That poor kid. Dad needs a good hip check into the boards.

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Gnothi Seauton.

11 players on a team of 7 year olds in a non-competitive league is way to many. They should have 8 at the most.
11 gives you a a “first team”, an entire “second” team and 1 “extra kid”.
Do all teams in this league have this many players?
I assume they play 6 minute quarters. Trying to find playing time for 11 kids across 24 minutes is not easy.
How close are the scores of the games?

Coaching seven year olds is tough. I’ve done it in soccer. Some kids just don’t want to play. Partially because of their confidence. So when coach asks, “who is ready to go back in?” And 4 kids sit on their hands, it’s tough to force a kid to want to play.

Does your kid like to shoot baskets in his free time? If he does- encourage him to keep playing. If he never wants to see a basketball outside of games, find him something he enjoys more.

I agree with Tim. Just adding, I think the coaches should more evenly split the time but I don't think it's discrepant enough to make an issue of it. The best answer is to volunteer to coach next year and then you can do it as you judge to be fair.

Had a similar thing happen to my now 6 yr old in his bball league last year. Participation league, supposed to be equal time. The difference was that my son is tall for his age and athletic too, one of the better players. Not the best but definitely not the worst. But for 2 straight games he sat out 2 whole quarters while others played more. I did say something to the coaches and they were sorry. They actually did have a spreadsheet to help them figure out whom to pull and when, and my son's name was entered twice by mistake, so he was sitting double what everyone else was. The coaches were sorry and made it up over the next couple of games and fixed their spreadsheet. Apologized to my son too.

If you approach it in the right way, you might find its an honest mistake (albeit a weird coincidence) and they will immediately fix it.

 
You still haven't answered the question of whether or not the kids who don't play as much just plain suck or if they even want to play more. Sounds like you are creating a race issue where there isn't one and ignoring all other possibilities.

Here is a fact in life, if your kid sucks at bball, he won't get playing time in Jr. High, High school, College, etc. unless he gets better. If you want more playing time, get better. With all the crying about millennial snowflakes that goes on around here it is interesting to see a thread full of parents getting upset about 5 minutes of play time difference between good players and bad players in the everybody gets a trophy league and then going as far as to make it a race issue. Jesus, talk about breeding snowflakes.

Like JD said, if your kid wants to play more, tell him to ask his coach what to work on and how to get better so he gets more time. Intervening with your participation spreadsheet isn't going to help your kid at all and will likely just embarrass him out of the sport.

How about just dodging the subject and saying: it would be nice if every possible rotation played together so that all the kids play together and know each other better?
And just provide a rotation schedule. 11 players. You have 462 (11!/(6!x5!))possible combinations. And you get to teach combinatorics to the kids.

It's a church league for crying out loud. Not the fucking golden state warriors...
Maybe all the white kids are the ones that suck and didn't make it in their school team. Maybe they're the snowflakes so they play in the little everyone plays church league...

Youth team sports are trouble. I hate them. My daughter has one individual sport (swimming) and one team sport (soccer). I'm so glad when it is swim season.

Some coaches are more competitive than others and will gravitate towards the better players, even when the intent is equal playing time. Maybe he doesn't even know he's doing that, unless there is an objective measuring system, it would be easy to get off balance.

Our daughter's youth soccer coach does a great job of getting everyone playing time, yet staying competitive. She puts the "participant" level players strategically throughout the lineup and in places where the "competitive" players can cover up their mistakes/lack of talent. That way, they still win games, but everybody gets to play. There was one tournament that she (the coach) couldn't attend and so another guy "guest coached" and didn't have nearly the same strategy and it showed, badly. None of the girls had any fun in the games where they were being soundly defeated.

Did I mention how much I like swim season.

This isn't a playing time issue for you. It's a race issue. Otherwise, you would have just said, "My son is on a non-competitive basketball team where they are supposed to play equally, and he is not. What should I do?"

Once you realize this fact, you'll know how to approach it.

I have been a coach on several teams like this. There is a simple way to make the playing time equal, but an amazing number of adults don't understand how to do it.

We were instructed to set up the rotation schedule at the beginning of the season. Then at the beginning of the next game, just pick up where we left off the previous one. Whether it was baseball batting order, or soccer, or football you just continued like it was one long game as far as playing time was concerned. If a kid was not there, you just skipped him/her in the rotation for that week.

