Play up and play down situations come up every season without fail. There are good reasons and bad reasons for doing this. Safety and development drive most of our decisions, but exceptions can be made. Let's talk about what these situations are, when they should be done, things to think about when they are done, and reasons to avoid play up or play down situations. What is a Play up or Play Down?First things first. What are we talking about? A play up situation is where a player is grouped with players who are older they he or she is in chronological age. Most clubs (particularly on travel or select teams) will use a birth-year system to group players - meaning all kids born in 2003 are grouped together and all kids born in 2004 are grouped together with their own age group. Some clubs use school year groupings, where all first graders play together, all second graders play together, etc.In school groupings, there tends to be more variety of ages, and the basis for decision making is informed by classmates who know one another and tend to move together through the system as they do in grades - moving up each Fall to the next level. It's pretty common to see one year difference on travel teams using birth year groupings. Kids born in 2004 may "play up" with kids born in 2003, for example. But age bands are more limited in competitive soccer. In recreation soccer, the rules generally relax a little, but still follow some safety guidelines I will describe in a few minutes. We might see three-year age bands, for example. a 10U might include 10 year olds, 9 year olds, and a sprinkling of 8 year olds playing up. Things get dicey the broader the age band gets - which I'll talk about later. Play down situations are where an older player is grouped with younger players. An 11 year old playing down with 10 and under players, for example. Play down situations are generally discouraged across the country and are a lot less common than play up situations. Kids who play down can be accused of being "ringers," tipping the balance of a game outcome in favor of the team with the older player. It can also restrict the older player from certain playing options and it can put smaller players at risk for being "run over" or otherwise hurt by the older player. Safety is Number OneAs with most everything in youth soccer, safety trumps everything. If an environment is not safe, then we fail. You've heard me talk about this many times before. Play up and play down situations are no different. As kids grow older, they generally get bigger and stronger. This is common sense, right? We might consider what would happen if we pit a smallish 8 year old against a larger 11 year old on a soccer field. Someone could get hurt. Before you say, "but my 8 year old has an 11 year old brother, they play all the time, and my 8 year old does fine against he and his friends" - things change in competition or when the children playing are not relatives or friends. In the world of youth soccer, a great deal of mental energy has been spent calibrating the environment to the various age groups. We adjust the ball size as legs grow stronger. We adjust field size as kids can run farther and see more over the field horizon. We adjust the relative ages to group kids with similar hormonal makeup and attention to emotional and environmental queues. The rules are adjusted to ensure we don't introduce head injuries to kids before their craniums are strong enough to manage the impact. If we took an 8 year old with a still yet unformed cranium - who is meant to play with a number 3 ball, and introduce them to 25 headers per week with a heavier number 4 ball, we're asking for trouble. Individuals MatterKids don't all develop exactly at the same rate. Some mature faster or slower. A given player can be anywhere along the maturity spectrum 1-3 years on either side of their chronological age.