My son is playing soccer on a U8 team, which means the kids are six or seven at the start of the year. It's a fun league, which means "we don't keep score." Of course, the kids keep score, and it's highly disheartening for my kids, because we're the team that always loses. (Actually, there's another team in our situation, and games with that team are actually interesting. We even won one.)
I know it really bugs my kids that we lose all the time. I fear some of them are getting turned off soccer. I bet we're not the only league with badly uneven teams. I think part of the solution is to keep score, and for the league organizers to use the information to balance out the teams over the years. Here's how.
Record every game score for the season. Ideally, also record which players actually showed up at each game. That would be pretty easy for the coach or manager to do. When it comes time to make the teams next year, give all the kids who have history in the league one point for each goal their team scored. Put the kids in order by points and assign the kids to teams on a round robin basis. If a coach or parent asks that two kids play on the same team, then the player moved to make room has to have the same number or more points than the requested player (to eliminate incentives to stacking).
Of course this isn't going to be perfect. You don't know about new players who come along. It won't work for the first year the kids play. But it doesn't have to be perfect. Part of sports is to learn to win and lose graciously. But kids have to be doing both. It doesn't do any good to teach some kids that the deck is stacked against them and they'll never win.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Why Lencho Reyes?
If you wonder why my Google name is lenchoreyes, here it is:
First, in my ongoing quest to miss every great development, I totally blew off my brother when he offered an invitation to a beta of this "gmail" thing. So I missed my chance to be larry.reid@gmail.com.
When I finally got around to signing up for all things Google, all variants of my name were taken. So I used one of my Spanish pseudonyms.
"Lencho" is short for "Lorenzo", which is the Spanish equivalent of "Lawrence". So "Lencho" would be "Larry".
"Reyes" is a real Spanish surname that literally means "Kings". When I was first traveling in Central America, the way to make long distance calls home was to go to a telephone company office, write up a little paper form, then sit in a stuffy waiting room for an hour or so until an operator connected your call and called your name. I missed a few calls because someone massacred the pronunciation of my name (for some reason, "Reid" is hard to read for Central Americans which is funny, because "reid" is actually a word in the Spanish spoken in Spain).
At the same time, I figured out that when I said my surname to people, and tried to make it "Spanish" so they could spell it, their brains would translate what they were hearing to "Reyes", because that's the closest surname they could think of to match the sounds I was making. So I just started writing my name as "Lorenzo Reyes" on the phone company form, and I never missed another long distance call.
First, in my ongoing quest to miss every great development, I totally blew off my brother when he offered an invitation to a beta of this "gmail" thing. So I missed my chance to be larry.reid@gmail.com.
When I finally got around to signing up for all things Google, all variants of my name were taken. So I used one of my Spanish pseudonyms.
"Lencho" is short for "Lorenzo", which is the Spanish equivalent of "Lawrence". So "Lencho" would be "Larry".
"Reyes" is a real Spanish surname that literally means "Kings". When I was first traveling in Central America, the way to make long distance calls home was to go to a telephone company office, write up a little paper form, then sit in a stuffy waiting room for an hour or so until an operator connected your call and called your name. I missed a few calls because someone massacred the pronunciation of my name (for some reason, "Reid" is hard to read for Central Americans which is funny, because "reid" is actually a word in the Spanish spoken in Spain).
At the same time, I figured out that when I said my surname to people, and tried to make it "Spanish" so they could spell it, their brains would translate what they were hearing to "Reyes", because that's the closest surname they could think of to match the sounds I was making. So I just started writing my name as "Lorenzo Reyes" on the phone company form, and I never missed another long distance call.
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