The biggest issue for children is playing time. Each child signs up to play, not to sit on the bench.

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 those kids participated in organized settings supervised by adults. 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, hopefully, lifetime involvement in physical activities.

These 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 the outcome that people forget about why their children are participating in the first place. This article discusses ways that athletic supervisors can program recreational youth leagues that de-emphasize competition 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.

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 on the outcome of the contest. The older children get, the focus inherently shifts as skills are mastered and emotional maturity grows.

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Another philosophy is that success is not determined by the outcome of a contest; it is determined by each individual player achieving preset, reasonable performance goals. Very rarely is the outcome of a team contest determined by the play of one individual.

The administrator has to maintain focus on all the needs of the children when creating league policies. These include skill development, social development and emotional development. Some of the decisions made in a child-focused league will conflict with what the 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.

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

Season Setup
Some traditional aspects of sport leagues must be evaluated strongly 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 does not define success. A league administrator seriously should consider eliminating a running score in leagues for younger children. The focus of those leagues should be skill development and the process of playing the game. Scoring invariably shifts the focus away from what is important. The lack of a score will not diminish the fun that the kids have. I have run leagues in this manner and have seen a remarkable trend: everyone has fun and even when the score is introduced at older age groups, the focus remains on the process not the outcome.

Tournaments and all-star games are popular ways to end season play. League administrators should take a hard look at each league and make a decision to hold them based on the focus of each league. As with keeping score, tournaments and all-star games are not 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 are concerned more with developing team dynamics. Recreational tournaments should be limited to the teams in the league. To do otherwise creates headaches. All-star teams should consist of kids chosen by their peers based on criteria such as attitude, attendance, teamwork, and skill.

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Leagues that involve participants from more than one community present more of a challenge but can add a new dimension to the league. The league administrators must hold the same beliefs and be able to keep things in control. Coaches, parents and players from all communities should all go through the same processes (e.g., training, meetings, evaluations, etcetera). Everyone then will be on "the same page" and many possible conflicts will be avoided. Make sure one person is in charge of overall league decisions. The administrator from each community should be responsible for the actions of their coaches, parents and players.

Rules need to be adapted for specific age groups to allow more success. The game may not completely resemble the original design, but will gradually look more and more like it should as the children get older. Rules should be designed to eliminate the fear of trying new skills (e.g., allowing a base on an overthrow except in steal attempts). Many communities already adapt rules, but the league administrator should know the reason behind each adaptation.

The biggest issue for children is playing time. Each child signs up to play, not to sit on the bench. In a recreational league, each child pays the same amount to play and should have the right to play at least half of each game. Not only should they play, but the younger kids should have an opportunity to play each position throughout the season (contingent on safety). The more they play, the more they learn and the better they get.

Team Selection
Assigning teams can be very tricky. There are many ways to put teams together. Some assignment procedures will work for small communities, but do not work for large ones. The trick is figuring out what will work for your community. Something to keep in mind is that kids have the opportunity to meet new people when they participate in sports. Developing social skills is one of the benefits of youth leagues. It is no secret that kids want to play on their friends' teams. When they are young, there is no reason why they cannot do just that. Sometimes the requests to play with other children are based on the parents' wants, not the child's. We've all received requests for "car-pooling purposes." Requests effectively can be taken if they are limited to one or two people and it is known in advance.

It is best that the athletic supervisor put the teams together for the younger age groups. Assigning by neighborhood or school works great with larger communities where driving across town for a practice can take 30 minutes or longer. Randomly assigning teams is great for smaller communities. This allows the kids to meet more people. Parents may get upset and threaten you with any number of things, but do what is right for the entire league. I remember making a mother cry because I could not put her daughter on a requested

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team (she signed up late) and that she wouldn't play unless she was on that team. Placing her on that team would have upset the balance of the league. After the initial tears, she understood and eventually everything worked out.

