Part One: (The Homegrown Plan)

In 2005 I started playing Hattrick, but lost interest by 2008 by not having any long term plan to work with. I have returned to HT recently. The thing that has really sparked my interest in the game is the Youth Academy and the Homegrown bonus.

In this article I hope to show a way to keep yourself engaged in the game by having a long term plan in place that starts with your youth players and follows them through their whole HT career.

First things first. I would like to show my gratitude to a couple of federations I belong to whom without I would not have come up with this plan:

GMC - The General Managers Club (85054)
GYO - Grow Your Own (92076)

The plan that I am putting forth is aimed at a new/newish club. Do not let that deter you if you have an established club. In the GYO there are many of teams in the upper echelons and even Premier League working out their own YA/Homegrown plans.

Helpful Tools and Links:

Youth Academy Article - The best, most comprehensive article I have seen written on the subject of how to run a successful Youth Academy by NatTheRat: (14564)

Homegrown/Loyalty Bonus - My plan relies heavily on the fact that if you train a player from your own youth academy they receive an immediate 1.5 bump per skill due to the loyalty and home grown bonuses. You can read more about it in the help manual. (/Help/Rules/PlayerAttributes.aspx)

HTYC - One of the best tools out there to help you organize and evaluate your youth club. It has training calculators - a list of what the coach and scout comments mean - twins (go to the site and read if you are not familiar with it). The site also recognizes specialties on your players even when your coach misses them within the match. (http://www.hattrick-youthclub.org/site/welcome)

HT-Spain - This amazing tool is widely considered the most accurate training calculator for the senior club you can get your hands on. I find this very useful in predicting what skills I will have on players years from now. It is what I used to calculate the eventual skills of my players I am writing about here. (http://www.htspain.es/index.php?pag=train_calc) It is in Spanish but there is a button to click to English or other languages.

Overview of the Plan

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1.) Choose a group of youths from your Youth Academy (YA) to be trained up to their best potential.
2.) Choose a training regimen that will allow flexibility in multiple skills.
3.) Do some long term planning to ensure you are on the right track.

I will give you insight as to my decision making and steps I took to start this plan. This may not work exactly the same for you but I believe every team can do something similar with the players they are given.

Background:

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When I re-started this game I started almost immediately training GK as I knew it was fairly easy to do and reasonably profitable for a new team to undertake. This worked out well for my plan as I had an American GK being trained up when I hatched this plan.

Note: If you can work it out to train a homegrown GK at the start of your cycle all the better. If you pull a poor keeper from your youth system you can have them up to supernatural (14.0) but playing like a titanic +.50 player in as little as 2 seasons (32 weeks). It would be especially good if that player had some defending skill as well.


Youth / Trainees

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Ages - You need to try to find a group of players (5-9) that are of a similar age to mark as the players that will be part of your long term plan. In my YA I noticed a decent group of 7 players that all had similar ages (10 weeks separating their promotion dates) that would work well for this plan.

Skills - You, of course, want to find the best players possible for this plan but you do not need superstar calibre players to make this work. For my plan the players were average at best ,with the exception of one, but they would do just fine. Most of these guys would have never sold if I put them on the transfer list. These players ranged from the lowest having one inadequate skill and 4 weak skills all the way to my one stud player that was double solid with an inadequate and weak secondaries. If you are planning to train them yourself they do not need to be super-stud players as training speeds when they are young do a great job evening things out.

Secondary skills - Secondary skills are almost as important or more important that the main skills you will be training in the senior club. If you will be training defending at the senior level I would suggest taking players with good secondaries (PM, Wing, Passing) even if their primary skill (DEF) is as low as poor. Remember that a poor DEF player will be at excellent +1.50 in as little as 15 weeks.

Specialties - One of the most important aspects of choosing your youth group is to gather as many trainees with specs as possible (you are playing creatively in your youth matches to increase your chances of finding the specs of your players right?). Remember with this plan you will not be purchasing many players for a long stretch of time so you want as many advantages as possible to begin with. You cannot train a spec so.. look hard for them when training.

Other players - As I mentioned I was only able to find 7 homegrown YA players to fit my needs for this plan so I was forced to purchase 2 additional players to fill the slots of my training. For me I picked up a good American DEF prospect and a Welsh DEF prospect (he is part of my cultural diversity plan :P ). If you can get a native player it will help save wages as you will not pay the additional 20% salary on them.

This is the group of players I started with for this plan:


[th align=center]Schmidt (te)[/th]

Mistfits Youth Players:
Name	Rider (he)	Cornish (un)
DEF	4	3	4
PM	7	6	7
Pass	5	4	2
W	7	6	4
SP	2	3	5
Name	Elam	Jackson	Jones (qu)
DEF	2	4	6
PM	5	5	4
Pass	3	4	4
W	6	4	4
SP	2	1	4
Name	Isom	Draper (po)*	Lodwick (po)*
DEF	4	7	7
PM	6	2	6
Pass	4	2	4
W	6	7	5
SP	2	3	4

*last 2 with the asterisk after their name are the ones I purchased.

Good mix of players with some good specs but not superstar players by any stretch.. except Rider :D

Choose a training regimen

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The neat part of this plan is that you will be training your players to be flexible and multi-skilled. This seems to be the way that HT is built now. Gone are the days of building a single skilled divine player to get ahead in the game.

I decided that with the players I was given that I would be best served training a mixture of Defending (DEF) - Playmaking (PM) - Wing plus Passing and Set Pieces (SP) in the off seasons. This is the reason that I chose 9 trainees to start with as when I am training DEF I can train all of my guys plus my GK in my friendly (~2.3 levels of defending=1 additional level of GK)

Do not think that these are the only routes you have available to you. There is no reason that you could not choose to do Scoring - Wing - PM for your team.. it will work out similarly.

Just remember that the different stages of your training offer different amount of training spots for your players. So you will need to decide at some point what players will end up being what type of players down the road and make sure you give them the best training possible.

Defending = 10 training spots @100%
Playmaking = 6 training spots @100% + 4 training spots at 50%
Crossing (Wing) = 4 training spots @100% + 4 training spots at 50%

So with that all of your players will receive DEF training but a more limited amount the PM and Wing training so choose who will get what training.

My plan is to give my players 2 seasons of DEF training to begin with with passing in the off season. Then 3 seasons of 50% DEF (7 matches per season) + 50% PM (7 matches per season) + SP in the off seasons. Then a full season of Wing training + passing in the off season. This will take me out to 6 seasons out where I will have to reassess my needs/goals and decide what to do with these players after that time.

Conclusion

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For this to work out you need to do your homework and set forth a plan of action for the future of your club. In my next article I will show you the power of this system as we project out these players skills and see what type of players we can come up with in the new HT era.

Until next time ~Mistfit

Link directly to this article (HT-ML, for the forum): [ArticleID=15104]