I am guessing this would impact at least a few people here, but US Soccer is voting next month to change the age matrix back to August 1- July 31 like it used to be rather than the current birth year matrix. In general I think it makes sense and didn’t fully understand why it was changed to begin with. The word I got tonight is it appears about 70% of people are in favor.
Selfishly, I am hoping they will “grandfather” in current teams and players to not necessarily have to change age groups. It will cause my son to move up an age group and have to leave the team/kids he has played with for the last 5 years. The other unfortunate part is he would be playing with kids who are in a grade ahead of him in school as well. He is currently in the middle age-wise of the age group and would then be the youngest as he is only 2 weeks from being at the cutoff with a mid-July birthday and is already a small kid.
Anyone here heavily involved and have insider information they can share?
I had a hell of a time trying to figure out why my daughter was considered U9 when I signed her up for this summer before she turned 8. Realistically I don’t care much. If it forces a team change for her that would be great, but I’m sure I’m not that lucky. Her coaches are horrendous.
I coach my son’s U6 team and both kids in 8U hockey and I’ve never seen such a train wreck both at practice and games. She has some really good kids on her team that seem to have made the coaches apparently look way better than they are. My daughter really likes the girls and doesn’t want to switch unfortunately. I offered to help since there are a bunch of girls but ya know, they got it under control or something.
Maybe it’s just our league but the requirements to coach are basically have a pulse. I have to get like 4 certs for hockey and then get recertified each year from USA Hockey after the kids aren’t in 8U anymore. Anyways point being right now the age ranges are the least of my concern for soccer.
There isn’t any one good cutoff but there needs to be some flexibility. A hard cutoff would work better. If every state had the same birthdate cutoff for starting school. Otherwise you always have those kids who are playing with others in another grade. If they play with those a grade ahead of them it works out ok but if they are the oldest on the team and everyone else is a grade behind it impacts recruiting.
It was Aug to July when my children played back in the 90’s, IIRC. It kept it simpler for teams but created havoc for ODP as they were calendar year.
Now my grandchildren play. I kind of like the birth year as it is simple, but it does create confusion with the U-Age aspect.
In competitive soccer, I have never seen a team with even a majority of kids from one school. And as they continue, it will be even less as players are added or dropped. So that issue is of no concern to me.
Same thing is happening for softball. My daughter will probably get 3 years of U16 as she already agreed to play 16u for the upcoming year but is now 14u eligible again. (Dec birthday). Although it’s been a three year process for the change with one org still holding out to Jan 1 for one more year- but we will not play their tourneys.
I think it helped her to play with a grade up as she is playing varsity as a freshman in highschool.
There are actually some studies out and it’s very interesting on how it affects kids. There is definitely a tendency for the kids at the beginning of an age group to do better because they generally mature earlier.
My son was born in December so last year he was basically the youngest kid for hockey. For soccer in our our rec program they let them play birth year or school year so I have him playing school year right now for soccer I couldn’t imagine him playing birth year right now.
The funny thing is the rumor was the ECNL, which is probably the league that has the most alumni in Div 1 programs was pushing it. As college coaches found it a pain when teams had players from two different grades.
I coach U10 right now, coaching on the A team of a 3 team club for the age group. So this is 3 and 4th graders. There isn’t a single 4th grader on the B and C teams. We have a couple of 3rd graders, but for the most part you can see the maturity difference right away, specially for those Nov/Dec kids. We have one 4th grader that plays U11. In the same sense, I have one 3rd grader that could be playing U11 without issue. I would prefer we keep status quo. For are current team, we would likely just let the three 3rd graders on the team play up. How we would deal with the U11 girls in 4th grade is a different subject. But I could certainly take some the 4th graders from the U11 teams, and 2 of the 3 3rd graders and make a better team.
One of the current issues that happen is with 8th graders that fall in the U14 age group because their birthday is later in the year. As some of their team will hit HS in the fall. For HS sports organizations that have a no playing for club teams during the current sports season rule, it leaves these kids hanging. Smaller clubs have no other options but to move them to the team below and make the younger kids play up an age group. This can certainly cause problems with numbers and potentially competitiveness issues. I don’t see this too big of an issue since most tournaments will have multiple brackets per age group to find the correct competition level.
Since there are two US youth soccer organizations, if US Club Soccer makes the change it will be interesting if USYS makes the switch too. Our club currently cards teams in both organizations for some teams since our local club league uses USYS sanctioning.
And back to my they need more certification for coaches… no idea they had two orgs for US soccer. But to your point, it’s one of the reasons I hate that we don’t have a 6U program for hockey here. Which is shocking given we have 300 kids in the 8U program. Too many of the younger kids, didn’t progress as well as they should have last year because they were playing 8 year olds. Or for that matter 9 year olds because we go off of birth year the season starts. So my son was going up against some early year birthday 9 year olds, right after he turned 5. He like some of the other younger kids would lose interest or not get involved as much because there are maybe 1 in a million, 5-6 year olds that could play at a 9 year old level.
Definitely trying to figure out the whole soccer structure. It’s just very weird coming from coaching hockey, we have a 3:1 coach ratio for 8U and everyone played at a pretty decent level. We have some coaches that aren’t good 8U coaches but at least understand the game. Soccer feels like the wild west where hopefully someone wants to coach the team for the rec level while I’m sure a bigger percentage of parents played soccer versus hockey…