Player evaluations work out best for selecting teams in the older leagues. I recommend the "evaluation" process over a "tryout" or "draft." Neither of the latter two words are appropriate for a recreational league since all registered athletes will participate. The idea behind this process is to create teams that have the best talent spread across the league instead of a couple teams. This is not an exact science. The supervisor and the coaches can get together with good intentions, but the process can easily spin out of control. Each coach should receive a clearly defined set of rules for the selection process.

The problem the supervisor and the coaches face is that you never have all the kids show up for the evaluation. Sometimes they have legitimate conflicts and other times they are asked by coaches not to show up. Whatever the reason, there will be some guesswork involved with this process. There are a couple of ways to select the teams after the players are evaluated at each skill station. The coaches can go through a draft-like selection, they can turn in their top picks to the athletic supervisor and have the teams assigned, or any other way the supervisor chooses. The main thing to keep in mind is that the selection process needs to be fair to the coaches, players and the league.

Managing Coaches, Parents and Officials
Once you have the foundation laid for the league and everything is set up, it is important that every coach parent and official involved with the league understands the focus and goals of the league and their roles in achieving them. To do this, the athletic supervisor should use established courses and resources presented at meetings and clinics. There are course and resource options for each group with the two largest providers being the American Sport Education Program (ASEP), based out of Champaign, Ill., and the National Alliance for Youth Sports (NAYS), in Jupiter, Fl. Some smaller organizations provide training options as well and can be found on the World Wide Web.

More supervisors are making these meetings and clinics mandatory, but there exist a large number of supervisors who are afraid to take this step. There is a fear that they will not be able to recruit enough volunteer coaches for the leagues. There is also the question of how to get parents to attend a mandatory meeting.

Volunteers
Volunteers wanting to coach require and often appreciate the opportunity to get trained. From my experience and talking to supervisors whose training is mandatory, we have found that more people volunteer when they know they will get trained. Many of the volunteers feel that they don't know enough to coach, but the opportunity to receive training will draw them into the league and you will usually have them throughout their child's participation cycle. New and experienced coaches, alike, will get something out of training.

Parents
It is essential that parents receive all the information possible before the league starts. Along with any sport parent course, they should receive a league specific handout that states—in clear terms—the focus of the league and any policies, special dates and events. If they know what to expect from the beginning and the expectations are realized through the course of the league, the supervisor will receive fewer questions and complaints.

As stated earlier, this meeting should be mandatory. By law, the city of El Paso, Texas, requires all parents to attend a training otherwise their children cannot participate in the league. I don't advocate punishing the children for a parent's lack of attendance at the meeting. I used to send out postcard reminders and achieved about 80 percent attendance. The parents who did attend learned what I needed them to learn and the other 20 percent either had one-on-one meetings with me or heard it from the other parents. If a large majority of the parents understand the league, they will stop inappropriate behavior themselves. Peer pressure works among adults just as it does with children.

Officials
Officials are the only people on the playing field who are supposed to have an unbiased interest in the game. They are there to make sure that the game runs fairly and efficiently. Some athletic supervisors hire state or governing body certified officials and others use high school or college kids to officiate games. Whether or not they have been certified, they have to understand the focus of the league. The style they will use to officiate varies from recreational to competitive leagues. They need to know what behavior is expected from them, how tight they should call a game, and how to handle conflicts.

Bottom line, the administrator will need to put in a lot of thought and effort to create a high-quality league that everyone will enjoy being a part of. Once everything is set, there will be some necessary tweaking and constant evaluation. The reward will not only be realized in the positive comments you receive from coaches, parents and participants, but ultimately by witnessing the actions, words and laughter of the children involved.

BRIAN E. KROENING, CPRP,
is the recreation supervisor for Athletics and Fitness at the Deerfield Park District. Previously, he was the Youth Implementation Specialist for the American Sport Education Program. He has five years experience supervising youth sports programs and has coached three seasons of youth soccer in Champaign, Ill.

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