On Thursday night I asked the players of the mighty Beachlands-Maraetai 9th grade Galacticos - who I coach - how they felt about their first match of the season last Saturday. It was "kind of" fun, they said. They enjoyed playing, but didn't enjoy losing 7-2. That really sucked, apparently.
The kids know when they win or lose, when they succeed and fail. They don't need league tables to tell them that. The tables are purely for adults, a mechanism for feeding over-competitiveness and vicarious dream fulfilment.
Ten-year-olds don't need to be winning championships, they need to be learning core skills and developing the tactical appreciation to play the game the right way. They also need to be playing when they are 11, which means being fully included regardless of ability.
League tables have long been a matter of debate. One of the reasons rugby split into two codes more than 100 years ago was because the northern English unions who formed what is now rugby league wanted to replace friendly matches with competitive leagues to help drive interest and revenues. The largely upper class southern unions did not. The fear was that when sport became meaningful, rather than simply the pursuit of fun, the masses tended to become excitable and less easy to control.
History shows that to be true. It's not a bad thing, unless the excess in excitability flows through into matches played by children.
I once refereed a five-a-side match between 7 year olds where one team was much better than the other and quickly led 6-0. Only two of the team's five players had touched the ball. I told them that, from then on, unless they completed three passes before shooting, their goals would not count. When I duly disallowed a goal the boy who scored it burst into tears. He was still crying at the end of the game, and still wouldn't pass. His team "won" the league that year. I wonder how many of his champion teammates came back to play the following year?
Getting kids to put aside the pursuit of victory in favour of the greater good ain't easy. With parents it can be impossible. I once coached two teams of 6 and 7 year olds from the same club in a skills session before they were divided into teams for games. One team had a squad of 10 players. The other had just three. The coach of the team with 10 players didn't share any players with the team that had three.
Presumably it would have hurt the team's title chances.
The decision not to publish league tables is sensible. You don't need tables to record the true measures of success. But if the adults involved in kids' sport don't already know what those measures are, it's unlikely this move will have much effect at all.
