Can My Kid Play Club AND High School Soccer? (2026)

Q: Does MLS NEXT allow high school soccer?

It depends on the division. The Academy Division allows it with no waiver. The Homegrown Division restricts it — you need a waiver from MLS Player Development, granted only where financial aid or private school admission depends on high school soccer. Middle school waivers are not available. Ask any MLS NEXT club which division it plays in.

TL;DR: For most families, yes. Girls Academy mandates it league-wide. DPL, EDP, NECSL and state leagues all allow it. ECNL generally allows it, but it is a club-by-club decision you have to confirm. The one real exception is the MLS NEXT Homegrown Division, which restricts high school soccer and requires a waiver from MLS Player Development — granted only in narrow circumstances. MLS NEXT's Academy Division was designed to allow it with no waiver. Then there is the part nobody warns you about: even when your club says yes, your state high school athletic association has its own outside-competition rules. Two different organizations have to agree, and only one of them is on the club's website. We checked all 1,494 clubs in our directory — not one publishes a plain answer to this question. So you have to ask. Below is exactly what to ask, and who to ask.

Are you a club director? This is one of the most common questions parents bring to tryouts, and almost no club answers it anywhere a parent can find. Claim your free ClubScout profile and state your high school soccer policy in plain language. It is a genuine differentiator.

The Short Answer, by League

Ordered most competitive to least:

League	High School Soccer?	What You Need to Know
MLS NEXT — Homegrown Division	Restricted	Waiver required from MLS Player Development. Rarely granted. Middle school waivers not available at all.
MLS NEXT — Academy Division	Allowed	No waiver needed. This was a deliberate design choice for the tier.
ECNL	Generally yes	No league ban, but it is a club-level decision. Ask the specific club, not the league.
Girls Academy	Yes — mandated	League policy requires every member club to permit it. 8-month track built for high school players.
GA ASPIRE	Yes	Second tier, managed through the DPL partnership.
DPL	Yes	One of its main selling points to families.
EDP	Yes	Works well for multi-sport athletes.
NECSL	Yes	Lower travel, lighter schedule.
NPL	Yes	—
State leagues (MYSA, CJSA, and equivalents)	Yes	No conflict in practice.

If the acronyms are still soup, our complete league comparison table puts every league side by side, and the club soccer glossary defines each one.

Read that table and the obvious conclusion is that this is a solved problem. It mostly is — at the league level. The complications are one tier down.

MLS NEXT Is the Real Dividing Line

If you have a son at the top competitive tier, this is the section that matters. MLS NEXT has two divisions, and the naming is backwards from what you would expect.

Homegrown Division is the top tier — all 30 MLS professional academies plus roughly 122 top independent clubs. High school soccer is restricted here. Players must obtain a waiver from MLS Player Development, and waivers are granted only in limited circumstances:

The player receives financial aid that requires high school soccer participation
Private school admission is tied to soccer

Middle school soccer waivers are not available at all. Assume the answer is no unless one of those two situations describes your family.

Academy Division is the newer, broader-access tier. High school soccer is allowed, no waiver required. This was an explicit design feature of the division, not a loophole.

Here is the practical problem: a club's league badge does not tell you which division it plays in. Our directory shows 93 approved clubs carrying an MLS NEXT affiliation and only 8 tagged specifically to the Academy Division — 7 of those 8 in the Northeast. That gap is partly a data-coverage issue on our side, and it is also the reality parents face. Two clubs can both say "MLS NEXT" on the homepage and give opposite answers to your question.

So if a club tells you MLS NEXT, your next sentence is: "Homegrown or Academy Division?" Everything about high school soccer follows from that answer.

We see this pattern regularly: a player joins a Homegrown Division club, skips high school soccer for a year, then moves to an Academy Division club specifically so he can play with his classmates. That is a normal, sane correction — not a failure. But it costs a season of upheaval you can avoid by asking in April instead of finding out in August. For the head-to-head, see MLS NEXT vs ECNL and MLS NEXT vs EDP.

The Second Gate Nobody Mentions: Your State Athletic Association

Every parent asks the club. Almost nobody asks the school. Both have to say yes.

Your club league governs whether the club will release your kid for the high school season. Your state high school athletic association governs whether your kid stays eligible for the school team while playing elsewhere. These are separate organizations with separate rulebooks, and they do not coordinate.

Most state associations have some version of an outside-competition rule — limits on practicing or competing with a non-school team during the school sport's season. The specifics vary a lot by state: some restrict competition but not training, some cap the number of outside events, some are far more permissive than their reputation suggests.

