Have you ever noticed how some coaches play favorites? I have. That's the main reason that I'm not playing soccer this fall. Some coaches feel that it is necessary to use their starting players the whole game. These coaches really aggravate me. Yeah, sure, my coach would play me, but only with three minutes left in the half. Now it wasn't like I and the other people on the bench weren't doing the work in practice, because most of the time, we worked twice as hard as the starters to try to impress the coach.

The team could be slaughtering its opponents and he still wouldn't sub in new guys to give them the experience. Then if you asked him why he kept the same eleven guys out on the field he would respond that he wanted experience out there. It's sort of like all those employment ads that say "experience only," but there is no way to get experience if they don't hire you.

It seemed that every team that we played against made substitutions six more times than we did. There was even one team that was second in our division who subbed half the team every 15 minutes. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not just picking on this coach because I have had others who coached the same way.

Some day I hope these biased coach will get the idea that if they don't play those who aren't as stellar as the starters, the team won't get any better. A team is only as strong as its bench and only really good teams have a strong bench. Take any team in the majors and look at their roster, the teams that win the championships always have a strong bench. So maybe high school coaches should take a tip from the pros and create a sound bench which would help the entire team in the long run. l