Reserve Teams

[Kuiper]

University of Mary-Hardin Baylor just promoted their assistant coach to head coach (the HC was promoted to Assoc. AD) and the story mentioned that the assistant coach had been HC of the reserve team.

https://cruathletics.com/news/2022/5/4/general-bankhead-allen-ralston-set-for-new-roles-at-umhb.aspx

Curious, I checked the website, and to their credit, they are pretty open about their reserve team, even posting a schedule with results (https://cruathletics.com/sports/ms-reserve-squad/schedule).  They played a small number of games against a mix of club teams and others.

On the one hand, I applaud the creation of a reserve team. If the university is going to mandate that coaches increase the size of their rosters, they should at least schedule a few games so those kids can actually play some. It might not be more than a more organized version of college club soccer, but it's better than sitting on the bench the whole season.

On the other hand, the existence of a reserve team should set off some red flags in a recruit's mind because it may be an admission that a large set of kids will never play.

The biggest concern, though, is about transparency or lack thereof.  I rarely see a reserve team mentioned on a team's website. Any idea how many D3 schools have them? Is it that they are really uncommon or are teams kind of hiding that fact until later? If the latter, are they at least transparent in recruiting about it and do recruits know when they are likely to play only on the reserve team? Are they used as legitimate stepping stones to develop freshman and others until they are ready to play in Soph or Junior year or are they basically permanent homes for players who they know will never play?  The former makes sense. The latter seems problematic without adequate disclosure.

[southsidejet]

All you need to do is look a prior seasons' rosters. If there are 30-40+ kids listed then there's a good chance they have a reserve team. If not, then there's a bunch of kids who will never see the field in any capacity (in this case a reserve team is good). I've seen these teams used both ways (development & home to those who don't make the main roster). It's competitive, and there are always new commits & transfers so never a guarantee of playing time regardless of the age of the player.

[Another Mom]

I think rosters in the low 30s are common. W&L has 34. No reserve team. Virtually all players get some playing time, with the exception of one or two. Those players tend to leave the team. In my opinion a good coach will give most players time. Not doing so harms morale. I know every player on W&Ls team traveled to North Carolina for the Final Four game, even though not all players were rostered. There's a sense of everyone being valued on the team.

As of a couple of years ago, Williams had a JV team. My son's high school team scrimmaged them..

[Kuiper]

I think rosters in the low 30s are common. W&L has 34. No reserve team. Virtually all players get some playing time, with the exception of one or two. Those players tend to leave the team. In my opinion a good coach will give most players time. Not doing so harms morale. I know every player on W&Ls team traveled to North Carolina for the Final Four game, even though not all players were rostered. There's a sense of everyone being valued on the team.

As of a couple of years ago, Williams had a JV team. My son's high school team scrimmaged them..

Thanks.  I think most college JV teams are defunct now.  Williams may still have one, but as of 2019 according to this article (https://williamsrecord.com/178652/sports/athletics-dept-rethinks-jv-teams-as-participation-dwindles/) they were being phased out there as well. 

It may be that most "reserve" teams still in existence are just vestiges of JV teams with a rebrand.  I'm not so sure though.  My understanding of JV teams back in the day is that these were really separate teams with a full schedule, while reserve teams seem to be players who actually practice with the first team, coached by a first team assistant, and they allow for a few more games to be scheduled for players who for all other purposes (travel, meetings etc) are integrated with the first team. I could be mistaken though.

At least in D3, it's becoming more and more common for those "30-40+" rosters, but I don't think most of those schools have reserve teams. Or, at least, if they have them and think they are good things, it's odd that they don't publicize them at all.

[Ejay]

My kid's team had 35 rostered players, and everyone played at least 1 game except the 4th string keeper.  There were cuts in the pre-season and those kids were guaranteed a spot on the club team. 

When I played years back, we didn't have a JV team per-se, but players on the bottom of the depth chart did play a few games against local CC's.

[Gregory Sager]

A fair number of midwestern D3 programs have JV/reserve teams. In fact, at least seven of the nine CCIW schools have them. (I'm not sure if Augustana and/or Wheaton fielded JV/reserve teams in 2021.)

However, a brief scan through Region VII, Region VIII, and Region IX revealed only three schools that post their JV/reserve schedules on their website's soccer page: Calvin, Carthage, and North Park. As I said, though, I didn't spend a lot of time and effort sifting through all three regions looking for JV/reserve schedules.

In the past, NPU's reserve team played a lot of games against local jucos. However, that seems to be a thing of the past; none of the three programs indicated above played any JV/reserve games against junior colleges in 2021. Almost all games were against their fellow D3 midwesterners, with a smattering of NAIA JV/reserve teams here and there. NPU did play one game against a local club team here in Chicago, Edgewater Castle FC, and a game against the reserves of D2 Lewis.

