called Sporting KC. This is a big deal because not only is my club team linked with an academy team, but we're linked with one of the biggest academies in the country. We're supposedly an academy affiliate, which means the club will go by the name of Sporting Iowa, and fall under the control of the Sporting KC Academy program. Me, and the rest of my teammates will all have the opportunity to participate in this academy program, something we would never had been able to do in Iowa before.

This is a huge step forward for Iowa soccer, and now hopefully players have a much closer option if they ever want to try to take that step to the academy level of soccer. This should help to improve the soccer quality in the state immensely and I can't wait to see what the future holds for the future of the program.