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Travel Soccer teams around NOVA let's discuss
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Anonymous
Well, if you are actively trying to prevent your kids from making friends outside of their grade at school, I can see how the US Soccer mandate would cause problems for you. I am assuming most people are happy or neutral about the possibility of their children making new friends. |
Anonymous
So if implemented next year (starting with June 2016 tryouts), a current U13 seventh grader born August-December would try- out in June for U14 as per usual, but the U13 on the same team born Jan-July would have the option of trying out for U13 or trying out "up" with his current seventh grade teammates for U14, am I correct? |
Anonymous
The angst is with the parents of rec kids. Travel kids don't play with all of their classmates. Different schools and very often different ages I within a travel team. |
Anonymous
And travel doesn't start until U9, anyway. People are less worried about the tween and teen travel players and more worried about the kindergartners who have to play a bunch of first-graders. |
Anonymous
But won't the kindergartners (Sept. to December) be on teams that are majority first graders (Jan-August)? Playing against other teams with the same mix? Under the old system and the new, the youngest kids play with and against kids can be almost a full year older. It's just that now the parents with the Sept.-December kids will fret that their kids are the youngest on the team instead of parents of the May-July kids under the old system. It doesn't seem like a big deal. |
Anonymous
Who cares about "playing against other teams"? We're not talking about competitive balance at U6. We're talking about kindergartners going to practice with and playing alongside teammates that are mostly first-graders. Is it a big deal? Compared to, I don't know, Hurricane Katrina, no. But is it necessary? No! So why alienate any kindergartners when there's no good reason to do it? There's no U6 World Cup -- why force "international standards" at that age? |
Anonymous
We're talking about the oldest kindergartners playing alongside some teammates who are medium and young 1st graders. It is not clear to me why that circumstance should result in any alienation for anyone, but if kids or parents are concerned about the idea of the kindergartners playing with kids who are from 1 to 11 months (at most) older, or feel strongly that they only want to be involved with their kids classmates, there are other options. The new mandates only apply to US soccer sanctioned leagues and events, so parents would be free to form or join kindergarten-only groups that don't participate in anything formal. And while there is no U6 World Cup, some kids who are U6 now will play in the World Cup. IMO, it would be nice if a greater percentage of American kids had the opportunity to be part of the sort of soccer culture that could help the best and most serious among them develop into soccer players capable of playing with the best players in the world. The less serious or less talented players will not be harmed by learning to play soccer in a model that more closely approximates successful ones from other countries--it's fun to learn how to do things the right way, and they can gain skills that will help them as high school players or in pick-up games. Kids who just want to run around and have fun with their classmates and don't really care about the soccer part of it will still be able to do so. That's a long-winded way of saying that I'm still not seeing why anyone will find this to be a real problem at any age other than for the current older high school teams. If anyone disagrees, I'd be interested to read a more detailed explanation of the cause(es) for concern. |
Anonymous
There are a few articles out there. I guarantee you putting kids with other kids of their age and class will neither win us the World Cup nor lose it. I mean -- if we want to do things the way they're done in the rest of the world, a much bigger priority would be dismantling the entire travel soccer industry as we know. Leave only free-to-play academies who don't give a flying crap about winning trophies in U9 and don't travel 300 miles for a league game. Everything else would be recreational, but then we could borrow Germany's system of sending federation-trained coaches all over the country to do sessions with those "recreational" players with an eye toward possibly bringing them into a pro academy at some point. (Some pro clubs in Germany will say you shouldn't quit "recreational" soccer until U12. No one cares who you're playing in games, and if you're getting a lot of touches on the ball, some of them with good coaches, you're doing all you need to do.) And this whole "oh, kids who really like soccer will think differently" notion just doesn't hold water. Everyone starts as a rec player. Christen Press started as a daisy-picker who wasn't even interested in her game, but some nice coach and some nice club still made it fun for her, and now she's a World Cup champion. No one came in and told her, "Oh, I'm sorry, little girl -- you need to be playing with the U6s instead of your friends because that's the way we think it's done in France." |
Anonymous
| Soccer is done outside of school, so I'm not sure why it would matter what grade a child is in. Is it really common that your Kindergartener would be on a team with mostly his classmates now? In my experience, my child's been on teams with a few schoolmates, a handful of times with a classmate. |
Anonymous
Yes. 80% of my child's team is with their classmates. The rest are private school kids. |
Anonymous
| Keep in mind that kids in other countries have many more options to play pick up soccer with their friends. |
Anonymous
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Isn't the set-up such that the older August - December kids generally play with their current grade level, and the younger January- July kids would play with a few kids a year younger in school?