I did notice that the coaches that could not grasp this simple concept tended to be the ones who always played their best kids the most by restarting the rotation every week.

ETA: When the kids did tryouts, they got a numerical ranking as to how they did (speed, agility, etc based on a stopwatch). Then the "draft" was just putting the highest ranking kid on team 1, the next on team 2, etc. This way the teams were as even as practical. This is also the order of the roster so that in theory the most skilled kids are playing each other and then as the substitutions happen, the teams are still fairly equal. Some coaches restarted the roster every week either because it was easier, or they wanted their best players to play more.

The more I read, the more I come back to my original question I asked in my first post: Is ~equal playing time mandated by an actual rule for this league? Or is equal playing time an assumption on someone's part?

I think if everyone plays between 1.5 and 2 quarters that is pretty close to even. I am assuming 8 min quarters so your talking every one playing 12 to 16 mins a piece. The challenge is you have an uneven number of players, too many players for even minutes.

What age group are we talking about here?

It's not really a sensitive topic as some kids are played more than others on every rec or select level youth team in the world. On top of that, its not worth the trouble to mention as the difference is not really that big a deal.

Just find a new team and new coach next season. Or be the coach yourself and play your kid the entire game.

Interestingly enough, you appear to be far more upset about this than me.

I coached rec league girls softball for 3 years..

it's all about development and giving people playing time.. the coaches should try to even it out. I have 2 1st place trophies and 1 2nd place for my hard work. This includes throwing in girls with next to no pitching experience in playoff games. I had a rotation based on what the girls wanted to do and what they felt comfortable doing. The teams "stars" sat as much of the not so "stars". I'm sure some parents blinked at the thought but they hell with them. My goal was to make it fun, get them to comeback next year and learn skills that would take them to the next level. Sadly my own daughter didn't want to play anymore... so I retired from coaching as well.

Let me check the math.
I assume 6 minute quarters.
If 7 kids are playing 2 quarters- that’s 12 minutes of play.
If 4 kids are playing 1.5 quarters- that’s 9 minutes per game.
So we are talking about 180 seconds of playing time per game that the 4 kids are missing?

Sometimes, you can’t sub exactly when you want. If the whistle doesn’t blow for an extra 60 seconds, you can’t sub. If the coach isn’t paying attention when a whistle blows, he may miss the opportunity to sub a player in. And that may take a minute or 2 to happen again.

I coach a 5th grade girls school hoops team right now. (And a 7/8 grade girls club soccer team). The basketball team has 7 players on it. 2 of them have played a little bit before (my daughter is one of them). In addition to these 2 another 4 are pretty athletic. The final one has a learning disability, impaired hand-eye coordination and has never played a team sport in her life.

In our game yesterday, my 2 experienced players were in foul trouble in the 1st half. They played maybe half of the game. Over the past few games, there hasn’t been a time when both of them were on the bench at the same time. They both sat most of the 3rd quarter and a lot of the 4th quarter. My daughter wound up fouling out with a few minutes left.
I was impressed with how well the girls played when their 2 “best” teammates weren’t on the floor.
We eeeked our a 14-11 win by playing solid defense and passing the ball. The other team had 1 ringer and she scored all 11 of their points. I think she shot 90% of their shots. I’m guessing she has been their main scorer all season.
6 of my 7 players have scored at least 2 baskets in 4 games.
We practiced for 4 weeks before the season started. We focused on the basics- layups. Bounce passes. Man to man defense. If you are in the paint, shoot it. Rebounding. No fancy plays. (We run an iso. We try to run a 3-2 motion, but execution is bad. And we run a pick and roll. We get called for moving screens on the pick about 50% of the time. Ugh!!)
We are 3-1 so far. The teams we have beaten have lots of fancy plays and play a zone defense. But they can’t hit a shot to save their lives. And give up a lot of bad passes.
The team that beat us was a score of 14-8. That’s the most points we have given up. They average 21 per game and have 2 players that make up 100% of their scoring.

I try to play everyone equal through the first 3 quarters. And then I have my best 5 play during the final 4 minutes. (We play 6 minute quarters. No full court press is allowed until the final 2 minutes of the game).