By Tom Mura
Question - I am getting complaints from parents about playing time for their kids. Some players get more playing time than others because they are better players. Do you have any suggestions on how to deal with this?
************************************************************
Some coaches like to give equal playing time for all players. Other coaches give their better players more playing time to try and win more games. There are downsides to both of these systems.
Giving all players equal playing time all the time, can take away the incentive to work hard at practice and even in games. Some kids will have the mentality of “why should I bust my butt at this drill, I’m going to play this weekend anyway?” When I was a kid in England, we usually had about 14 or 15 players on the team, but on game day, only 11 players were selected, plus one substitute. So in practice, I used to give 100% on everything we did so I would impress the coach and get selected in the 11 for the game. It doesn’t affect all players but it’s important that the incentive to do well isn’t taken away.
Playing your best players most of the time with other players getting little playing time has many issues with it. Two main issues is that your weaker players don’t get enough playing time in order to develop and they can feel discouraged and even not part of the team if it happens often.
So to try and avoid those downsides, I use parts of both systems. As a rule, for all league games and tournament group games (about 90% of our games for the season), all players had pretty much equal playing time. I would occasionally deviate from this for instances where I might need to make a point to a particular player for example. This ensured that all players had plenty of opportunity to develop during the season and felt as much as part of the team as the better players did.
For the handful of tournament semis or finals we had during the season, if needed, the better players would get more playing time. The players knew this in advance, so it was never a shock to them if they played less. It actually worked out well, because it would sometimes spur a conversation about what they needed to work on in order to improve and be on the field more in these types of games.
I also never have certain players that always start a game. The players are in a rotation system for starting games and subbing during games and they know if it is their turn to start a game or not.
The perfect scenario is having 16 players. It works like this in the 4-4-2 formation. Three players play the two fullback positions. Three players play the two center defender positions. Three players play the two center midfield positions. Three players play the two outside midfield positions and three players played the two striker positions. So in each position, two players would start for each position and one would be on the bench. If we played 30 min halves, you could sub every 10 minutes and all five players would sub on at that same time. This would continue through the game. Then for the next game, the players that didn’t start this game would start and it would continue to rotate for game after game.
I would leave it to the players to keep track and they would know who was going to start the game before I did.
I don’t think there is a perfect solution to this, but I developed this method over the years and it works great for me. Give it a try and see how it goes.
By Tom Mura
