A&H

Junior/Youth What do I do??

one said:
I used to be part of the committee in a club with 40 or so junior teams (U16 and under) for a few years.

Alomst every single junior teams who got the wooden spoon was dismantled the following year because some players did not re-register and most others going to a different clubs. They generally had to play their last few games short or forfiet. It's a fact. Interpret it whichever way you like.
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Well its a fact that if you have a competitive league, there will ALWAYS be a team that wins it and there will ALWAYS be a team that finishes bottom or last.

There will ALWAYS be some matches where teams beat others heavily - basic facts of football - I'm thinking if players/parents can't accept this, they are perhaps in the wrong sport, or indeed maybe should avoid sport altogether - there are always losers in any sport!
 
The Referee Store
alexgr said:
Punishing players for being good at football? Absolutely not.
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Don't get me wrong, I would carry on playing even if 20-0. But if there has to be some kind of equalisation surely it is better that the game carries on with the winning team having one less player, than the entire team being punished as the game ends?
 
I'm watching LIVROM and wondering if the ref should show some sympathy - maybe ask LIV to go down to 10 players, or perhaps blow the whistle for full time early? 😂
 
The only solution to the problem of teams getting hammered, is to do everything possible to prevent such games taking place. Leagues need to do more to grade teams and promote/relegate mid-season for the younger age groups. The Herts Mercy Rule is wrong in that it states the referee must....
On the one occasion i had a team winning by 10 goals, i just gave the coaches/kids the choice and both teams were happy to plough on. On the other hand, I've had numerous teams pleading to sack it off when 5 or 6 adrift
 
PinnerPaul said:
Well its a fact that if you have a competitive league, there will ALWAYS be a team that wins it and there will ALWAYS be a team that finishes bottom or last.

There will ALWAYS be some matches where teams beat others heavily - basic facts of football - I'm thinking if players/parents can't accept this, they are perhaps in the wrong sport, or indeed maybe should avoid sport altogether - there are always losers in any sport!
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Not necessarily disagreeing with you but there is more to it than just accepting there are losers in competitive sport. There is a difference between accepting you have lost a game or some games and you are a loser (every game in a entire season). Every decent parent wants to teach their kid how to accept losing. No parent want to teach their kid to accept being a loser.

And there are those who rightly or wrongly thinks the coach/manager is to blame and with a better coach the team would be doing much better. Or the club graded the team in the wrong division and didn't do enough to regrade them after they had 40 goal against them in the first three rounds. Also there is the plastic trophy hunting teams who deliberately under grade themselves and thump every team week in week out. And the league who only want their rego money and don't care if after three rounds everyone already knows who is going to be the premiers and who is going to get the wooden spoon. And...

There is the idealistic view and there is the practical view and the two are not always the same.

I refereed a schools girls futsal game a couple of yeas ago (5 a side, 15 min halves). Red school had 4 players only. After the game started I figured why only 4 showed up. They could hardly kick the ball and if they could manage to kick it (in any direction) they cheered as if they have scored a goal. Green on the other hand had three subs and you could tell most of them played Representative futsal/football outside of school. At half time the score was 32 - 0 (in 15 minutes). I approached the coach of green team, a teacher in her 20s, and said it would be beneficial to both sides if she lent at least one player to the other side so that they can play against a full team and her players would get more game time. Her response "why would I want to strengthen the other side?" I didn't insist because I realised I'd be hitting my head against a brick wall (a teacher who doesn't realise she teaches kids more than just maths, English and whats in the text books). Red team had a player turn up 5 min into the second half and the game ended up 56 - 0. What really got me worried was that I heard the green team's "fantastic achievement' was announced at the school assembly the next day.
 
Losing every game in a season does not make anyone a "loser" in the sense you mean......
A "loser" in the common parlance is someone who is unsuccessful in life generally not in a single aspect of it.
You seem to be trying to stretch the principles of safeguarding far beyond their intent. Where in the following does being beaten by a cricket score or losing every match in a season fall?

protecting children from maltreatment
preventing impairment of children’s health and development
ensuring that children grow up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care and
taking action to enable all children to have the best outcomes

Unless of course your understanding of the last is that everyone should be a winner or at least there should be no losers?
 
