A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece looking at and critiquing a new youth development initiative introduced by the United States Soccer Federation called Bio-Banding. I wasn’t exactly positive. Bio-Banding hoped to address a real enough problem: the dominance of players at youth levels who are more physically mature than other players they play with, creating an incentive for physical play over technical and positional skills. After all, it doesn’t matter how many step-overs you can do on the ball if the opponent can just push you over and take the ball.
Bio-Banding is supposed to address this by evaluating how developed a player is, and then giving him or her an opportunity to play with players that match that point in their development, rather than strictly by age.