I'm not sure if I'm sticking out the election to the end. If a more qualified or driven manager arrives, I will drop out and happily vote for him or her. I would like all the candidates to understand that this is a long-term commitment. You will be the U21 Manager for somewhere around 7 months. It's not something to take lightly.
First off, I'd like to expound a little on my term of service. I felt that my strength was taking the tournament as a whole and planning. Through the early portion of the season I played exclusively to our strength. Later, it was quite easy to tell when people would start adjusting tactics to stop us and throw out a different offense to give us the edge.
(10502)(10508)I truly believe our team was the best in the world in season 12, so it did make things easier. I doubt we'll ever have same depth and talent in our bigs again. Our guards were very complimentary to the bigs and it worked out quite well. Needless to say, I was quite happy with our Continental Team. We also got good turn out for our games and it was a fun environment.
Last season was completely different. I am pretty disappointed with myself on a number of fronts. I feel like I lapsed in communication with the community and the managers of people on the team and potential candidates. Derrick Anglin was one of the best 21 yo guards in the world and he was essentially useless as I could not get his owner to take his GS seriously. Percy Peachey , my favorite PG going into the season, was quite similar. I don't feel like I did an adequate job in staying in touch with potential candidates. Most importantly to our success, I did not follow my own gameplan for the tournament. Anytime we normal or CT a game we should win. The Chile game was very unlucky. They CT'd us and had a dominant run to end the game. The next game against the Philippines should have either been a CT or a TIE. I knew that Chile would be hard pressed to advance after CT'ing us. They had a 1-2 record and 1-1 in the last two games ended up not being enough to see them advance. I normaled Philippines and we lost. We needed the win against Italy to advance and it backed us into a corner and put us behind for the rest of the tournament.
The timing of the tournament games made attendance pretty horrible. I was only able to watch a couple games live. U21 Coach or not, I'll be at almost all the games this season. I love this stuff. =D
My main focus for a second term is improving the amount of communication that happens between me and the owners of potential players for our team. Most importantly, I think I would need to have more of a dialogue to help direct players to train their players in ways that are beneficial to their team as well as the U21 team. This is very important to develop more of a community here. This would also involve financial planning, especially for people training bigs.
Feel free to spank me, I'll be hanging around the debate thread.