[EnmoreCat]

Can't speak for D3 teams, but I know Marshall in D1 had a reserves team last year, but have now cut that.  Even if it was every second week, it would at least give players proper game time, particularly those freshmen/players returning from injury.  I presume that given the tight budgets many colleges have to work with, if they ran a reserves team, it might have to be at the expense of something else.

[d4_Pace]

At Tufts our golden number for the roster was 28 with slight variance. We didn't have a reserve team but the independently run club team was very good, qualifying for club national against the big D1 state schools most years. Each year we would have a kid or two from the club team be invited to tryout for the team with a few making it and becoming big contributors/starters.

[camosfan]

I visited Wesleyan in 2019 with my son and the coach stated that the club team was his reserves.

[Flying Weasel]

JV teams, as a separate group with somewhat separate practices and their own (abbreviated) schedule of games, seemed fairly common back in the 80's and 90's.  They've declined after that, I guess.  Messiah discontinued their JV program when Dave Brandt took over as head coach in the the late 90's.

Messiah also seems to target a roster of 28 players and have never had more than that.  In the early days of the Messiah's rise to dominance (early 00's), roster sizes were smaller in the 23 to 25 range.  Then 26 (+/-1) was typical for a while before 28 became typical in the last 10 years.

[Gregory Sager]

JV teams, as a separate group with somewhat separate practices and their own (abbreviated) schedule of games, seemed fairly common back in the 80's and 90's.  They've declined after that, I guess.

Not everywhere. As I said, they're still fairly common in the midwest.

[Kuiper]

JV teams, as a separate group with somewhat separate practices and their own (abbreviated) schedule of games, seemed fairly common back in the 80's and 90's.  They've declined after that, I guess.

Not everywhere. As I said, they're still fairly common in the midwest.

It's interesting how some of those midwestern schools with reserve teams list a separate reserve team roster, while others list everyone on the same roster and include them in the same team photo, making it difficult for a recruit to know the real size of the varsity roster and how the school uses its reserve team. 

In the CCIW, Carthage is an example of the former. It has a JV team roster of 38 and a schedule of 14 games (the Varsity has 43 listed on its roster, but 8-10 of those appear to be guys double rostered on the JV team, like some extra GKs).  By doing this, it suggests that the JV team practices separately and a few of those players are also invited to practice with and be available for the varsity.  On the other hand, both squads traveled to Texas to play games against Concordia in September, even though Concordia doesn't list a separate JV team and the JV team did list a mid-week red v. white scrimmage that could have been varsity players who didn't play in the game the day before v. JV.

https://athletics.carthage.edu/sports/jv-mens-soccer/roster

North Park, by contrast, lists a roster of 60, has a team photo with 60 players, and only lists a separate reserve team schedule and doesn't identify who played in those games.

https://athletics.northpark.edu/sports/mens-soccer/roster

Hard to imagine that North Park could hold integrated practices with 60 players, but you can't really tell from the website.

Elmhurst, North Central, and Illinois Wesleyan are on the JV team schedules for both North Park and Carthage, but don't mention that they have reserve teams on their website at all and just list really large varsity rosters. Since they aren't the 60-70 total players on Carthage or North Park, that suggests there may not be a fixed group and who plays in those games may change from week to week.

In any event, none of this is really the wrong approach. I personally like transparency from the standpoint of not misleading recruits, but if a coach really uses the reserve team games for anyone on the roster who didn't play that week, it certainly makes sense not to label kids as one or the other.  It shouldn't take web sleuthing, though, to figure all of this out.

[Gregory Sager]

It's interesting how some of those midwestern schools with reserve teams list a separate reserve team roster, while others list everyone on the same roster and include them in the same team photo, making it difficult for a recruit to know the real size of the varsity roster and how the school uses its reserve team. 

In the CCIW, Carthage is an example of the former. It has a JV team roster of 38 and a schedule of 14 games (the Varsity has 43 listed on its roster, but 8-10 of those appear to be guys double rostered on the JV team, like some extra GKs).  By doing this, it suggests that the JV team practices separately and a few of those players are also invited to practice with and be available for the varsity.  On the other hand, both squads traveled to Texas to play games against Concordia in September, even though Concordia doesn't list a separate JV team and the JV team did list a mid-week red v. white scrimmage that could have been varsity players who didn't play in the game the day before v. JV.

https://athletics.carthage.edu/sports/jv-mens-soccer/roster

North Park, by contrast, lists a roster of 60, has a team photo with 60 players, and only lists a separate reserve team schedule and doesn't identify who played in those games.

https://athletics.northpark.edu/sports/mens-soccer/roster

That's more a function of sports information staffing and priorities at the D3 level than anything else. I can't remember the last time I saw a D3 school post JV stats or box scores on its website for any sport, including football and men's basketball.

