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[quote=Anonymous]

Just go away. You don’t understand competitive sports and the purpose of travel and rec sports. Your kid will not last long in travel sports.

Just because you paid does not mean playing time is an entitlement. 50% of minutes is fair. Take a look at DA game reports and you’ll see kids getting 10-20 minutes a game and they pay significantly more than U10.

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Yep. That’s me.

I have 3 kids who played youth soccer.  1 played 4 years of college. 1 played through u18 and is in Germany now - he switched to competitive lifting (there’s a dull sport to watch).   1 dropped out at u14 but is a heckuva drummer.  I coached 8 years myself and had my D license (lapsed long ago)  I have stood on the sidelines and watched my kids in at least 1000 youth games (my daughter at u14 played in 82 games - another dad and I figured that out a few years back.  Insanity of course but the goal then was to set the team up to win a USYSA national championship (just prior to ECNL days)).  Oh, and don’t forget about the 150 or so high school games (tried to get to most) and about 40 or so college games (can’t travel that much).  I also was an officer of our youth rec league for 4 years.  And, as my kids reffed I also took the certification classes and reffed for 4 years due to a shortage.

In retrospect I can say with some surety that exactly zero of all those club games meant anything other than maybe the  usysa regionals. (Never had a kid make finals).  And, the handful of games where my kids were being scouted.  Some of the college playoff games were “important” in the sense of team ranking and rivalry. More important to the kid than to us obviously.  By then though, as I have said before, you are mostly hoping to have your kid avoid getting hurt.

So - one thing all those years of experiences gives you is perspective.  And one large dose of parent perspective is that your kid’s team winning a u10 or u14 or u17 game, any game, means exactly zero.  Nothing at all.  What matters is whether your kid and others learned something at each stage, and whether they had fun at each stage.  That’s it.  So, with all that hindsight, that all good coaches and club directors have, it is easy to say:  play every kid as much as possible.  And if you have a concern that a kid is not good enough to play then don’t put them on the team and don’t take their money. Easy.

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