Debating the Calendar Year Age Groups for US Youth Soccer
Can the Grassroots Fight This?


Update

In somewhat stunning and very appreciated moves, The Seattle Youth Soccer Association has postponed the birth year changes and US Youth Soccer teamed up with other youth soccer organizations to issue a pretty blunt rejection of the way that USSF tried to implement this change!!

Here are the two links:

SYSA Website (Scoll down to the last page)

Statement from Youth Council Technical Working Group to U.S. Soccer

Other Rec Soccer Organizations Not Implementing the Change:

Massachusetts Youth Soccer
Soccer Maine
San Francisco Youth Soccer
Portland Youth Soccer Association
Kansas Rush Soccer
Asheville Buncombe Youth Soccer Association
Caddo Bossier Soccer Association and the Shreveport United Soccer Club
Loudoun Soccer Club
AYSO North Huntington Beach
Montville Soccer Association
Lutherville-Timonium Soccer
ABC Youth Sports
Carolina Rapids Soccer Club
Annandale United FC Soccer
Capital Area Soccer League
AC Sandhills Rec Soccer
Centre Soccer Association
Asheville Buncombe Youth Soccer Association
Avery County Youth Soccer Association
Burke Soccer Association
Burlington Soccer Club
Capital Area Soccer League
Carolina Mountains Soccer Club
Carolina United Soccer Association
Catawba Valley Youth Soccer Association
Central Carolina Soccer Club
Chatham Soccer League
Cherokee Co. Soccer League
Cincinatti Hills SAY Soccer
Coastal Area Soccer Association (Was Dixon Soccer Club)
Davidson County Youth Soccer League
East Duplin Soccer Club
East Wake Soccer Association
Eastern Carolina Soccer Association
Fayetteville Soccer Club
Greater Cleveland Athletic Association
Greater Cleveland Co. Soccer Association
Green Bay Kickers Soccer Club
Green Bay Strikers Soccer Club
Greensboro United Soccer Association
Henderson County Soccer Association
High Country Soccer Association
Indian Trail Athletic Association
Iredell County Recreation Department
Jacksonville Area Soccer Association
Jamestown Youth League
Kernersville Soccer Association
Lake Norman Soccer Club
Lenoir Youth Soccer Association
Macon County Soccer Club
Mcgee'S Crossroads Athletic Association
Mebane Youth Soccer Association
Mint Hill Athletic Association
Monroe Soccer Association
Northern Triad Soccer Club
Onslow Classic Soccer Association
Piedmont Area Soccer Association
Pitt-Greenville Soccer Association
Porter Ridge Athletic Association
Roanoke Valley Youth Soccer Association
Rutherford County Soccer Association
Sampson County Soccer Club
Sanford Area Soccer League
Seashore Soccer League
South Iredell Soccer Association
Southeastern Stokes Youth Soccer Association
Southwest Soccer Club
Stokesdale Park Soccer Association
Strikers Of Gaston County Soccer Association
Swain Youth Soccer Association
Swansboro Soccer Association
Tar River Youth Soccer Association
Toe Valley Soccer Association
Transylvania Youth Soccer Association
Triangle United Soccer Association
Twin City Youth Soccer Association
Waxhaw Athletic Association
Wilson Youth Soccer Association
Yadkin Soccer Association
Albany Youth Soccer


On August 24th, US Youth Soccer announced a plan to institute a “Best Practices” switch to calendar year or birth year registration for team rosters next fall and “mandatory” use of this system by fall of 2017. Rather than Aug 1 to July 31 age groups, each age group would be from Jan 1 to Dec 31. It was not clarified until just recently that the upper echelon of the national structure expected even rec teams down to U-6 to comply with this directive.

Coaching my older son in rec U-7 thru U-10 and my younger son in rec U-6 thru U-8, I found it very disappointing that both teams may soon face the decision of
1) playing a majority of our players up in age and skipping the next yearly step of U-11 or U-9 or
2) telling players on either team who were born in the previous year that they will need to find a different team.