In the Northeast, the body you are looking for is one of these:

State	Association
Massachusetts	MIAA
Connecticut	CIAC
Rhode Island	RIIL
New Hampshire	NHIAA
Vermont	VPA (Vermont Principals' Association)
Maine	MPA (Maine Principals' Association)
New York	NYSPHSAA
New Jersey	NJSIAA
Pennsylvania	PIAA

We are deliberately not printing the specific rules here, and you should be skeptical of any blog that does. These regulations are revised, reinterpreted, and applied differently school to school. ClubScout does not track them, and a number that was right last season can quietly cost your kid a season of eligibility this one.

The person who actually knows is your school's athletic director. Not the club director, not another parent, not a Facebook group. Email the AD before you sign anything, ask in writing, and keep the reply. It is a five-minute email that prevents the worst outcome in this entire article: a kid who loses high school eligibility over a club decision the family thought was already cleared.

Girls Academy is a useful illustration of how these two gates interact. GA mandates high school soccer league-wide and builds its calendar around it — and even so, players who play high school soccer may miss GA's April Spring Showcase depending on their state association's rules about overlapping seasons. The league said yes. The state still had a say.

What Our Directory Data Actually Shows

We swept all 1,494 approved clubs in the ClubScout directory for any mention of high school or varsity play. Here is the honest result:

Finding	Count
Approved clubs in the directory	1,494
Clubs mentioning "high school" or "varsity" anywhere in their profile	154 (10.3%)
Clubs stating a policy on whether players may play high school soccer	0

We read all 154. Not one is a policy statement. They break down into three groups:

Age-range descriptors — "programs from Pre-K through high school age." This tells you who the club serves, not what it permits.
Program and camp names — "High School Preseason Camp," "High School Teams." A product, not a policy.
Coach biographies — a staff member who coached high school or varsity somewhere. Nothing to do with your kid.

This mirrors a pattern we found when researching coaching credentials: the field looks populated until you read it. We are publishing the zero rather than smoothing it over, because the zero is the actionable finding. The single most consequential scheduling question in youth soccer is not answered on any club page in our database. Nobody is hiding it. It just is not written down. Which means the answer only exists in a conversation you have to start.

What the Schedule Tells You When the Policy Doesn't

A club's calendar leaks its real position. Three clubs in our directory answer the question structurally without ever stating a policy:

Medfield Youth Soccer (Medfield, MA) organizes high-school-age teams in the spring only, based on interest. Fall is left to the schools. The policy is the schedule.
Internationals SC (Medina, OH) runs a "Fall Team for High School Players (U15-U18)" as a distinct program alongside its ECNL and regional teams. A separate roster for kids whose fall belongs to their school.
Saints Soccer Academy (Portland, ME) holds ongoing tryouts through fall and winter and explicitly encourages "players finishing Rec or High School seasons" to register — a club that expects the high school season to happen and plans intake around it.

Then there is a whole category of clubs selling high school preseason camps — Hartford Athletic Youth Academy and Ole Soccer in Connecticut, Target Soccer Academy in New Hampshire, FC Puma Soccer Academy in Vermont. A club that sells preparation for high school tryouts is not a club that will fight you over playing in them.

Use this when you evaluate clubs. Pull up the program list and the calendar. If high-school-age programming clusters in spring and winter, or the club sells a preseason camp, the fall is understood to belong to the school. If the club runs a full fall season for U15-U19 with no high school accommodation anywhere in its structure, ask a much more pointed question.

What to Ask, and Who to Ask

Ask the club:

"Which league and which division?" For MLS NEXT, Homegrown or Academy Division. This one answer settles most of it.
"What is your policy on players playing high school soccer?" Ask for it in writing.
"Does that answer change at U16 or U17?" Some clubs are relaxed at U14 and much less so as college recruiting ramps up.
"What happens to training and playing time during the high school season?" "Allowed" and "supported" are different things. A club can permit high school soccer and still cost your kid their starting spot for it.
"Who on staff has done this before?" Ask to speak to a parent whose kid played both last season.

Ask the school:

"What is our state association's outside-competition rule for soccer, and how does this school apply it?" Athletic director, in writing, before you commit.

The strongest version of question 4 is not a question at all. Ask whether your kid can join a training session or two on a trial basis — many clubs allow this, and some offer it before you ask. Watching a practice tells you about the coach. Joining one tells you how your kid responds to the coach, and gives you a parent-to-parent conversation on the sideline while you wait. Our how to choose a club guide covers the full question list.

The Tradeoff, Honestly

If you are weighing a Homegrown Division spot against high school soccer, be clear-eyed about what each one gives you.

