<using a throwaway>
Wanted to vent about a situation this weekend but that's also been ongoing.
Daughter plays on a large U12 club with multiple teams at U12. There are typically 3 teams - PreECNL I'll call the "A" team, a "B" team, and a "C" team. We all practice at the same time but they have separate head coaches. The teams are somewhat fluid where where girls might get pulled between teams for practice or games week to week depending on the needs of each team and where the girls are. I would say on all these teams in my view the bottom 4-5 players and top 4-5 players between them are pretty interchangeable skill wise depending on what you are looking at.
We have a girl, "J", who played almost entirely with the C team at the start of the season. About 1/3 through the season her parents complained in passing that she was very upset about this - she had been with the club the longest and all her friends were on the higher team. I guess almost to the point where she didn't want to play anymore.
More recently "J" has started playing with the B team much more. After a while I noticed every day before practice she would ask the C team coach to go practice with the B team. Fair enough, sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
This weekend we had a 3 day tournament and "J" was rostered for the C team. We had 3 typical C team players that got rostered for the B team in the tournament and the C team head coach was not there so a younger assistant was coaching. The first day "J" doesn't show up for the game. The C team was light on subs because another of the girls couldn't make the first day. Then a player got hurt so the team had no subs for most of the game.
The next day "J" is at our game. Apparently she had played with the "B" team. The one parent said they had a miscommunication with the other parent who brought them about what field they were supposed to play on, they saw the "B" team first who were playing at the same time we were scheduled and thought she was supposed to be there. Ok no worries mistakes happen.
Final day "J" is not there again. C team again only has 1 sub because the injured girl is still out. The B team is a few fields away and I can see they have 5 subs.
After the game we see "J" leaving the other field. Clearly not a miscommunication anymore.
I'm not sure if the coaching staff is going to address yet this, but it seems to be getting ridiculous that you can just self-assign to the team you want to play for. Taking playing time from others on a well rostered team and leaving the other team with no breaks.