I don't think its about protecting kids from losing, or from feeling like "losers". For me its about recognising when a player or players (or a team) are getting disheartened, and working out how you can keep them engaged in the sport. The objective from mini-soccer to youth, as its first principle, must be to keep kids interested. If you keep kids interested, they will turn up for training as well as for matches. They will be outside running around and not permanently stuck on their phones/xboxes/playstations* (*replace with indoor-based electronic device of choice). A positive side effect of that will be that some of those kids will be really keen on football. Some of those really keen players will be actually quite good. Some of the players will improve significantly. Some will progress to county football, a tiny tiny minority will be signed on to professional clubs' academies. Others will keep playing up to and beyond the legal drinking age, and become our nemesis on a Sunday morning. But by ensuring kids don't become disheartened through their formative years, we keep the game alive. And this can be done by balancing leagues as best can be done, and not by other artificial constructs such as shortening a game midway through, or reducing the opposition size to below that of the team being beaten. Playing for 60/70/80 minutes and being beaten 3-1 is a great losing scoreline. Being annihilated 18-0 is painful. Enduring that loss week in week out is wrong, and does no favours either to the winning team or to the losing team.

A long rambling post that would be better posted on a coaching forum I think. As a referee you have no responsibility other than refereeing the game in front of you. If you have 11 versus 10 and the winning, larger team want to take a player off to even things up, sure - no problem. "Ref, we're losing 15 nil, can you blow the whistle early?"... "Sorry, I have to play two halves of equal length." The time to have agreed a shorter playing time was before kick off" (of course, if they know the LotG, they might realise they can take "injured" players off and reduce the team size to below the legal limit...). If the coach simply takes all his players off and march away - that's fine, report the facts. Feel for them, but don't play to your own set of laws to cater for them.
 
xPositor said:
I don't think its about protecting kids from losing, or from feeling like "losers". For me its about recognising when a player or players (or a team) are getting disheartened, and working out how you can keep them engaged in the sport. The objective from mini-soccer to youth, as its first principle, must be to keep kids interested. If you keep kids interested, they will turn up for training as well as for matches. They will be outside running around and not permanently stuck on their phones/xboxes/playstations* (*replace with indoor-based electronic device of choice). A positive side effect of that will be that some of those kids will be really keen on football. Some of those really keen players will be actually quite good. Some of the players will improve significantly. Some will progress to county football, a tiny tiny minority will be signed on to professional clubs' academies. Others will keep playing up to and beyond the legal drinking age, and become our nemesis on a Sunday morning. But by ensuring kids don't become disheartened through their formative years, we keep the game alive. And this can be done by balancing leagues as best can be done, and not by other artificial constructs such as shortening a game midway through, or reducing the opposition size to below that of the team being beaten. Playing for 60/70/80 minutes and being beaten 3-1 is a great losing scoreline. Being annihilated 18-0 is painful. Enduring that loss week in week out is wrong, and does no favours either to the winning team or to the losing team.

A long rambling post that would be better posted on a coaching forum I think. As a referee you have no responsibility other than refereeing the game in front of you. If you have 11 versus 10 and the winning, larger team want to take a player off to even things up, sure - no problem. "Ref, we're losing 15 nil, can you blow the whistle early?"... "Sorry, I have to play two halves of equal length." The time to have agreed a shorter playing time was before kick off" (of course, if they know the LotG, they might realise they can take "injured" players off and reduce the team size to below the legal limit...). If the coach simply takes all his players off and march away - that's fine, report the facts. Feel for them, but don't play to your own set of laws to cater for them.
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I think you've kind of hit the nail on the head with your final paragraph there. As referees, we have no obligation towards targeting a close game, our job is to give correct, fair decisions regarding what is put in front of us. But I don't think that precludes a bit of common sense, or a quiet word that reminds the manager of an U11s team that is winning by 10 goals that he could take a player off, or lend a sub to the short-staffed opponents to balance things up and that this action would be totally fine with you.

You're under no obligation to do so, but given that I think a lot of us referee in part due to a love of the game, I think it's reasonable to ask what we can do within our powers to help the game as a whole.
 