High school soccer is generally not the stronger development environment. The coaching level is uneven, the competition varies wildly by district, and the season is short. If pure development over the next three years is the only thing you are measuring, club soccer wins on the merits.

That is not why families want it. High school soccer is playing with the kids you sit next to in class. It is a home game under the lights, a student section, a school jersey, a bus ride. It runs four years and it does not come back. Parents consistently tell us this is the thing they most regret trading away, and almost never the thing they regret keeping.

So the honest framing is not "development versus fun." It is: your kid gets a marginal development gain in exchange for a social experience with a hard expiration date. For a player genuinely in contention for a professional pathway, that trade can be worth it. For the other 95%+ of players — including most who go on to play in college — it usually isn't. Our college recruiting guide covers what actually moves the needle with college coaches, and high school soccer is not what does it. Neither is skipping it.

When This Actually Matters

Age-qualify this whole conversation before you let it drive a club decision.

U8-U12: it does not apply yet. There is no high school team. Do not choose a club at U10 based on a high school policy that may not exist in the same form by the time your kid is 15, at a club whose coaching staff will have turned over at least once. Choose on the quality of a Tuesday practice and the length of the drive. See our age-by-age guide.

U13-U14: start asking. This is when tier-one leagues begin and when the answer starts to have consequences. Ask now so the answer is not a surprise later, but understand you are asking about a decision that is still two years out.

U15-U19: this is the decision. High school soccer is live, college recruiting is live, and the two calendars collide in the fall. For many families at this age, the high school question narrows the club list faster than cost or level does. If it is non-negotiable in your house, say so out loud at the first tryout conversation and let it filter your options early.

FAQs

Can my kid play club and high school soccer at the same time?

Usually yes. Girls Academy mandates it, DPL, EDP, NECSL, NPL and state leagues allow it, and ECNL generally allows it as a club-level decision. The main exception is the MLS NEXT Homegrown Division, which requires a waiver. Separately, confirm your state athletic association's outside-competition rule with your school's athletic director.

Does MLS NEXT allow high school soccer?

It depends on the division. The Academy Division allows it with no waiver. The Homegrown Division restricts it — you need a waiver from MLS Player Development, granted only where financial aid or private school admission depends on high school soccer. Middle school waivers are not available. Ask any MLS NEXT club which division it plays in.

Does ECNL allow high school soccer?

Generally yes, but there is no league-wide mandate the way Girls Academy has one. It is decided club by club. Some ECNL clubs are fully supportive; others schedule in ways that make it hard. Ask the specific club, get the answer from the coach who will actually have your kid, and ask whether it changes at U16.

Will playing high school soccer hurt my kid's college recruiting?

Not by itself. College coaches recruit primarily from club showcases, league play, and ID camps — high school soccer is rarely where they find players. But skipping it does not help recruiting either. Playing both is the normal path for the large majority of college players. See our college recruiting guide.

My club says yes but the school says no. Now what?

The school wins on school eligibility — it controls the roster your kid wants to be on. Start with the athletic director to understand exactly which activity triggers the problem, since some rules restrict competition but not training. Then bring that specific constraint back to the club. Clubs that regularly have high school players usually already know how to work within their state's rule.

Why doesn't the club just publish its policy?

We wish they would. Of 1,494 approved clubs in our directory, none states one. It is not usually evasion — high school policy tends to live in a coach's head and a league handbook rather than on a website. If you run a club, claiming your profile and writing the answer down is a genuine advantage over every club that hasn't.

Can my kid play middle school soccer while in a club program?

Same two-gate structure, with one hard exception: MLS NEXT Homegrown does not offer middle school waivers at all. Most other leagues treat middle school like high school. State association rules generally apply at the high school level, so for middle school the binding answer usually comes from the club and the school district.

What if my kid wants to play a second sport too?

That is a scheduling question more than an eligibility one, and it points you toward the lighter-commitment leagues. EDP and NECSL both work well for multi-sport athletes. A tier-one club training four nights a week will not flex around a second varsity season.

What to Do Next

Establish the league and division for every club on your list. For MLS NEXT, get Homegrown or Academy Division in writing.
Email your athletic director and ask how your state association's outside-competition rule applies to soccer at your school. Do this before tryouts, not after.
Read the club's program list and calendar for high-school-age teams, spring-only scheduling, or a preseason camp. The structure tells you more than the sales pitch.
Ask the five club questions above, including whether the answer changes at U16.
Ask to join a training session and talk to a parent whose kid played both last season.
Decide the high school question before you shortlist, not after. If it is non-negotiable, it should filter your list on day one.
Search what is actually near you. Browse clubs by location or take the Club Finder quiz, and check the tryout calendar — tier-one clubs can begin evaluations as early as April.