Do eight-year-old athletes really need to be told who the best player on the team is? Should 10-year-olds be wildly celebrating wins and mourning gameday losses? Athlete rankings—both team and individual—can do more harm than good in early developmental years in sport. Not only do the rankings potentially discourage late bloomers from continuing in a sport that they might otherwise love, but rankings can actually hurt high performers as well.
Here, TrueSport Expert Amanda Stanec, PhD, the founder and owner of MOVE + LIVE + LEARN, explains how ranking systems can be harmful to young athletes, and how a coach can navigate making gains as a team without an extreme focus on numbers.
How rankings hurt athletes
As a coach, pause and ask yourself why you care about ranking kids in the first place, says Stanec. “Kids aren’t professional athletes, they aren’t nearly finished growing and developing, and ranking them at an early age makes very little sense from any perspective,” she adds. The emotional toll of being ranked first or last (or stuck in the gray zone in the middle) can be hard for young athletes, and from a practical physical perspective, your highest-ranked player could change depending on when kids hit puberty or have growth spurts.
“Rankings cause too much attention to be focused on the individual, and this can stunt development in a variety of ways,” Stanec adds. “Rankings create this culture of playing for the short-term wins, instead of focusing on the long-term plan to help kids develop and reach their potential.” This isn’t just true of youth athletes under 12. This is also true of teen athletes, even at the high school level.
“Focusing on winning rather than developing all the athletes is also more likely to hinder team chemistry, as some coaches will play those experiencing success early in the season and fail to give others a chance to prove themselves,” Stanec says. “When the team chemistry falls apart, I’d argue that you’re much less likely to achieve that high ranking as a team anyway.”
So why do we rank kids if there isn’t a positive outcome? Because adults seemingly enjoy applying adult constructs to youth sports. “There don’t seem to be positives to ranking youth athletes, other than serving adult egos,” Stanec says. “Championships and rankings are adult constructs that we’re putting on kids when it is not age or developmentally appropriate to do so.”
