Absolutely not. This bubble wrapping kids from the big nasty world garbage needs to stop. When I was playing as a kid and lost to a team, it gave me extra motivation to beat them next time and fueled my desire to improve.

Perhaps there needs to be more focus by coaches and parents on more than just the score. Sure, losing sucks when you're playing but it's even worse when mum & dad or the coach feel like they're playing for sheep stations at a young age.

In a nutshell, keep the score so the kids have a tangible goal. Parents & coaches, stop looking a the scoreboard for kids in U10's & below. Worry about their enjoyment and development

the kids know what the score is.

sport is about and winning and losing gracefully.

If you do not want a winner, do not play a game, just practice

Losing usually makes you appreciate winning so much more.
Leave things alone please

This 'soft entry sport' thing is little more than a power move by the AFL

AFL is trying to foster an entry level "participation" here.

after all it is a competition they are running !

sooner the kids learn to live with it the better.

maybe it was not the "competition" side of things but how the adults were running / delivering it.

i would liken this to "aussie hoops" level of entry - and no score is kept

One night a week I help our club by training under 12, under 11 and rookie age players all the way down to about 7 or 8 years of age.

This week we have several of our teams in grand finals, which is common for our club in the domestic league we play in.

While our rookie teams often play in non scoring competitions, with lowered rings and the emphasis here is on learning the game and fun, when they get to the under 11 age group it is more of a competative game situation for many of them.

Each Association tends to run its own rules under their by-laws to suit the standard of their competitions. This is slightly different to football.

For example, you may have under 11 teams that are quite good and can play in a Division 1, with scoring and it suits the kids just fine, others at this age are still learning to catch and dribble, so they might be structured differently with the referee acting as a coach on court etc...

At training and as a club we always place focus on sportsmanship, so although everyone likes to win, the emphasis is on learning the game and having fun, especially at this age group, in juniors this is how we retain players.

Often, after training I would speak to the kids about what it means to be part of our club and how they are expected to behave on the court and towards each other as players. Parents too are encouraged to embrace the club and understand that they are part of it, not just an outsider paying a club membership fee.

I don't think basketball needs to follow football as a blanket rule of no scoring, we just need to place some trust in our Associations and parents need to stay on the right path, stay focused on why their kids are playing in the first place.

This issue of scoring or not scoring is almost certainly an issue of poor parent behaviour in the football circles, let's not follow like sheep on this, let's try to lead for once and keep basketball above this issue with sportsmanship as the key...

everything in life is a competition that has winners and losers.

At school kids work hard to "win" at exams so they can have the choice of careers. At job applications, they try to "win" the interview to get the job they want. In love, they are trying to win the desired person. In nature, the winners survive, and the losers perish.

Sport is no different, part of the enjoyment is winning, that is why you see more smiles on the winning team than the losing team. In life you must learn to win, but also learn that you cannot win every time. A good place to start is in junior sport where the correct values on both winning and losing should be learned.

Does anyone actually believe U10s actually learn life lessons about winning/losing from the presence of a scoreboard?

U10s struggle to remember the following day whether they won or not, because they were probably (hopefully) engrossed in learning a sport and basic movement skills which are still foreign to them.

Make no mistake about it: the scoreboard is for the parents. Scoring has about as much impact on the development of these kids as their parents barking instructions from the sideline all game, every game.

It would be a controversial change, but one that I think could be beneficial.

we already have this "no score" or "no table" with aussie hoops participation.

that is the level that AFL are looking at as well.

don't confuse it with u10 comp

if anything was to change - I would rather see it come from a controlling government sporting body rather than just AFL or the kids will be confused - as when they play one sport there will be scores and other sport no scores.

also my experience with u10 footy is a lot more feral than u10 basketball - when my son played u`0/`` footy - there were feral parents at certain clubs drinking UDLs at 9am games on a sunday bringing a certain culture - I am yet to witness anything like this at basketball - so wrong to compare.

could i suggest that the people who do not want scoring have never won anything in their sporting careers. It is natural to want to win.

not scoring games will not solve the problem of "bad parents"