From a Board Member: Looking at the positives and negatives of club retention offers
Friday, December 4th, 2020
By Holly Jablonowski
Badger Region Board Member
Retention offers are a topic that come with much controversy. When the topic was first presented at our board meeting two years ago, I voted in favor to allow retention offers. It has many positives. For example, for clubs who are near Great Lakes and North Country regions, retention offers allow them the opportunity to offer players from out of state who previously played for them, as both states have tryouts earlier than Badger Region. This was the main reason why I felt we should allow a retention period.
There are many pros and cons to retention offers, and I’m going to do my best to share both sides. As a coach for Milwaukee Sting I got to experience retention firsthand this year. Going into the 2019-2020 club season, Sting elected not to use the retention period. With so much uncertainty in the world, going into the 2020-2021 season Sting wanted to remove the uncertainty of not having a place to play. Sting also decided that the retention offer was for a spot within the club, and not a spot within a team. All athletes would be evaluated during the first two weeks of tryouts and then team placement would be made.
First, I’ll go through the pros and cons for the club. Retention offers allow you to retain the talent that was in your club, and not lose them to another club come tryouts. The con is that you could end up missing out on new talent, and you could also end up retaining athletes that were problematic in previous years. To be transparent, Sting showed how many spots were open in each age group. As a coach, I can tell you that evaluating athletes is daunting. Time always goes so quickly, and you want to make sure that you’ve given each athlete a evaluation. With an additional two-week evaluation period, athletes will end up having a larger performance sample and should help for athletes to end up on the appropriate team. Another pro for the club is that you can get a jump-start on ordering uniforms. This is one of the big tasks that must happen right after tryouts, and for boys it’s always a race against the clock to order uniforms due to tournament season starting 1-2 weekends after tryouts.
As a player, the pro of accepting a retention offer is that you don’t have to endure the daunting tryout weekend. The con of accepting a retention offer, at least with how Sting went about it, is that you don’t know what team you will actually end up on. For some players knowing who the specific coach is, who their teammates will be, and what level team they will be on is a really big deal. Other players may just want to play for a club, and trust that the training, coaching, and teammates that they have aren’t that important when deciding where to play. Another pro to how Sting is deciding their teams is that players have multiple opportunities to show their talents, and won’t be pressured to have one good performance. With all the pressure that comes on tryout weekend, athletes can be both physically and mentally exhausted and not have their best showing. Although there is still pressure during the first few weeks of practice, it is much less than the pressure on any given day.
The region does its best to not interfere with how clubs choose to run their business, so at the end of the day, allowing clubs to utilize retention offers are just another decision that clubs and families have to make. Now that I have experienced retention offers firsthand, and talked with many families, if the topic is a voting matter again, I would still vote to allow clubs the option of a retention period. By the time you’re reading this article we will have had two practices, and be halfway through our evaluation period. If you’re curious how the retention offers pan out this season, feel free to shoot me an email at hvogelsang15@gmail.com.
