Balanced Teams

Balanced Teams is one of ASYO's 6 Philosophies. Unified practices is our Region's time to have coaches look at players and do our best to ensure no team is significantly stronger than the other at the start of the season. Coaches will run drills and scrimmages to evaluate players. Players just play soccer and have fun.

Is it a try-out?

In a sense yes. But nobody is getting cut. There's no pressure to make the team. In most practices, players will likely not even notice that they are being evaluated.

When will my child be placed on a team?

Unified practices will run from July 29 through August 9. Coaches will then meet and hold a blind draft where coaches are randomly assigned to teams after they have been divided up evenly. Once coaches have their teams, they should be contacting players throughout the weekend so practices with the team can start on August 14th.

Does it work?

Evaluations aren't perfect and there are a lot of factors that determine a team's success. Unified practices work well when coaches get as much time as possible to evaluate as many players as possible. The more we know, the better it works.

Will you move players if team balance doesn't work?

Moving players is very rare and is done only in extreme circumstances be done with careful consideration for the players involved. This won't be done for the sole purpose of fixing team balance.

NOTE: Divisions that do not have enough players to form more than one team will begin practice as soon as coaches are ready instead of holding Unified Practices.

1. Players must be registered to participate. If they are not, register them now!
2. All players must have shinguards completely covered by socks. We also recommend bringing water.

We get it... multiple kids in multiple locations? Got to work late? Life happens and we know we aren't going to get 100% participation. We'd prefer to see everyone at all practices but if everyone can make two, it will help us immensely with balancing teams.

Running a unified practice well requires a lot of volunteer help. Here's what we need:

Setup/Tear-down

Need parents to help set up goals and equipment before practice and put everything away after practice.

Check-in/Field Assigner

Players will be assigned to fields prior to the practice. We need parents to sit at a table, check players in and direct players to thier assigned field.

Evaluators

Coaches need to be part of this process but anyone is welcome. The more opinions we have, the better our evaluations will be.