Power BEHIND RANKINGS
Just the other day at practice, I noticed a shift in a group of five players. It was towards the end of my youth girls’ practice and this group of players had either lost or tied every match that day. As they walked onto the pitch for their last match, one of the girls yelled to her team, “Come on, we need to win!” Her teammates looked over at her and nodded. Then she growled, “This goes in the rankings!” Not surprisingly, this team went on to win the match and celebrated like they had won the World Cup. It reminded me of what we are trying to teach our players: that effort is a choice and when given both fully and effectively, we have the power to shape our destiny. If we win, we are elated. If we lose, we know deep down that we gave our best and can use it as a learning opportunity to grow. The real question here is: what motivates a group of youth girls to give every inch of their soul to win a game at the end of practice after losing several matches on an unbearably hot, humid, and long evening? The answer is a player power ranking.
There seems to be this idea that the ranking of youth players creates an anxious environment where both players’ and coaches’ competitive drives tend to go overboard. In return, this highly competitive environment eventually becomes a toxic one in which players lose confidence in themselves, distrust teammates, and eventually burnout. I am sure that this outcome has happened before in many a competitive football environment and I am not here to deny its potential. Yet, through my research with elite coaches and several years of implementing measurements for youth players with expert statistician, Jon Nichols, we have actually found the exact opposite experience to be true. We found that ranking players is a powerful tool to not only analyze players, but also motivate them. Ranging from my U17 to U12 players, we found that measuring and ranking players sparked a new and deeper passion for the sport, enhanced their enjoyment of training sessions, and taught them that every moment at practice counts. By measuring players there is not a session that goes by where they can just go through the motions or lose a match because they do not want to put in the effort. The measurements and rankings provide an incentive to perform, and it strikes to the very core of why we enjoy playing football: competition.
If we examine the juxtaposition of these experiences with implementing a ranking system, toxic versus motivating, we can only logically conclude that like any tool its power is defined by the wielder. Therefore, it is how well the coach and staff understand the players (developmental age, team chemistry, mindset, culture, and socio norms, etc.) and how they both value and implement the ranking system. For example, with my U13 girls, I listed only the top three players in the overall rankings every two or three weeks, understanding that developmentally they are entering into a critical phase of constant self-evaluation and the need for peer acceptance. Therefore, revealing to the group that a twelve-year old girl ranks last or even second to last in a group of sixteen players is not going to help her both mentally and emotionally. Yet, what I have learned is that by showing the top three players over the past few weeks, the group applauds their accomplishment and moves on to training with the understanding that those three top positions can change. They start to believe that anything is possible, and they set off to both work and compete harder.
Finally, one of the most overlooked emotional aspects of measuring youth players is that they can feel a sense of being seen and valued. Many teenagers want to be heard and know that what they do matters. When you measure a player and they see both their ranking and individual scores, you accomplish both goals simultaneously. Consistent feedback on a player’s performance shows that the coach cares and values his or her players. Moreover, they show that they are committed to the players’ development while modeling transparency. Players and parents will in the long run appreciate this objective feedback and it can defuse and avoid miscommunication over topics such as playing time and player cuts. For example, when a U-13 team I coached moved up in the club, I had to leave a few players behind. In these emotionally loaded player conferences, I displayed the 37 measurements I took over the year in the various characteristics and explained to the parents that their daughters had just not reached the level where we were. They agreed looking at the rankings and data for their daughter, so I asked them how I could bring their daughters up a level when they had not yet reached the competitive level where we were as a team? Long story short, these players dropped to the team below us for the next year, became the team captains, put in greater effort to improve in the areas I detailed for them, thrived in their positions, and found confidence in their abilities. Though these parents were not happy with me at first making the choice to leave their daughters down, the data backed my subjective experiences as a coach and it displayed the time, effort, and thought put into making my decisions on and off the field, which the parents and players greatly appreciated.
In the end, there is no question that measuring and ranking players is a powerful tool that provides valuable feedback and motivates them. Moreover, disappearing are the days where parents pour thousands of dollars into their child’s club and there are no reports or records to keep them informed of their investment’s performance. Ultimately, measuring and ranking players is the key to building a structured player development system that can be replicated. Author, Ryan Hanlon, comments in his book, Net Gains: Inside The Beautiful Game’s Analytics, on how “random” the soccer development system is in America and for some reason every other sport has “a clearer conception of what a good player does,” and that here in America, “no one knows what they are really talking about in an objective fashion.” Instead, our player development system here in America is more about what Coach Raymond Verheijin claims as “the survival of the fittest” rather than “the survival of football talent.” The truth is that there are many variables that go into creating elite footballers and our job is to figure them out, measure them, and use the results to make better decisions in the future. Choices that start to eliminate the chaos of player development, meet the needs of the human beings behind our players, and bring out the highest ideals of our sport.
