What A Relief

Thing One's travel soccer team held their annual tryouts a few weeks ago.  It took approximately forever for them to get back to us with the results, but we finally received the team assignments this past week.  As background, the A team is composed of the "best" players, and the B and C teams are more development-focused teams. In general, this coming year's B players are the same boys from last year's B squad, and the C team boys are the newcomers to the club without much experience playing at this level.  We've been told that Thing One will be on the B team again.

According to Himself (who played soccer for years) Thing One got much better this past year, and also played really well at the tryouts.  One of the coaches we know who was doing the rankings came up to us afterward to say that he was likely going to end up on the 'bubble' between A and B, and to ask if we had a preference regarding where to put him if that was the case.  

It was a tough call.  Obviously, you want your kid on A if he or she is good enough for A, but this particular A team is seriously dysfunctional (mostly a massive parent ego/jerk problem) and on A teams, playing time is determined by merit, not an equal-time principle.  So, if you aren't one of the best players on an A team, you ride the bench a lot.  At this time, he'd never be a starter on the A team, so we finally decided to have him go B if there was any question.

On B, he's one of the best players.  He'll get good playing time and keep developing. And we won't have to deal with the crazy political nonsense and infighting that plagued the A team for the entirety of last year.  Win-win!!