OT - rec league dilemma

[Mark Padgett]

Any comments would be appreciated. As I've mentioned, I'm on the Board of our local kids rec league and have been for quite some time. Our policy on picking teams is to have a draft, similar to the NBA. Each HC and AC gets their kid on their team but the rest of the players are drafted. We hold "tryout" nights where kids just are run through drills and the coaches take notes. A few nights later, we hold the draft. The league is for boys and girls in grades 3-12. We've had this program for over 30 years and it seems to work pretty well.

Over the past few years, we've seen the numbers on the girls side drop off so we did some research and were told that more girls would sign up if the could "play on teams with their friends" so it would be more like a "social event". So, this past year we decided to form the girls 3-8 teams by school, hoping that kids would then "recruit" their friends to play with them. It worked and the numbers went up. We also tried it with our 3rd and 4th grade boys teams and it worked there, also.

Once the season concluded, we asked all the coaches who had these teams to comment on the change. So far, almost exactly half liked it and half didn't like it. Those that liked it said the kids really enjoyed playing with their friends and those that didn't said the teams wound up too unbalanced and there were way more blowouts than usual.

We're having our final Board meeting of the season in two days and this will be one of the topics up for discussion. If any of you have any thoughts on this point, please post them. Thanks.

BTW - there were about 800 kids in the program this year.