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| J at U9 |
At the end of the summer season last year was the first time I started to entertain the possibility of our kids playing elsewhere. When I picked J up from evaluations (deciding at the end of July which team your child will be placed on for a season starting the following May) he was upset. He said that he didn't know why they bothered with evaluations because they already knew who was on the top team (not him). He said that the top team kids didn't pass to him at all during the evaluation scrimmages, so he never got any opportunity to show what he could do. I didn't watch the evals, so he might have been right, or he might have been exaggerating, but he was visibly deflated. This came after a season in which he hated going to soccer at all. He had some good friends on the team, and I think that was the only reason we got him to finish out the season.
That ride home with J, was the primary reason we enrolled J in a private soccer coaching academy. He very much wanted to improve, and hadn't had any real coaching to do so over his previous few seasons. You could see the disparity pretty clearly between the top team who had just won state at a level higher than J's team played at and the half of J's team who actually showed up at all for evaluations. The kids who knew they would make the top team, and the kids who felt like it was a waste of their time to even be there. That was pretty much how it played out too. One player from J's team made the top team, but the remaining handful were placed on a half roster with the assumption that somehow enough boys would be found to fill out a team by the following spring. I was relieved that J had the soccer academy coaching to look forward to. He finally got good coaching to help him with skills he wasn't proficient at, and he got lots of opportunities to play soccer throughout the year.
I wrote in my last post about this soccer season, so I won't rehash the details here. However, we are nearing the end of the season and it is time to look forward. There is still a top team/bottom team problem in the club, and it is more pronounced because they move to U13 and 11v11 in the fall. Both teams need bigger rosters to cope with a bigger field. For the most part I think that kids from our city leave our club for other clubs, so magically attracting enough boys to fill out two rosters is likely a long shot. I found myself looking up evaluation schedules for neighboring clubs because of this fact. J might make the top team this time around, but I'm not sure I want him to. When the options are make the top team and deal with not really feeling like you are part of the team, or being on the leftover roster that will hopefully fill in with enough boys to play it seems like a simple choice to find a different club to play for.
It isn't a simple choice to leave though. We went to our city's fireworks last night where we sat with 3 different soccer families. At one point I looked up and J was sitting with 5 or 6 of his teammates laughing and having a great time. If we leave nothing really changes for the club, J is just a name taking up a roster spot or not. I don't think they would even ask us why we left. I've asked J what he wants, and ultimately he just wants to play with his friends. He only wants to go to another club if his friends do too. He doesn't want to be on a leftover roster either though. He loves soccer, and he wants to play on a team filled with kids who love to play as much as he does. I'm still not sure what we will do, but I hope that either way J continues to love playing as much as he does right now. I also hope that I can keep it about what J wants, and not what my ego wants for him.
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