Reply to US soccer rumors of changing back age groups?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]They need to make teams based on a 6 month age band. Jan-June and July to Dec. That would solve a lot of problems.

Most of you should have noticed that the top teams consist of players primarily from the Jan- June birth years...otherords kids with the higher graduation year. For example, look at any U17 ECNL or GA team. About 75 percent of the players are Class of 2022 (some cases more).. About 25 percent are Class of 2023.  Same for any 05 team as well.

The only thing the age change accomplished was to change the RAE to benefit the Jan - May birth month kid verse the Sept- Dec birth month kids in order to align birth months with international competition standards.

From a players prospective, it caused the kids with the later birth months to get washed out.

From a development prospective, this is horrible because we are awarding the older player while discarding a large portion of the younger players while kids are still developing and growing. So forth and so on.

Go to six age bands and double the amount of teams per age group. That will begin to solve any of problems. Very simple. [/quote]

This would only matter and work through about 6-7th grade. It should absolutely be done for elementary age players but not so much beyond that.

Other solutions like bio banding should be looked into for truly small at age players. But for girls, once you hit 15 97% of the growing is done.[/quote]

Yes, it might not be as much of a big deal for girls. For boys it is a very big deal. God forbid you are a boy with a fall birthday who is also small.

One of my kids is an August birthday who potentially might not fall within the birth year of his classmates (cut off for school is September 1). I liked the old age group because it kids like mine a choice. My son was happier and did better playing slightly "up" with his classmates than playing as the oldest on a younger team. There is a small segment of kids who  might fall into this group with school year cutoffs, as opposed to 4 plus months of kids who are disadvantaged with the birth year cutoff.

It does get harder playing up for boys with the disparity in growth during the middle school years. [/quote]

While boys grow later it simply becomes increasingly difficult to maintain that many age groups through middle and high school. bio banding based on actual growth percentile is the best solution for kids who fall into the extremes of the growth bell curve. There is no need at those older ages to maintain dual age groups for players who fall outside 75%-85% of the general population.

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