An eighth grader spent last season on your top team and played sparingly. This fall your staff moved him to the second team, where he'll start every tournament game. The call is right for him, and everyone on staff knows it. His parents hear something else: a demotion, delivered in October, after a year of paying for the top team's travel schedule. By Friday they're asking other directors what their top team looks like.
Where the Move Down Breaks
Most programs already soften the label. Teams carry colors or names instead of letters, and the placement email talks about development rather than ranking. That helps, and it rarely holds up past the first tournament weekend, because families judge the second team by what it feels like week to week, and a name can't change that.
Ricky Reyes, who directs CLA Lacrosse across the Carolinas, runs red and white teams at several age groups and keeps a large share of the families he moves down. His explanation is simple: "they don't feel a drop-off." The rest of this piece is about what has to be true for a family to say the same.
The No-Drop-Off Standard
The no-drop-off standard is a test for the second team: a family moved down should find the same training, the same people, and a visible route back up. Fail any one of the three and the move reads as a verdict, however carefully the email was written.
1: Same Training, Same Faces
The first thing a family checks after a move down is whether the program still invests in their kid. At CLA, the red and white teams at an age group get the same training and the same directors on the field, and Ricky describes joint practices with his two oldest teams where it isn't always obvious which kids belong to which team. What changes is the tournament schedule, while the coaching does not.
In practice that means sharing the session plan across both teams, running at least some practices jointly, and making sure the director and senior staff are seen at second-team sessions as often as at top-team ones. If the second team gets the newest coach, the leftover field time, and no visits from the director, families will notice by the second week.
2: The Conversation Built on Minutes
The placement conversation lands better when it's about playing time rather than ability. Ricky's version starts by granting the point the family is ready to argue: the kid can play at the higher level, and the staff has seen it. Then it moves to tournaments, where the stakes are concrete. A family on the top team may travel several states away, pay for flights, a hotel, and meals, and then, in his words, "sit on the sideline and watch your son not play." His case is that development comes from game minutes, and that the second team guarantees them.
For kids on the bubble, CLA puts the decision partly in the family's hands. After this summer's tryouts, Ricky sent about six eighth-grade families the same message: the second team offers guaranteed tournament minutes, and if the athlete would rather stay with the top team, train with that group, and accept limited playing time, the spot is theirs. Some families take the minutes and some take the challenge, and Ricky is comfortable with either, since both choices come from a family that understood exactly what it was choosing.
3: A Visible Route Back Up
A second team with no way up feels permanent, and a family that believes the placement is permanent starts shopping. The route up has to be visible in the ordinary week. Ricky's instruction to his staff is direct: "if there's an opportunity to pull a kid up for a certain drill with our older guys, let's give them that opportunity." When a top-team player misses a tournament through injury or a conflict, the bubble kid who has been working hardest gets the spot, with the expectations spelled out in advance.
Coaches also have to feed the kid's belief that he's in the right place. Ricky describes a white-team player who dropped a couple of balls in a full-field drill, got one piece of feedback, and nailed the next rep. The coach's response, by Ricky's account, was immediate and loud: "that was awesome. You did it." Small moments like that, repeated across a season, are how a kid stops feeling moved down and starts feeling like a leader on his own team.
What It Looks Like When It Works
CLA's 2028 teams are the clearest example. The white team was disappointed at first, then found its level and became the winningest team in the program. When staff later offered three of its players a move up to red, the players turned it down; in Ricky's telling, their answer was "we are perfectly fine where we are." They were good enough for the top team, liked their teammates, and preferred their tournament schedule, which is exactly the decision a well-built second team makes possible.
That outcome takes years to build, while the standard behind it can start this fall: same training, a conversation built on minutes, and a route up that families can see.
The eighth grader's parents are going to ask other directors about their top teams either way. Make sure what they're comparing against is a second team where their son starts every game, sees the director at practice, and knows exactly what it takes to move up.
