Anyone's child played soccer for AYSO? Reviews?

[brookhaven]

AYSO is NOT an organization you want to participate in or having your children involved with. It's run by a bunch of incompetent bureaucrats. They have a couple of dozen staff at the headquarters that have more excuses why things are going wrong than the will or the capability to solve them. You could save a lot more headache having a neighborhood soccer team than spending money on this disarrayed organization.

[pyro4ik]

Originally Posted by FTG-05

Spent many a year with AYSO here in Madison (AL, not AZ!). Including but not limited to coach, referee, even a board member (wife) and finally, just another parents of two kids.

Glad it's over but wouldn't have missed it for the world. The kids loved it until they outgrew it.

AYSO = time, all local travel, unless you get into the state playoffs (one year we ended up in the state playoffs in Demopolis).

Club = lots more time, travel plus lots of money. I would only do it if you're kids were really, really serious about soccor.

I played club soccer for like a decade when I was young. Looking back, I have no clue how my parents pulled that off. Every year was three seasons: outdoor-outdoor-indoor-repeat. Our away games ate up the whole Saturday b/c games were sometimes 2-3 states away (east coast). And tournaments ate up 3 day holiday weekends.

Oh, and with club (at least for me) there was no guarenteed playing time. Unless I was hurt, I started and played all game, everygame and felt a little bad for friends who drove x-number of hours to sit and not play at all.

[Diana2015]

When you think about joining your kid in AYSO.Consider the following;
1)AYSO claims that it's for the kids, but the parents involvement has it's benefits & drawbacks.
2) Coaches are the parent volunteers & the experience differs depending on each coach.
2) Referees, who lay out the rules during the game(game is once every week) are parent volunteers & can be biased. AYSO allows a referee to be the referee of a game in which his son or daughter is playing!!
3)It's fun for the kids if the game is played with fairness by applying the rules equally to every or both teams in the game without any kind of exceptions or bias. Because, If it goes in the other way, It can deteriorate the kids' innocent & enthusiastic spirit.