I coach my kid’s junior soccer team. Anyone who has stood on the sideline with a clipboard knows the bit nobody warns you about. It’s not the coaching. It’s working out who comes off, when, and for how long, so that every kid gets roughly the same time on the field.
At U7 level the footy itself is chaos in the best way. Eight kids chasing one ball in a swarm. The hard part is the bench. You’ve got a squad, you’ve only got so many spots on the field, and you promised yourself at the start of the season that every kid would get a fair go. Then the game starts, a parent asks you something, a kid needs their shoelace tied, and suddenly it’s half time and you’ve lost track of who has had a rest and who hasn’t.
Why equal playing time matters at junior level
At this age it isn’t about winning. It’s about kids falling in love with the sport. The quickest way to put a seven year old off soccer forever is to leave them sitting on the bench while their mates run around. Equal game time keeps everyone involved, keeps the parents happy, and honestly it just feels like the right thing to do.
The trouble is that doing the maths in your head while you’re actually coaching is almost impossible. If the game is 40 minutes, you’ve got 10 kids and 7 on the field at a time, how long should each kid sit out, and how many times? That’s the kind of sum that is easy at the kitchen table and impossible on a cold Saturday morning with a whistle in your mouth.
So I built a calculator
With a bit of help from AI I put together a simple tool that does the sum for you. You tell it the basics about your game and it tells you how long each player should spend on the bench and how to rotate them so everyone gets the same time on the field.
You enter a few things:
- How long the game goes for
- Whether it’s played in halves, quarters or periods
- How many kids are in your squad
- How many can be on the field at once
- How many times you want each kid to come off
Hit calculate and it gives you a fair rotation. There’s also a share button, so you can send the plan to your assistant coach or the team manager before the game.
It works for more than soccer now
The first version was built around my soccer team, but the same problem shows up in basically every junior sport. Basketball coaches rotating five on the court. Netball with seven on. Footy with the interchange bench. Hockey, rugby, all of it. Same headache, same need to keep it fair.
So now you can pick your sport at the top and it sets up the sensible starting numbers for you. Soccer, basketball, netball, AFL and a few others. You can still change everything to match your own competition, because junior formats vary heaps depending on the age group and the local association. Think of the sport setting as a head start, not a rule.
Give it a go
If you coach kids and you want every one of them to get a fair go without doing sums on the sideline, have a play with it. The playing time calculator is here.
It’s free and there’s no sign up. If you use it and something would make it more useful, let me know. I’m still tweaking it.