The purpose of this website is to motivate parents and volunteer coaches to speak up about this change, find out what can be done to avoid it, and to offer some competing arguments to the one-sided ones offered from the top levels of US Soccer. The purpose is NOT to whip up negative feeling or disparaging comments directed at our local soccer leaders, who may have volunteered more of their time for youth soccer than any of us parents or rec coaches may ever do. But at the least, our local soccer leaders need to field our respectful input and take it back up the chain to the national leaders who are spearheading this change.

Information from USSF and US Youth Soccer

USSF and USYS had two arguments for the change, one a half argument and the other completely empty:

1) Align with the international standard and
2) combat relative age affect.

The International Standard

First, they tried to make it sound like dividing up friends in the same class with the soccer age group change was the way all the rest of the world did it. But, the calendar year age groupings make sense in many parts of the world because such countries have their school year closely aligned with the calendar year. Below is a listing of many such countries. It is interesting that most all of Central and South America have their school year and soccer age groups aligned. This is after all the area of the world that has developed perhaps the three best players the sport has ever seen.

Countries that Align Soccer Age Groups with School Age Groups

Country (When School Year Starts)
Argentina (Beginning of March)
Bolivia (Beginning of February)
Brazil (Beginning of February)
Chile (Beginning of March)
Colombia (End of January, beginning of February)
Costa Rica (Beginning of February)
Ecuador (majority of schools start in April and end in January)
El Salvador (End of January, Beginning of February)
Guatemala (Beginning of March)
Honduras (Beginning of February for the vast majority)
Nicaragua (early February)
Paraguay (February)
Peru (beginning of March)
Uruguay (Beginning of March)
Kenya (half of the country starts beginning of January)
Nigeria (early January)
South Africa (mid-January)
Sudan (the majority start March 20)
Tanzania (mid-January)
Cambodia (November)
Japan (April 1st)
Malaysia (beginning of January)
Maldives (beginning of January)
Nepal (April)
Pakistan (April)
Singapore (beginning of January)
South Korea (March 3)
North Korea (Beginning of April)
Australia (End of January)
New Zealand (End of January/Beginning of February)

Young rec soccer players do not play internationally! While the present age groups may cause problems for US Youth Soccer with international tournaments and the like, this only affects older kids at the highest levels of soccer talent.

There are some really big differences culturally when it comes to soccer in the US and in other countries around the world. In many countries, youth soccer is more centered around club soccer than around the local schools. For many nations, there is no sport that can actually claim to be as popular as soccer. In the US, soccer is at best the fourth most popular sport. It is hard to understand how this change wouldn't push more kids toward US Club Soccer and away from US Youth Soccer. And, it is difficult to believe that this wouldn't push at least some kids back towards the other big three sports.

Relative Age Affect

What is really odd is that US Soccer's video goes into a very detailed discussion of relative age affect, but at no point explains how a switch from an Aug 1 -July 31 age range to a Jan 1 - Dec 31 range improves anything. A boy or girl born the first day of either period will have an almost one year biological head start on a boy or girl born the last day of the period. In fact, in rather counter-intuitive logic, they end their explanation by stressing that existing teams can stay together, that younger kids can play up and play against even older opponents, and that “training and competing with older players can aid in development.”

But, this change has very odd implications with regards to birthdate and school year. For the new U-5 teams, it will mean that the logical connection is between those kindergarteners born after Dec. 31 and preschoolers born before Jan 1. For many kids who first come to learn about the opportunity to play in kindergarten, the kids with Aug. 1-Dec. 31 birthdays will be disappointed to find out that they can't be on a team with many of the kids in their kindergarten class. Instead, these kids will have to experience their first year of soccer playing with a majority of first graders. Talk about a messed up relative age affect.

Then, at an older age, as kids move from one school to the next, there will be years where every team will have one set of kids still in elementary school and another set in middle school, or middle school and high school. At U-18, many would end their involvement with youth soccer with their high school graduation. The other portion, those born Aug 1 - Dec. 31, would still be juniors. This latter group could only play U-19 their senior year with probably a lot of missing faces from their team.