Hard to imagine that North Park could hold integrated practices with 60 players, but you can't really tell from the website.

North Park holds separate practices for the varsity and the reserves. Given the size of the coaching staff, it's just not feasible to run one practice with a roster that large.

Elmhurst, North Central, and Illinois Wesleyan are on the JV team schedules for both North Park and Carthage, but don't mention that they have reserve teams on their website at all and just list really large varsity rosters. Since they aren't the 60-70 total players on Carthage or North Park, that suggests there may not be a fixed group and who plays in those games may change from week to week.

The same is true of fellow CCIW programs Carroll and Millikin, although in reality none of those CCIW programs goes tremendously deep into its roster in terms of varsity rotation. Illinois Wesleyan is an exception, since head coach Kyle Schauls is a firm believer in using two shifts of players (21 of the Titans saw action in ten or more varsity games in 2021, and five other Titans appeared in nine). You pretty much know ahead of time which players you're going to see in any given CCIW contest, unless it's a blowout.

While I can't speak conclusively for any program other than NPU's, the impression I have of the Carthage program is that, despite the roster overlap, the Firebirds really do run discrete varsity and JV teams. NPU definitely does -- although it's certainly not unheard of for Vikings reserves to move up to the varsity in mid-season.

Also, the size of the rosters can be deceiving. A very large percentage of NPU's roster consists of walk-ons, and I strongly suspect that much of Carthage's roster is likewise annually made up of self-recruited players. As one would expect, attrition is pretty pronounced among the walk-ons, once they come to the realization that they really don't have what it takes to reach the varsity level in a program that's that good, and they drop away ... after having already appeared in the team picture.

In any event, none of this is really the wrong approach. I personally like transparency from the standpoint of not misleading recruits, but if a coach really uses the reserve team games for anyone on the roster who didn't play that week, it certainly makes sense not to label kids as one or the other.  It shouldn't take web sleuthing, though, to figure all of this out.

I agree that it would be helpful to split the roster on the website, but there's so much in-season fluidity there that it'd be next to impossible to keep it up to date, anyway.

Again, though, this is to a certain degree about walk-ons rather than recruits if we're talking specifically about NPU and Carthage. I won't speak for Carthage here (especially since there was a coaching regime change made this off-season up in Kenosha), but nobody's being misled at North Park. The mere fact that the NPU men's soccer page features a team picture with sixty guys in Vikings kits, plus a reserve schedule, informs any prospect before he's even spoken to head coach Kris Grahn or one of his assistants that there is a lot more competition for a varsity spot at NPU than there is at, say, Millikin or Elmhurst, and that, unless he's an elite recruit who had a lot of other opportunities, there's a very good chance that he'll be playing with the reserves as a freshman.

[Hopkins92]

JV teams, as a separate group with somewhat separate practices and their own (abbreviated) schedule of games, seemed fairly common back in the 80's and 90's.  They've declined after that, I guess.  Messiah discontinued their JV program when Dave Brandt took over as head coach in the the late 90's.

Messiah also seems to target a roster of 28 players and have never had more than that.  In the early days of the Messiah's rise to dominance (early 00's), roster sizes were smaller in the 23 to 25 range.  Then 26 (+/-1) was typical for a while before 28 became typical in the last 10 years.

I played JV baseball... very much a separate entity from the full squad back in the day...

[Gregory Sager]

Junior varsities are an interesting part of intercollegiate sports, and they're definitely not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Some programs run their JV teams as a true junior squad, in which underclassmen who will definitely get promoted to varsity somewhere down the road, and who may in fact end up being key players by their junior or senior years, get the necessary development, refinement, and game experience they need. Some use it as a dumping ground for walk-ons and/or marginal recruits; IOW, a JV team whose purpose is more programmatic than developmental and which is run with little or no expectation that anybody useful for varsity purposes will arise from the JV roster. Some programs are a mixture of the two philosophies. Some JV teams get a lot of involvement and input from the head coach. Some don't, and are considered to be a means for younger assistants to develop their head coaching potential. Some play extensive schedules, some don't. Some run schedules that go all of the way through the season, some don't (for example, JV football teams often stop playing games in early October, due to the sport's natural injury attrition). Some programs publicize that they have a JV team, while with others you have to actively inquire or search to find out if the JV team even exists. Some programs have JV teams every year; others only operate them when there's an excess of players. And, as we've been discussing, some have rosters discrete from the varsity, while others are simply culled from one large general roster on a game-by-game basis.