Buddy / Coach Requests

AYSO 459 Philosophies and Resultant Policy

AYSO follows six pillar philosophies, which you can read more about here.

One of them is balanced teams.  The purpose of this effort is to ensure the players have a good experience and we don’t have one team winning every game and another team losing every game.  This is a cornerstone of the program.  If we had the top six players who play two other sports together requesting to be on the same team? This effort would be thwarted.

This is why we frequently do player evaluations at the start of a season, and why coaches do player evaluations at the end of each season. 

In support of the effort to balance teams, we do not take requests for buddy assignments or specific coach assignments beginning with U10 and going upward in age.  Siblings are placed on the same teams when they fall into the same age division. “Siblings” means children who share at least one biological parent or legal guardian.

These requests are welcomed, encouraged, and honored for U5, U6, and even U8 as long as we can still balance the teams.

Still want your child to play with his bestie? There is one way. Get involved!

Separately and unrelated to this policy, we allow adult volunteers in the positions of Head Coach, Assistant Coach, and Team Referee to request to work together.  This is intended to allow our volunteers to carry forward good synergy, and benefit the players.  An indirect effect of this is the children of these volunteers are placed on the same team and the team is balanced around them to the best of everyone’s ability.  Team Parents are not included in this policy, and are added randomly per volunteer after teams are formed and are already fully staffed Team Parents are chosen on a first-come, first-selected basis. 

There are two things we can’t fail to mention.  First, for U10 in particular, there are no problems solved by children being on the same team.  Teams are all interplay within the region.  This means carpooling is exactly the same for all U10 players no matter what color jersey. Further, the only time that would be particularly social during the actual duration of the game would arguably be a quarter sat together, and the odds of that are very slim. As these kids are still in the same place at the same time – and will end up on the field together one way or another for some games, they’ll see all their friends.  Second, U12 and U15 divisions are getting older and they are prime age to learn to work with various teammates in many capacities, whether it’s a group project at school (where friends are often disbarred from working together) or on a soccer field.  This is an opportunity to hone skills of communication, tolerance, flexibility, and innovation. 

Soccer is a small piece of your child’s life and we hope to be part of the village that encourages growth, development, and achievement.   

This policy predated every current administrator on the Board of Directors, but the policy has been deemed important to carry forward. It works.  Volunteers spend an exorbitant number of hours looking at data points and trying to blindly balance each team every season.  If we were to add buddy requests to that mix, it would take twice as long and the balancing procedure would not be nearly as robust.