well good job acy60, you brought it to the point, but there are always those guys who are still trying to cause trouble because the teams are not successful and than its the fault of the foreign players of the other teams....
Display MoreI must partially agree with this comment, but I wish to say this in not entirely the club's fault either. Permit me to take my club as an example for this case study.
Genève Volley managed (still can't get over it) to get promoted to NLA with NO foreign players. But the difference between NLA and NLB is so big, that if we had kept the same team, we would be today last of the ranking and we would have received spankings from Volero, Köniz and others. Therefore, we talked it over with our girls. Of a team of 12 last year, only 6 agreed to go on with some extra practice every week, and physical work, etc. Of these, 2 are very young juniors that we feel have expectations in a 2 to 4 year span and therefore do not really count for this upcoming season. We promoted one girl from our second team, and are very happy to have her around as a substitute, even though I don't feel she actually has NLA level yet, especially since she is finishing a doctorate and is not as free as she would like. Nevertheless, as we are plagued by injuries, she has played quite a lot this season so far !
Furthermore, despite the fact that we have invested to promote our swiss players by helping them financially, they all have full time activities : either a job or studies. They can't practice during daytime, only on evenings. Therefore our foreign players (who can practice twice a day if we could find halls that were not in schools and therefore rentable...) don't get enough practice either.
This comes to say that the situation in NLA is now the following : there are less than 50 women in Switzerland with a really good playing level that can withstand NLA standards as the top teams have set them (Volero, Köniz). Perhaps not even 30... As there are 10 teams in NLA, that means that each can find about 3... Some have more (NUC, Schaffhausen), other less (VFM, Düdingen).
As of such, we'd love to have real professional swiss players as we have foreigners, but none have accepted to suspend studies or jobs to take the risk ! Furthermore, neither high school nor university in Geneva have programs enabling top sportsmen to have arrangements for schedules or exams, for instance. Which can sound unbelievable, but is unfortunately true.
So it's easy to critisize these teams, but actually, if they intend to manage a NLA volleyball team, they must think of it as a product in the marketing of the development of the sport in their region. At least, that's what we try to do. Our first team's promotion in NLA proves it to be correct : we have never in the past ten years received so many requests from beginners or non beginners to come and play in our junior or other senior teams. We even are thinking of starting a beginners group for adults - something I simply never heard of in the past 15 years.
This means that our club must strive to maintain and progress in NLA. It's our showcase, our number 1 promotion tool. It helps bringing good young players to the club who might have an opportunity to become future good NLA players in... 5 to 10 years. As of today, in our Under14 and Under12, we have identified three girls we think have a potential for NLA in the next 10 years. That is not enough - despite the fact that we have more than 40 youngsters in this age group in 2 different schools and more coming every year.
So you can be as patient as you wish - and yes, some teams do leave potentially good swiss players on the bench - but the main problem remains the stubborn fact that there are simply not enough young swiss players with a potential NLA level, for one, and when they come of age, most of them are not willing to sacrifice even temporarily their studies or their jobs to try and become real volleyball professional players.
So for me, the main question is : why ? How can we change this mentality ? And the biggest part of the answer is : school. Schools must change their habits and try and offer programs adapted for top sportsmen and women.