It will never ever be skills points you are missing. My training philosophy is as following:

1. Find Physicals caps.
2. Then decide the player's position based on Physical caps.
3. Play the player in friendlies and bot stomps, while training primary and secondary skills of the desired position.

This will result in a player having primary at the desired level, and possible the secondary skills are reasonable level before reaching maximum BPOS based on talent level.

Odball wrote: there is no real reason to have the YA yes u may get 2 points more on a stat than normal. u can pick one with good physicals but its still a lottery on his caps and talent. so wasted money imho it doesnt take that long to catch up when u have full coaches anyway.

6 or 7 training points over 3 or 4 skills would take 15+ weeks. That's easily going to cost $30k+ in wages. Obviously you still need to get lucky with talent and caps but it doesn't adversely effect that any.

I don't recall the exact points and I don't feel like looking them up at this time, but I'm thinking that a player's starting skills range from 1-5 pts without a youth academy and from 1-6 with a youth academy. The higher skills do NOT affect Intelligence, speed, strength, stamina, teamwork, consistency, or talent.

The only useful aspect of the youth academy as it's currently implemented is that you get to choose from up to 4 players, which gives you a better chance of getting a younger player, and seeing the physicals of each player, which allows you to shorten some training time there IF the player is worth training up.

I just have the first level youth academy, and I like having three guys to choose from instead of two. I feel like I get a 16 year old almost every week. If I can pick one with slightly higher speed (the only attribute I know), that will save me some time training physicals as well.