5-6 year old soccer play--- bad form or good plan?

[TacoVendor]

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5-6 sport should really be non-competitive.


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I don't know how much I agree with this. I think the main point of sports at this age is to stress teamwork, but also learning to deal with winning and losing. I don't think that it should be super-competitive, but I also think it's a mistake to take competition entirely out of it so that everyone's a winner. Kids need to learn how to win as well as lose. And by "learning to win as well as lose", I mean learning to win and lose in the manner of a sportsman (i.e. not being a sore winner or sore loser).

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Every kid out there on the field knows what the score is even if it is not recorded or tracked. There was a coach one year of 6 year olds that broke out monogrammed ball caps for every player on his team that said "Undefeated!" under their team name right at the final whistle of their last game of the "untracked" season. His team dominated every other team, but that was a little over the top.

Over time I have seen youth soccer go from a real sport that built competitors into a game that just brings out players. All the while, the rest of the world laughs at our inability to compete at the highest levels of the sport. These two issues are closely related.