This is an essential question every aspiring athlete must ask themselves as they progress towards a professional career. Before being able to assemble a rational answer to this, you need to know what it is you actually want to achieve? Once you’ve got your goals sorted, you should be able to map out a rough plan of least resistance towards those goals.
Past Performance
What’s your clubs track record of developing and matriculating high quality talent? If your clubs organisational structure doesn’t have anything contacts and/or does not expose their talent to the next level of competition, it will not help to achieve those types of promotional goals, its function would be training and conditioning only.
Opportunities For Progression
A lot of semi professional clubs act as feeder clubs to the professional institutions, they nurture underdeveloped athletes and exposure them to a high standard of competition in seasonal competitions, along with trial matches with professional clubs. That way the professional clubs get quality practice opportunities, and the semi-pro players have a chance to impress the professional hierarchy for further trials and training.
Is the grass greener on the other side?
What are the other clubs like? The quality of coaching and development programs definitely vary from club to club, not necessarily better or worse in general, but different. Everyone responds to different cues in different ways. So compare your goals of what you want to achieve to what your available options are, make the most of all the opportunities you receive.
Present Yourself Professionally
It’s no understatement to say that the world is hungry for a constant stream of sports all the time, the level of ubiquity is always increasing, thus the opportunities for potential elite athletes to matriculate to the professional arena increases.
