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[quote=Anonymous]
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The rec requirement is 50%. You need to stand down. Work harder or drop a team level. [/quote]

Is the kid’s family paying the same as everyone else?  If so, then he/she needs to play as much as they can.  50% is not a goal. It is a mininum that sometimes results when a team has lots of subs and coordination of subs can often get screwed up.  Still it is a coaches job to keep track.  And as pretty much every even half way decent coach can do that - if you have 2 subs and they are only playing half a game it is intentional.

Have a talk with the coaching director and if not satisfied then walk and demand a proportional percentage of your money back.  Let them know you will be talking to the other parents as well.  Explore other club options for the kid ASAP.   Most clubs can still take on a kid at that level.

Here’s the thing, between u9 and u18 your kid will play in exactly zero club games that matter or are in any way important.  Club soccer exists to improve players, not teams. Ever do a coaching license clinic?  From E to national A it is all about how best to improve individual players in a team practice construct. 
Players should always play and practice hard, and the coach should work hard to make every player better.  If a player is on a team and doing the work then they get to play. How much?  As much as reasonably possible.  Leagues and clubs will often put out a 50% minimum but that is a minimum.  Think of it as a 60mph minimum on the freeway. No one drives the minimum but it is there as a guideline.

If you have a coach who is worried about winning more than improving all the players - fire him or her and get a good coach.

As said before - if there is a kid you don’t want to play on the field as much as everyone else then don’t put the kid on the team, and don’t take their money.  I would add, over the years I have seen once when a kid just was misjudged at tryouts. I want to say it was u11 but around that time.  The kid was athletically behind.  I spoke with the kid’s dad a couple years later and learned the club offered to move the kid down to a lower team within the club.  They did not want that over concerns about potentially being made fun of for the late move. So the club found her a spot on another local club and paid the cost of her uniforms, refunded the fees paid by the parents and paid $1000 of the cost of the new club.

Finally, if your kid is going to play in college and/or professionally they need to be athletic and fast.  They also need to be working by themselves or with a friend or two all of the time.  Pretty much everyday that there is no practice.  Why?  Because that’s what their competition is doing.  It sounds nuts.  Crazy frankly. But, there you are.  I tell the story all the time now about our good friends’ son whose best friend growing up and still today is a Major League Baseball star player.  There is not a MLB team that wouldn’t kill to get him now.  (I know a front office guy in our local team and I tease him regularly about how they could of gotten him for a bag of baseballs after his rookie year).   Starting young and continuing through high school he worked on something almost everyday with his dad.  Hitting, fielding, throwing.  They had a cage set up in the basement. Sometimes friends would come over. And sometimes school or other sports would require more time. But, I would guess he and his dad probably worked 250 days out of most years on something baseball related between age 8 and 18.  Yes he obviously has the physical ability. Lots of kids work hard and just don’t have the coordination to hit a 95 mph fast ball or a curve that stays up a bit.  All through middle school and high school you would think he was just another athletic kid if you saw him. Not super big. Not super muscled up.   But, the point is - this guy is where he is now because he has the physical abilities and he worked on his skills by himself and with his dad all of the time.

In a much less lucrative way my daughter finally did the same thing in college.  She worked hard through her teens but in retrospect obviously not at the level she needed in order to compete.  When she got to college she played a fair amount her freshman year - getting time in most every game.  She played in only about half the games her sophomore year.  Starting after the season she and her boyfriend who played on the men’s team worked on something pretty much every day, and she kept it up through the summer.  She worked herself into a position where when a starter got hurt early in the season she went in and kept the position until she graduated.  The point being - you have to work more and harder than your competition, and almost all of that work will be outside of a team practice.

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