The Slugs need YOU!

Local manager born2reign pulled no punches about the state of the Oceanic National Teams recently when he was interviewed by OrangeStar for The Oceanian. The National Team does not just belong to the National Team Coach or a select few on the Oceania National Federation/Forum; it belongs to all of us, and we all need to get involved, regardless of the results we achieve. This is an extract from the interview in Issue 99 of Oceania's longest running HT News Magazine (16415208.1).

TO- You have had a lot of involvement with the Oceanic National Teams of late. Can you explain why community involvement is so important for the U20 and Nat teams? What should people who are interested in getting involved in any aspect of the National Team program do to help out?

b2r- Community involvement is huge because not enough teamwork leads to those actually contributing to become disillusioned and burned out more easily. I have tried to get u20's scouting to pick up in recent times and it has thanks to leeny63, baguar, Chillins, UnionRuler all helping out. It really does make it less than 10 mins a week to scout when there are numbers on deck. I know mastercyb is doing his best get NT scouting where it should be as well. These tasks are fundamentals which we haven't been doing properly in the past to be honest, and it has shown in our player retention / development and more obviously in most of our recent NT results.

When I say "burn out," I am referring to the amount of scouts that come and go, who must be thinking that the process is too tedious because there is only one person contributing to a sector. I am also referring to the (self-observed) fact that out of our recent NT coaches, (scootboy, Cyntech, TT, Milk Man, LyleMellor, 944), only leeny63 has actively stayed in the NT scene and contributing on a regular basis. This isn't a dig at the above managers by any means, but merely an observation that managing a NT team in Oceania appears to suck out the fun for our NT managers, to the point where they need a "break" from NT scene or HT in general. This, I feel is partly due to the lack of support and tediously having to do everything themselves + poor results which makes the manager disillusioned and an unproductive waste of time for the effort that they have put in.

The main problems we have are scouting, player retention, ongoing player development, depth and specs on our NT players. To give evidence of this, I have looked at the next qualifying generation that we have for season 55 in HT, these guys are currently around the 18y, 60d range.

In each position, we scouted the the "best" accordingly, which gave us a batch of approx 70 players that are the best of this generation that we knew of, before promotion @ 17,0. I've always thought that our player retention was bad and there is a common perception in our community that we "lose" a lot of players to foreigners who do not train them up properly and that player is forever lost. However, nobody has actually looked through the evidence and provided numbers from a decent sample size, so I thought I would do so:

Check out the Oceania National Team community
Oceania National Forum (HT) (108107)
Oceania National Forum (offsite) (http://chemist.the-milk-bar.com)
National Team: (/Club/NationalTeam/NationalTeam.aspx?LeagueID=15&LeagueOfficeTypeID=2)
U20 National Team: (/Club/NationalTeam/NationalTeam.aspx?LeagueID=15&LeagueOfficeTypeID=4)

Link directly to this article (HT-ML, for the forum): [ArticleID=17503]