During my PhD, I collected newborn dairy bull calves from farms within roughly 300 kilometers of the university. Each calf had to be collected within three hours of birth, which meant long drives and visits at unusual hours. One of those farms was in a Hutterite colony.
I remember meeting the dairy manager and his son, perhaps seven or eight years old. I asked the boy a question adults often ask children: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Before he could answer, his father replied: “A good dairy farmer.”
I had visited Hutterite colonies before and knew that farming and communal responsibilities were deeply connected to family life. Perhaps the father was expressing pride in a life he loved. Perhaps he knew his son’s hopes better than I did. Still, the exchange stayed with me. I had asked the boy about his future, and someone else had answered.
Years later, watching my daughters grow up in youth soccer, I began noticing a quieter version of that moment. No one was telling children what they must become. But adults were already giving them answers about what kind of players they were.
In larger clubs, where enough children in one age group register to form several teams, those answers sometimes come in three colors: Black, White, and Yellow. In the clubs I have known, Black is the top-ranked team, followed by White and Yellow. The colors sound ordinary until you see what they mean to the children carrying them.
My daughters experienced that hierarchy differently.
My younger daughter joined Black when she was seven or eight and remained there. The players understood what Black meant and took pride in belonging to it. I noticed pride among the coaches, too. As a parent, I was pleased to see my child recognized. I did not question the arrangement very much.
My older daughter was on White. I remember how badly she wanted to reach Black. She practiced and hoped, and eventually became the only player from her White team to move up. She was happy. I noticed a little more confidence. We were proud of her.
But making Black and finding a place on Black were not the same thing.
Most of the players had been together for years. She arrived as the newcomer, was often a substitute, and received limited playing time. At the same time, she trained with talented teammates and had access to stronger competition and more demanding tournaments. After a year, she moved to another club and played with an older age group. There was only one team in that age group, not an internal ladder of Black and White.
I cannot claim that her year on Black was wasted. What stays with me is how much reaching Black had come to mean to her before she ever arrived. I had celebrated the name of the team before fully considering the experience my daughter would have on it.
What, exactly, had she been trying to reach? Better competition? Recognition? A sense that she was finally good enough? Probably more than one of those things. And what had we, the adults, taught her that the color meant?
Neither of my daughters invented what Black meant. That meaning was already there when they entered the club. It was reflected in the team rankings, in how players talked about moving up, and in how adults responded when they did. My younger daughter learned the pride of belonging to Black. My older daughter learned to see Black as something worth reaching.
And I wondered what a child assigned to Yellow might learn about herself in the same environment.
Psychologist Albert Bandura called the belief that we can carry out a task self-efficacy. Such beliefs grow through experience and are influenced by what others communicate to us.
I think about my daughters now: one belonged to Black from the beginning; the other worked to earn that place. How much of their confidence came from what they did on the field, and how much from what the adults around them had taught them the colors meant?
The contrast became clearer as I watched how other clubs organized their children. In one nearby community, a girls’ age group has only one team, which competes in the Black bracket. Another club has kept children of the same birth year together across different stages of development. I have also seen a club combine two birth years when numbers were low, then introduce Black and Yellow divisions after more players arrived.
Each arrangement has practical reasons. Larger clubs need to organize rosters, and higher-ranked teams often provide stronger competition and tournaments. A single team playing in the Black bracket does not mean all its players have identical abilities. Still, a child could play for a smaller club’s only team, then move to a larger club and be assigned to White or Yellow. Her ability has not necessarily changed. The number of players around her has.
I understand why clubs organize children according to their current abilities. Stronger competition can help players develop, and coaches need manageable groups. But I wonder whether seven- and eight-year-olds need to carry those differences as team identities. Could children train in flexible groups, play across different levels, or simply belong to teams whose names do not announce a hierarchy? We may not be able to avoid assessing young players, but perhaps we can be more careful about turning those assessments into labels they carry.
Would a seven-year-old understand that distinction? Or would she hear something simpler: I am a Yellow-team player?
She might take the label as a challenge, settle into it happily, or begin to doubt herself. I cannot know. What adults see as a temporary assessment of ability, a child may begin to carry as a description of herself.
I still remember the boy at the dairy farm.
I never heard his answer.