Minors' leagues, major headaches? Common-sense guidelines for creating conflict-free, age-appropriate youth leagues

Parks & Recreation, August, 2002 by Brian Kroening

According to the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, 75 percent (36 million) of all children in America participated in at least one team sport in 2000, and 54 percent of them participated in organized settings supervised by adults. Obviously, then, organized youth leagues play an important role in any community--they give all children an equal opportunity to play in an environment that promotes social as well as skill development and, ideally, lifetime involvement in physical activities. All that being the case, it's vital that youth leagues be structured and run to best nurture these hoped-for outcomes.

Organized youth leagues can be classified as recreational or competitive. While competition is inherent in all sporting contests, sometimes the focus is so tight on who wins that people forget about why their children are participating in the first place. Following are some suggestions on how athletic supervisors can program recreational youth leagues that focus on play and promote participation.

Administrative Issues

Everything starts with the league administrator. The administrator must fully believe and embrace the philosophy that leagues are for the benefit of the children involved. Administrators must convey that philosophy to the rest of the people involved in the leagues (coaches, parents, coordinators, officials, etc.)

One philosophy emphasizes that winning is a goal of competition, not the driving force behind competition. The younger the children, the more the league should focus on skill development, and less it should spotlight the outcome of the contest. With older children, the focus gradually shifts as skills are mastered and emotional maturity grows.

Another philosophy is that success is determined not by the outcome of a contest, but by each player achieving preset, reasonable performance goals. After all, the outcome of a team contest is rarely determined solely by the play of one individual.

The administrator has to maintain focus on all the needs of the children when creating league policies. These needs include skill, social and emotional development. Some of the decisions made in a child-focused league will conflict with what parents want to see from the league and will be hard to make, but the administrator will need to make and stick to them. The parents will come around.

For example, once when I was putting teams together and trying to balance numbers in a girl's softball league, I wasn't able to honor a mother's request to place her daughter on a neighborhood team. (The explanation revolved around playing-time issues and social development.) The mother became so upset that she withdrew her daughter from the league. A day or two later, she called to say she understood my decision, and her daughter rejoined the league. In another instance, I received a lot of griping from coaches regarding some rule changes and the decision to treat the first two games in youth basketball leagues as scrimmage games with no running score. Once the season got rolling, the gripes turned to compliments.

League evaluations should be given at the end of each season. You also may want to evaluate in the middle of the season to make minor changes that could benefit the rest of the season. The evaluations should have questions directed to the participants. You will find that their answers usually differ to some degree from their parents' responses. The participants' responses should guide and back up league decisions.

The Scoreless Goal and Other Issues

Some traditional aspects of sport leagues must be evaluated before you decide to incorporate them into your youth leagues. These decisions will affect the tone of the entire season.

For example, a score is necessary to define a winner of a specific contest, but it doesn't define success. A league administrator should seriously consider eliminating a running score in leagues for younger children (kindergarten through 5th grade). The focus of these leagues should be skill development and the process of playing the game. Invariably, scoring shifts the focus from what's important. Although their parents might not appreciate the concept, the lack of a score won't diminish the fun that the kids have. One nice consequence of having younger children participate in un-scored leagues is that when a score is introduced among older age groups, the focus remains on the process rather the outcome.

As with keeping score, end-of-season tournaments and all-star games aren't necessarily appropriate for younger age groups. It makes more sense to introduce them to age groups that have a better handle on the sport's fundamentals and that are concerned more with developing team dynamics. Recreational tournaments should be limited to the teams in the league. To do otherwise creates any number of conflicts, such as unruly parents and coaches by having teams that don't share the same sport philosophy, eliminating any chance of fun competition by bringing in teams of unknown talent that may result in one-sided game or creating confusion about rules by teams that play with different sets of rules. All-star teams should consist of kids chosen by their peers based on criteria such as attitude, attendance, teamwork and skill.