Finally, in their FAQ, USSF/USYS is devaluing the bonds that develop between children in the same grade level at the same school, who after just a few years have probably had a class for an entire year with almost all of their fellow classmates, and who often don't really know that many kids a year ahead or behind them. Perhaps the true value of this whole youth soccer exercise is on the team building exercise, and the value and the success of a team on something other than just wins and losses. But for others at a much higher level in these organizations, it appears that the primary purpose of this exercise is to identify and advance the next DeAndre Yedlin or even that elusive American Lionel Messi. At the start of US Youth Soccer's FAQ document, they summed it up best, these changes challenge “the status quo of our soccer landscape by focusing on the development of the individual versus the success of a team.”

Here's excellent and more in depth information about this subject:
Relative Age Effect

Recreational vs Select Soccer

In USSF's FAQ pdf, they offer this regarding forcing recreational teams to conform:


Why can't there be different standards for recreational and competitive teams?
There is no universal definition of what separates recreational from competitive soccer. In addition to supporting the overall objectives of player development, U.S. Soccer believes that having separate registration systems based on undefined levels of play would create unnecessary confusion, and this would not provide a consistent approach across the soccer landscape. Players should also be provided the opportunity to develop to the best of their abilities regardless of the level of play they are participating in.


What I know of this in the Seattle Youth Soccer Association (SYSA), there is a fairly well defined separation, it is recreational youth soccer and Seattle United select soccer. For players who have the talent and drive, parents who wish to invest the extra time and money remove their child as an individual from a team likely based around a single elementary school and place them on a Seattle United team with less or little such connection. As to separate registration systems, they obviously don't mention the competing and different systems of Youth Soccer and Club Soccer. As to creating unnecessary confusion, if parents or volunteer coaches can't figure out a Aug1/July31 time frame, then how are we supposed to understand the myriad of proposed micro rule changes to an already complex number of existing micro rules that change year to year? And, at no point is there a logical explanation on how we volunteer rec coaches using the present Aug1/July31 age range are failing our players to provide them “the opportunity to develop to the best of their abilities.”

Interestingly, USSF/USYS's FAQ directs further questions back to “local soccer leaders.”

Seattle and Washington Youth Soccer

SYSA will be making a change for this Fall. The statement at the below link under the title “Change to Birth Year Registration for Player Placement on Teams” makes this clear.

http://www.sysa.org/home.php

They have two options to massage the change and try to reduce its harmful effects. They do offer input on the two options they have come up with. I feel for the leaders at SYSA who have been put between a rock and a hard place by USSF and USYS. The SYSA statement ends by directing any further questions to WYS:

http://www.washingtonyouthsoccer.org/statement_on_ussf_mandated_rule_changes/

In the WYS statement, they do mention that, “U.S. Soccer has released several conflicting documents in regards to the new age group classifications.” In the FAQ section, they do begin to grapple with some of the obvious problems with this calendar year idea with regards to U-15 and U-18 teams. But, otherwise, they appear to be going along with the higher level decision no later than 2017.

What Can Be Done?

There is a lot that can be done if there are enough parents and volunteer coaches who want to fight this. The initial efforts can be fairly simple:

1) Have a simple conversation with other youth soccer parents who simply haven't heard about this.
2) Forward an email to people you know from youth soccer.
3) Connect to other parents and volunteer coaches via social media like Facebook
4) Sign up on the online protest petition in the below links
5) Contact your state youth soccer representatives. In Washington State, as the above WYS link suggested, that would be Washington Youth Soccer Director of Communications, Mike Anderson, at Mike@WashingtonYouthSoccer.org or 253-944-1606.

Other options might be considered down the road.

Don't let local soccer leaders who don't even like the change feel like they just have to go along with it. Don't let top USSF/USYS officials in Chicago or Texas dictate how this should work for our kids, even down to rec team kindergarteners. These teams are our teams!

Links

US Soccer Breaks the Glass
No To US Soccer Mandates on Youth Soccer
NO to New USSF Youth Soccer Mandates
O'Sullivan: Some thoughts on U.S. Soccer's mandatory changes in youth soccer
Dure: U.S. Soccer's birth-year plan is shortsighted, helping coaches, not kids
4 Real Issues to Consider Before Switching to Birth Year Registration
Dure: Age-group issue puts Development Academy in a time warp
Fans View-The Nightmare Brewing In Youth Soccer
Will US Soccer Change Their Stupid Age Law

Will