(HealthDayNews) -- If you're thinking of getting involved in your child's sports league, here are some words of wisdom.
Because the goal of child sports is to build character, not characters, the journal Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Clinics of North America suggests:
Let teams be well balanced. One popular method is to have the coaches get together and organize the most balanced teams possible. Then the coaches pick a predetermined team roster from a hat to find out which one they'll be coaching.
Another technique is to rate every player on a scale of one to five, then compose every team so that each has the same total rating.
Don't break up a balanced team to accommodate carpools. Let the parents find new ways to carpool -- they do in school classes.
And don't let the kids' teams use the same names as professional teams. According to the psychiatrists, these names fuel unconscious associations and fantasies, and may subtly tilt all participants toward the professional "win at all costs" mentality.
