An Open Letter to US Youth Soccer:

Dear US Youth Soccer,

While I recognize this as a "first world problem," your top-down bureaucratic decision to align US Youth soccer with the rest of the world, and switch from school year age ranges to calendar year age ranges is an arbitrary pain-in-my-ass (are you also going to dictate that we use the metric system?) and while this change could have been implemented with the youngest teams, and you could have "grandfathered" the older teams, instead you are tearing apart every team, everywhere; in larger towns, this isn't as much of a problem, as they have more participants and so it is easier to do a complete reset and conduct new try-outs, but this dictate truly punishes the small town coaches who have cobbled together competitive teams and now have to either play them "up" a year, which isn't good for anybody-- especially my team, which is generally undersized to begin with-- or send some kids packing (who probably won't have another place to go) and so while I recognize that you want to align yourself with international soccer as far as small sided training, which is beneficial to players, I don't understand why shifting age ranges is going to benefit any player in particular, and it is certainly going to hurt a number of teams, and give a number of volunteer travel coaches a huge headache . . . in fact, I'd far prefer adopting the metric system to dealing with the logistics of this; perhaps you will reconsider . . .

Irately,

Dave.