My 11yr old is playing under 12's this year for his 8th consecutive year of footy comprising of 4 years of Auskick and now his 4th year of under aged football, including the year off in 2020.
Junior football is a bloody tough gig at the moment with youth participation numbers at best maintaining but often decreasing in most leagues.
Playing numbers might be fine in some age groups but is evened up by lesser numbers in the rest.
My son plays for a club that yearly makes top 4 in a division 1 metro league here in Melbourne and is sandwiched between a few lesser clubs from a senior football point of view, but by far and away has a far smaller junior program then those other teams consisting of a just recently promoted to division 1 team and a division 2 team.
Admittedly those clubs have a far larger catchment area to attain players from but they'll have anything from 4 - 6 junior teams in 1 age group to our 1 - 2 maximum.
In the last few years, the best players Archie has played with in under 10's have moved clubs for reasons I'm not sure of but our club is the closest one to where they live so there is a barrier there somewhere I hope our club can identify.
In Archie's under 12's we have around 30 players with a huge gap between player ability which is to be expected at these sorts of age groups so instead of playing 25 in 1 age group and having players miss out on games, they've opted to go with 2 teams of 15 in divisions 2 and division 5.
With covid still playing havoc within football clubs, our division 5 team, Archie's team, hasn't been able to play together as a team yet this season because of 2 forfeits, the division 5 players have been playing division 2 against far better and older competition, not even getting a sniff of any sort of any in-game actions as the much better players from both teams simply dominate the ball which is to be expected.
Today we were able to play our division 5 team against another division 5 team for 15v15 and it worked a treat.
All players from our team were all heavily involved in the game with most, if not all, getting more touches of the football today then in the previous 2 games combined, with more being an understatement - it was probably closer to 5 - 10 x more touches and in-game actions really (I was central umpire).
Archie isn't majorly into footy and to be honest if I forgot to take him he wouldn't even notice but he said he enjoyed today's game far more than the last few years - in 2020 he was to be a top age player and probably the biggest player on the field most week's which I was hoping was gonna be a big development year for him but we missed out on that.
Playing division 5 is now a similar year to that and he might now be able to more clearly see the benefits of team sport/footy now that he can be more involved, which leads to more engagement which leads to having more fun which leads to longer participation, and hopefully wanting to play football off his own boot rather than mine!
Currently I'm leaning towards "rolling" age groups that might span more than 2 years where other aspects such as ability and body size (biobanding) are taken into account more so than age. Archie is quite big for his age (155cms/60kgs @ 11yrs old) so he's big but that is also often accompanied by lack of speed and less than stellar coordination combined with not playing a heap of sport in his spare time like us old timers used to, and he'd be in the bottom 10 - 20% of 11yr olds if I had to guess meaning he'll be a solid year behind everyone in basic ability as he goes through age groups, on top of him being born in early Jan where he's the youngest in his bottom year but the oldest in his top year - an advantage in 1 year but a severe disadvantage in his bottom year.
Now if he gets to his top age year of under 12's and he's still 12 months behind then there should be no issue with him staying in under 12's if his ability suits him to that age group better, rather then him having to go through 2 more years of not getting much action until he reaches his top age year again in the next age group.
I also wouldn't be against junior leagues with 10 - 12 teams splitting into a division 1/2 set up either and even though you might play each team 3 times in a season, I'm 100% sure that the kids don't care and and parents who do should remember whose actually playing the game. This would hopefully keep major blow outs to a minimum and thus engagement, enjoyment and participation remains high in all age groups.
Now with the top divisions of potentially playing 15v15, the players can kick better/further, can run faster/harder for longer and know far more about positional play so they could still get away with playing full field but today there were so many times where the ground was simply too big for just 30 under 12's.
We all know what it looks like with the ball in the defensive 50, drawing all your midfielders in there to stop the opposition scoring but then the forwards, of which there are only 4 or 5 depending on how you structure you're 15 players, 10 - 20m out from our goal, leaving a 100m gap between the ball and our next line of players.
This causes a mass of confusion for the players who are shown and told how to play forward by staying close to goal and/or inside 50 but of course all the coaches are saying push up to the middle of the ground so if we get the ball moving our way we have someone to kick it to.
This isn't correct but as I said it's confusing for the players, and unless you've been ultra specific with your coaching instructions and have literally trained this scenario, the players will hear what you say but have little, if any comprehension of what you actually mean and instead of doing anything, they'll do nothing, and they'll remain 100m from the ball.
The easy fix for this is to shorten the ground for lower divisions and/or games played with lesser playing numbers.
Another fix is to alter your playing positions simply to positional lines which might look something like this:
You can see on the left side of the board I have B1/B2/B3 which is back line 1, back line 2 and back line 3 and the same for forwards.
Players essentially play in pairs and are in charge of their own area's which I think will make it easier then 5 players trying to work together when none of them want to talk or anything.
You might train using a good portion of the ground but breaking it up 3rds or so like Auskick but simply using those area's as a teaching aid, not a heavy constraint, but teaching your players that if we get back to that scenario above then there can't be zero players in the middle zone if the ball is in either of the end zones.
With this you might want either all forwards to push up into zone 2 or the 2 forward pairs and the single forward player to stay in the forward zone.
You simply teach the reverse for the backs and the mids are to work mostly in the middle zone but can go slightly into the end zones temporarily if required.
Another way is to simply have all players in the closest 2 zones to the football but still setting up in their pair positions (F1/2/3 etc).
The last point I'll touch on is to use more games at training that don't follow any rhyme or reason as far as ball/player movement goes like cone to cone drills do. Cone drills only teach players that there is 1 way to solve this 1 solution leaving them helplessly unprepared to game day when that's the complete opposite.
Use kick or handball games in small, long, wide and long playing area's and expose your juniors to as many different, albeit slightly different, situations as they can to develop a deep bank of solutions for similar situations that they'll encounter during games.
Oh and coach to develop not to win - just my thoughts.