Mintyref said:
Losing every game in a season does not make anyone a "loser" in the sense you mean......
A "loser" in the common parlance is someone who is unsuccessful in life generally not in a single aspect of it.
You seem to be trying to stretch the principles of safeguarding far beyond their intent. Where in the following does being beaten by a cricket score or losing every match in a season fall?

protecting children from maltreatment
preventing impairment of children’s health and development
ensuring that children grow up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care and
taking action to enable all children to have the best outcomes

Unless of course your understanding of the last is that everyone should be a winner or at least there should be no losers?
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Never mention safeguarding. A lot of posts here about learning from the experice etc etc makes sense. But they come from adults with a good level of maturity. Idealy a 15 year old has the same level of maturity but that is not the case in the real world. Some parents have both the maturity and patience to guide their kids through the experience to make sure they come out as a better person at the end of it. But in practice they either don't know better or just take the easy (and poor) option of taking the kid out.

Those who stay in it, as kid, losing becomes an acceptance for all the wrong reasons. And that is the reason behind my reference between losers and accepting losing.
 
I think we need to bear in mind that this was a U-15 game, which at this stage of the season means that at least some of the players (possibly a good percentage of them) would be 16 already. In at least 12 countries in the world (including Scotland) these players would be considered to have reached the age of full legal capacity or majority.

Yes, we have to be mindful of protecting children but here we have players who are on the threshold of adulthood and who in the not too distant future will be playing in open age leagues (some 16 year-olds probably are already) where they will have to be ready to accept the (sometimes harsh) realities of life.
 
Peter Grove said:
I think we need to bear in mind that this was a U-15 game, which at this stage of the season means that at least some of the players (possibly a good percentage of them) would be 16 already. In at least 12 countries in the world (including Scotland) these players would be considered to have reached the age of full legal capacity or majority.

Yes, we have to be mindful of protecting children but here we have players who are on the threshold of adulthood and who in the not too distant future will be playing in open age leagues (some 16 year-olds probably are already) where they will have to be ready to accept the (sometimes harsh) realities of life.
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Another post from a mature adult.

"who in the not too distant future will be playing in open age leagues" My point is from my experience, not many would.
 
one said:
My point is from my experience, not many would.
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In which case, football wasn't for them anyway .....

You can't be something you're not. It's a fact of life, for 5 year olds or 50 year olds. If you're a crap player and also happen to be playing in a crap team, then you're gonna get hammered by good teams with good players. The notion of "contriving" scorelines or results in order to preserve kids feelings or even for "retention" purposes anyway is frankly nonsensical and is indicative of a lot of what is wrong with our overly liberal society these days.

"Sorry son, but you're not as good as you'd like to be and nor is your team. Either find another team (and see if they'll even give you a game - don't get me started on that one ... :D) or try something else"

Retention isn't our concern. Always plenty of kids/adults wanting to play football - good and bad. :cool:
 
Big Cat said:
Don't agree with the last statement. Open Age Grass Roots Football is dying rapidly
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There's certainly a reduction in participants which is a great shame. Cricket is suffering hugely from this and it would be tragic to see local football suffer problems
 
Kes said:
You got a link to any stats that support your statement? :)
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In my area, West Herts Saturday League had six leagues in it when i played. Hertford & District League the same. The former now has two and the latter three. Nine Sunday Leagues in and around West Herts are now down to three. The London Commercial League once had nine leagues; it doesn't even exist any more. In my area, there are arguably more referees than there are games now (open age only), so if you're not much good, you'll get weeded out. Not for a moment do i think this trend is just a local thing
 
Kes said:
If you're a crap player and also happen to be playing in a crap team, then you're gonna get hammered by good teams with good players.
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Kes said:
Always plenty of kids/adults wanting to play football - good and bad.
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You are sort of hinting to one of points. Put all the crap teams with crap players in one comp (given there are plenty of them) and don't put any good teams with good players in that comp. Then you don't have a hammering. Problem solved. :)
 
Kes said:
You got a link to any stats that support your statement? :)
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No links but I can support it with experience from within my locality. The Sunday league I played in when I started no longer exists, and the majority of teams didn't join other league's. There were 6 divisions in thenother Sunday league I played in after that and now there are 3.

I think there will be figures online to suggest I'm correct (with male football anyway) but I cant be certain...
 
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