U21 Candidacy Speech
After 2 years as the Nippon U21 manager my message to you is that the future is looking brighter. We’ve had a couple of tough years but we are turning the corner with our talent and will begin to see the results from that work soon. Let me tell you about where we’ve been, what I’ve been doing, and where we are headed.
When I took over the team for Season 14 we had a couple solid 21 year old players and bunch of others. We struggled that season, lost a couple close games I had expected to win and finished the season 1-5. Once the season was over I set off to building the season 15 team. I had been doing some scouting over the first half of the season but it wasn’t until that point that I really understood that team I adopted had no pipeline of players for season 15 and beyond. We basically had no future in place. In season 15, with not much talent at all, we went 2-6, winning the games we should have won. If we are really going to be successful as a smaller country I was going to have to be really active recruiting and building a pipeline of prospects for the team. Because of our small country size we could not just rely on the community to develop players for us.
Since that point of realization in season 14, I have been dedicating a lot of effort towards identifying talented players and working with their managers to develop them as best as possible. I am constantly searching BB for new, previously unknown prospects and adding their names to my candidate list. After each draft, I scrub the results to find all the talented draftees and add them to the list as well. With that list I track every week each player’s performance as well as any attributes about the player I can to identify the top set of prospects based on talent and performance that have the potential to develop into a U21 player. For all the top prospects and U21 players, I have contacted each manager, to help them with development plans for their players, and to get them excited about participating in the team. Currently I am tracking the performance and development of 58 players. In just the past month I have been in contact with 26 different managers in Japan and around the world about 38 of the more promising prospects. The point of all this effort is to get people interested in developing players for the team and helping them make their player(s) as strong as possible.
All this work seems to be paying off. Here’s some proof of the progress using player salaries as a simple comparison:
Season 15 vs Season 16 – The top 5 players in season 15 had average salary or $16,453 (4 of them were only 20). In Season 16 our top 5 players average $25,503,
20 year olds – Season 15 top five 20 year olds (now 21) average salary was $12,960. In Season 16 the 20 year olds (21 next year) average $17,600.
In summary, the level of talent we are developing is improving for each year into the future and we will see a more talented team, more capable of competing and advancing to the second round of competition.
I hope you can see from above the effort that I and our managers have been making to improve the team and that the benefits are on the way. It really takes at least 4 seasons to fully develop the pipeline of players if none existed before. So far, after 2 years we have gotten through the hard times and better success is just around the corner. As small nation we can’t expect to win every game but we also don’t want to accept losing. The goal for the next couple seasons should be to advance to the second round of our tournaments. As we continue to work on player development we may be able to stretch that even farther.
With that, I would like to ask the Nippon community to re-elect me for another term as U21 National Team manager, to continue the process of building our team, and start delivering results we can all be proud of.
ありがとございました、
Coach Taiyo