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Anonymous
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No, the new set up groups by birth year. In our school district, the oldest kid in any given grade is born on October 1 (not counting kids who were held back) and the youngest on September 31. So the kids born between October 1-December 31 are actually born in the same "birth year" as the kids in the grade above them who were born between January 1 and September 31. So those three months of birthdays (oct-dec) would play with mostly kids in the grade above them.
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Anonymous
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I follow this thread because I have older kids playing travel soccer. I agree that for those kids, the shift in groupings is probably not that big of a deal. They are committed to travel soccer because they love soccer for the sport itself. They are committed to training multiple times per week and they understand that travel is not what you do if you want to play with your neighborhood friends. By the time you are old enough to play travel soccer, there is probably not much of a difference between an older fourth grader say, and a younger fifth grader. But I also have a preschooler with a fall birthday and here is why I think this new rule might make it a little harder for some of these really little kids to fall in love with soccer early on. Not impossible, just harder.
I think there is a HUGE difference in every developmental way between a four year old finger painting at preschool for a few hours a week and a kindergartener attending elementary school all day, riding the bus, receiving instruction in all the core subjects as well as PE, art, music. I think there are also huge developmental difference between a rising kindergartner and a first grader with a full year of elementary school behind them. I think as every year goes on these differences diminish, until you get to the point where I agree there is probably not much difference at all between a fifth grader with a November birthday and a young sixth grader for example. But at these young ages the differences that extra year of schooling make are huge and it is more than just the difference of the same number of months but between kids in the same grade. These kids are just not on the same level emotionally, socially, cognitively focus etc. Yet under this new rule a four year old pre-K child born in the fall would no longer be eligible for our club's introductory preschool U5 soccer program with other preschoolers because they are in the same birth year as the U6 kids who are already playing games. So these preschool kids would go right to games with the kindergartners (who not only are so far ahead developmentally in all the non soccer ways, but were also all eligible for two seasons of U5 soccer when they were in preschool). It's not that I am worried that these younger kids will be the "worst soccer players" on the team - there is always someone who is the youngest, someone who has never played before on any team. Sometimes, this will even be your own kid. But take the developmental differences and then add into the mix that these younger kids are not with many of the kids they know from school (Maybe we are just spoiled but our club does place kids together with other kids from their elementary school to try to make it as fun as possible for them). So the question then, is whether some of these younger kids will be so far behind the kids in the older grade in every developmental way and not with their buddies from school that attempting to play with these kids in the grade ahead won't be fun, and they won't want to stick around until these developmental differences begin to diminish. So if the point is to try to make it FUN for these little kids so they want to keep playing and keep signing up, then the new rule just makes that objective a little more difficult to achieve at the youngest age groups. Not impossible to achieve. Just a little harder. Obviously these are not major life problems, and if your biggest problem is that your kindergartner has to play soccer with first graders, then you should thank your lucky stars every day. But I think whether you think this matters at all or not depends on what it is you want to get out of soccer. Someone on this thread mentioned that somewhere out there there are U6 kids who are going to play in the world cup and wouldn't it be great if we could give them everything they need to succeed. Sure, that would be nice. But you need to balance the needs of that handful of kids with the fact that the majority of parents don't have future world cup players or even future travel players for that matter. Most parents just sign their kids up for rec soccer hoping that it will be fun, and that they will keep playing long enough to develop a lifelong love of physical activity, spend some time away from screens, and maybe learn some life lessons about teamwork and working hard along the way. I just think this new rule makes it less fun for some of these these little kids than it otherwise would have been at the precise time they are being introduced to organized sports, and I am just not really sure I understand how applying this rule nationwide to travel and rec players from pre-K to high school really does anything positive for most kids (who are not and will never be elite soccer players), regardless of how it works elsewhere in the world. |
Anonymous
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I think what they are trying to do is mesh the international setup with the research. Research (on primarily physical sports) indicates that the earlier born kids in the age group get better coaching from the early ages (because they are physically bigger/faster), and the early extra attention continues that early advantage at the detriment of the jan-July kids. In the current U.S. Format these early ID players are the Aug-dec kids, but when those kids get to the older age groups and the international setup they are now the younger kids in the international age groups. The older international birth year kids were the lesser/younger players in their U.S. Teams.
For those handful of international players this makes sense - but it may have an impact on the younger rec set. Soccer is so social for the early kids, and breaking up the oct-dec kids from their school age peers may intimidate them and take some of the social part out of it before they get to the point of loving the sport so they play more for the sport than the social aspect. |