Which Team Did Your Kid Make?

By Regina Symons, Ph.D., BCBA-D, LBA

It is often the first question parents hear after tryouts.

“Which team did your kid make?”

The question seems harmless. Parents want their children to be challenged, to improve, and to feel successful in a sport they love. Yet the answer can quickly become far more than where a child will practice or play that season.

At seven or eight years old, many children primarily want to play with their friends. Some are already intensely motivated and eager for every opportunity to improve. Others divide their attention among several sports and activities. Their interests, confidence, commitment, physical development, and abilities may all change considerably over the next few years.

Yet this is often the age when clubs begin to divide children into A and B teams.

Categorizing children is not necessarily the problem. Children need different levels of challenge, and treating every player as though they need the same experience would not serve them well.

The problem begins when a temporary grouping becomes a status system.

Once a club creates an A team and a B team, the environment changes for everyone. Parents compare teams, coaches, schedules, tournaments, and playing opportunities. Children quickly notice which team adults seem most excited about and where the greatest value appears to be placed. A roster decision begins to feel less like a practical arrangement and more like a judgment about a child's ability and future.

Soon, the conversation shifts. It is no longer just about helping children develop. It becomes about securing positions, protecting status, and ensuring that one's own child is on the "right" team.

Parents may apply pressure on coaches, question selections, resist movement between teams, or threaten to leave the club. Some families have more access to coaches and decision-makers than others. Clubs may worry that dissatisfied parents will take talented players and their registration fees elsewhere. Coaches can become reluctant to make changes because almost every decision risks upsetting someone.

Before long, the system may become more focused on protecting positions than developing players.

That is not simply a problem of over-involved parents. It is an environmental design problem.

When an A-team position brings status, better opportunities, more visible success, and greater attention, parents have strong reasons to protect it. When being placed on the B team appears to restrict a child’s future, families have strong reasons to fight against it. Telling parents to stop caring will not change those incentives.

Clubs have to create environments in which parents have less reason to view every roster decision as a permanent verdict.

That begins with recognizing how unpredictable development can be.

A player who appears advanced at age seven may have had earlier exposure, greater physical maturity, more confidence, or more time available to practice. Another child may improve rapidly after finding the right coach, the right position, or simply the right reason to keep going.

A struggling team can also become an unusually productive developmental environment. Players may initially lose often and give up when they fall behind. Over time, repeated opportunities to solve difficult problems can produce skill, persistence, and confidence. A goalkeeper facing frequent shots may develop faster than one who spends most of each game unchallenged. As the players improve, the entire team may begin responding differently to setbacks and eventually compete at the same level as the club’s original A team.

Once the teams have been labeled, restructuring becomes difficult. A-team families may interpret movement as a demotion. B-team families may resent losing players who helped their team improve. Children who have learned that one team represents success may resist any change, even when the new arrangement would provide a better challenge.

The original categories begin controlling future decisions long after they have stopped reflecting the players in front of us.

This raises a broader question: What are youth clubs actually being rewarded for producing?

When young teams are publicly ranked, and tournament victories become part of a club’s reputation, winning acquires value beyond the children’s immediate experience. Strong results can attract families, players, coaches, sponsors, and additional revenue. Clubs then have reasons to concentrate the most advanced children on one team, preserve winning combinations, and give greater resources to the group most likely to produce visible success.

Even without a formal rule connecting league position to funding, rankings can influence reputation, enrollment, parental spending, and access to opportunities. What the system measures becomes what adults work to produce.

That creates a contradiction. We may say the purpose is long-term development while reinforcing clubs for short-term results.

Norway offers a useful contrast. Norwegian children still play games, experience winning and losing, and can be matched with appropriate competition. However, its national children’s sport framework restricts formal rankings, results lists, and championships for younger children, while organized children’s sport is defined throughout the year, until they turn 12. The system emphasizes inclusion, local participation, friendship, varied experiences, and the child’s right to influence their own sporting involvement.

Formal national football talent identification begins at age 12 through Norway’s Landslagsskolen pathway. Before that point, the model is designed around children remaining in local clubs and playing with friends rather than being separated into a national elite structure.

Removing early rankings also changes the contingencies for adults. Clubs cannot as easily build their reputation around proving that their eight-year-olds are better than another club’s. Parents have less public evidence to use when arguing that one coach, team, or child deserves greater status. Coaches have less reason to protect a winning roster simply to preserve a place in the standings.

It does not eliminate disagreement, ambition, or parental influence. But it removes some of the competing pressures that can pull adults away from development.

Norway also demonstrates that broad participation and elite performance do not have to be opposing goals. Its later national pathway has developed internationally successful players, including Erling Haaland. That does not prove that delaying formal selection automatically creates elite athletes. It does show that a country can protect broad childhood participation while still building a serious, systematic pathway for players who later demonstrate the motivation and ability to pursue more.

The question, then, is not whether competition is good or bad.

It is whether competition is being introduced in a form that supports motivation and potential, or one that allows adult incentives to narrow children’s opportunities too early.

Children who want more should be able to pursue more. A highly committed player may need greater intensity, stronger competition, and additional training. A child balancing soccer with another sport may need a different experience for a season. Six months later, those needs may change.

Movement between teams should therefore be expected rather than exceptional. It should reflect what will help a player develop now, not function as a reward or punishment. That becomes possible only when every team receives strong coaching, meaningful competition, visible support, and a credible pathway forward.

A family should be able to believe that their child can remain with a club, continue developing, and move when their needs change, even without the immediate status of an A-team label.

The success of a youth club should not be measured by how accurately it identifies the strongest eight-year-olds.

It should be measured by how many children are still playing at twelve, how many are still improving, how many still believe they belong, and whether those who want more have a genuine pathway to pursue it.

Parents will always care about their children’s opportunities. That care is not the enemy. The responsibility lies with adults who design the system.

We need environments in which parents can trust that development is happening across every team, that movement is normal, that strong coaching is not reserved for the children already ahead, and that one early placement will not quietly determine the opportunities a child receives for years to come.

So perhaps the most important question after tryouts is not:

“Which team did your kid make?”

It is:

“What has this club created to help every child keep growing from here?”