It’s time for the student’s favorite time of day. Recess! One student sprints to the materials bin, grabs the football, and shouts, “Football!” A horde of kids cheer and sprint, skip and jump over to the student with the football. The student with the football declares they are one of the captains. Two more students declared that they wanted to be the captain. As the kids look around, they see many people want to play, and choosing teams may take a while. Inevitably, one of the best players looks to their best friend and suggests to the group, “Hey, how about the two of us versus all of you?” The other kids say okay, thinking they will win on the sheer size of their time, but they are wrong. In fact, in the history of this type of matchmaking, the smaller team with the two or three best players is undefeated. And so begins the highlight reel as the tiny all-star team completely annihilates the other team.
On paper, it would seem like this type of matchmaking would elicit even odds, but this is not the case. This is just a farce and illusion the skilled players use to convince their less skilled peers that they have a chance. They don’t. They never did. However, since the not-so-skilled team agreed, the skilled players can hold it against them when they inevitably win by a landslide. “You agreed to the teams” is used as justification. In real-world terms, the skilled players got the other kids to sign a bad contract and now are telling them you shouldn’t have signed it in the first place. “You agreed to the teams” is “you agreed to the terms.” However, they will try the same thing again the next day.
Now, this would never fly if the skilled players tried to pile on to one team and took a couple more players so that the teams were evenly numbered. It would be blatantly unfair. So, the skilled kids have to create a smokescreen of fairness by reducing their numbers, but the kids they remove from their team are not the good ones. It becomes a perfect metaphor for David and Goliath because the smaller team is more skilled and will easily dismantle the large team ahead of them.
The truth of this type of game is that it is boring for everyone. It is obviously not fun for the larger team that is going to lose by a large margin. At best, they might try again the next day to no avail. At worst, those kids are so demoralized they decide football (or whatever sport they are playing) is not fun and stop playing for good. Getting beaten and knowing you cannot win is never fun. But it should not be fun for the skilled kids if they are honest with themselves. The best and most fun games are the close ones where competition is close. The problem with close competition is that there is a chance one could lose. So these skilled players tip the balance of the scales and put the game on easy mode but claim it was difficult. However, playing a game you know you will win quickly makes it dull.
Frankly, if the better athletes had more guts, they would make the teams as even as possible because there we would see actual competition. With the certainty of victory gone, the game should be much closer. The closer games are much more fun, and winning a close game will feel much more exciting than walking through an easy opponent. However, I’ve shared an observation that others agreed with in a previous blog post: highly skilled players typically can’t “play for fun” as easily as their friends. This is a sign that this child needs some intervention in sportsmanship, and they need to work on their social skills as much as they are working on their physical skills.
However, another reason not apparent to the students is that this type of matchmaking means the larger team will play less than the smaller team. The larger team will be playing less because each individual player will have fewer touches of the ball and have less influence on the game. The opposite is true for the smaller team. Those skilled players will be touching the ball almost every play and having more fun because they are more active. An excellent example of this phenomenon is kindergarten soccer. When I played soccer as a youth, we all gravitated to the ball, and it was like a moving mosh pit of kids until the ball squirted out and the fastest kid scored a goal. Most players did not contribute anything meaningful, and the game could be downright boring. Compare that to how my son’s kindergarten league is organized. Each team has only five to six kids and only plays three at a time. This ensures that each kid actually plays because there are far fewer kids on the field. It looks way more fun than my youth soccer days.
If you observe kids at recess, discourage students from doing two versus all at recess and help them make fair, even-numbered teams. When there is an uneven amount of students, having one student be “all-time offense or all-time defense” can be an elegant solution as long as that player plays as best they can for both teams. If there is one child athletically far beyond the others, having that player be the all-time offense can make the game more fun if you give them the goal of getting the most assists. If it were football, a team could use this student as the quarterback so that the throws would be more accurate and (hopefully) evenly distributed. There is an art to ensuring the fairest teams possible, and it is not always easy, but it is worth it for the sake of the community of kids playing.
In general, I try to be hands-off during recess with the students. I want them to resolve their own problems. However, when I notice the students are making the same mistake over and over again, I step in to help. In the long run, removing the “Us Vs. Them” dynamic will get more students playing. The goal of recess is to allow the students to play. We just need to guide them to make sure everyone is playing.