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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Which is better for DD's development, to play at age (u13) on a higher quality team or up (u14) on a lesser quality team? Both teams play in same league so overall competition is similar (other than age effects), quality of coaching is also similar, and she would start on both teams. Seems to come down to whether it's better to play with and against bigger / faster / stronger players or with teammates who have significantly better skills.[/quote]

Playing up generally doesn't mean playing against better quality (mostly bigger not faster) if those are your options. My daughter's team wasted an entire spring season "playing up" for the bigger field against just horrible teams to get used to the bigger pitch. I get how some smaller clubs are forced to combine age groups, but you are almost always better playing against the top age competition assuming it's actually available near you.[/quote]Most of the teams playing up at u13 are playing mostly 2 or 3rd teams. Take the GA teams, they can’t play GA or Aspire teams so they are in EDP no mans land. Most of their tourneys are the same. Also, there is a reason why most of the world wants to hold off on 11v11 until u14 let alone 10/ 11 year olds. Most parents love the idea of playing up for the perception of an early advantage. However, it’s the long game. IYKYK[/quote]

Short version is if you're playing up, the league you're in matters a lot. It's not a good experience if you're dominating every game playing up, but it can be a lot better than playing same-age because the quality of teams in the pre-MLS/ECNL/GA leagues varies so much at u12.

Longer version is my DC's team played up a year for the last few seasons and there's been some good and some bad. Playing at our age group was a mixed bag because there were 2-3 close games and the rest were blowouts. Playing up the first two years was almost worse because almost all the games were blowout. As other said, we were playing second or third teams who were bigger but not better. Not sure our kids got better from playing up. Then last year when they were a u12 team, they played up in u13 league and that was shockingly the best experience. The top u13 teams were off to MLS/ECNL/GA/etc, but the teams we played were either other top u12 teams or top teams whose clubs don't have an option for MLS/etc. The teams they played against were generally similarly skilled as our team but bigger and faster which forced our kids to play smarter. Then we'd go back to playing our normal u12 league and it a lot less fun (same as before where only 2-3 games are competitive and rest aren't). We played in some tournaments against other u12 teams that hadn't played up and you could see the difference. Our team had to fight every single u13 game whereas the other teams were only used to competing in a handful of games each season. Looking at this year, I'm not going to say it was life changing and we're suddenly far ahead of the other teams, but playing up was the highlight of last year from a team development perspective.[/quote]

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