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After years of practicing, you did it you finally made a goal.

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You are excited that they scored a goal, aren't you?

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You are excited that they scored a goal, aren't you?

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I saw the team cheering because they got a goal

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Write one sentence underneath each Point of View to describe this picture from that perspective.

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Canadian soccer group doesn't keep track of children's goals, and that's a good thing

Straight from Canada, the land of loonies, politeness and socialized medicine, comes the latest concept to baffle Americans - a youth sport that doesn't keep score.

The Ontario Soccer Association is phasing in a policy in which all teams of players 12 and under will no longer track goals or keep standings. The idea, as the group explains on its website, is to focus on skill-building rather than competition when children are young, thereby creating better players and encouraging more kids to stick with the sport.

"When kids drop out because of pushy parents or because coaches sit kids 'on the bench' ... because they need to 'win,' we lose thousands of kids every year - and we don't have to," the group said.

I read about this in a publication called Athletic Business, and the online comments that followed were about what I expected. Most expressed horror at the idea of playing games without keeping score, particularly a guy named Mike who exercised his caps lock a lot more than his spell-checker.

"This world is raising a bunch of non competitive tree huging sensitive kids that are taught FAIRNESS," Mike wrote. "LIFE IS NOT FAIR. Tthese kids will be failures because of their parents."

But as someone who has played, coached and watched hundreds of youth sports games, I have a different take on the association's scoring policy:

What took so long?

I can think of many benefits children get from sports, from physical fitness to confidence to camaraderie, but I'm hard-pressed to identify anything good that comes from sorting them into winners and losers at a young age.

The downside, though, is quite clear. We create a legion of kids who hate sports and hate exercise, and then we wonder why they're so chubby (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says childhood obesity has more than doubled in the last 30 years).

There are standard objections to no-score sports. Let me answer them in turn.

Kids won't learn to compete. This is bunk. Watch any peewee game, score or no score, and you will see that some children hurl themselves into it and others just cruise along, showing excitement only when it's time for the postgame juice box.

Does a blank scoreboard turn go-getters into sloths? No. Does a coach pulling out every trick to secure victory - shuffling his lineup, yelling at the top of his lungs, badgering the ref - transform the daisy pluckers into mini-Messis? Absolutely not.

Children compete against each other all the time, from the classroom to the playground, and they know perfectly well who's a stud and who's a scrub. They don't need an LED display to tell them.

Kids keep score in their heads anyway. That's true, as far as it goes. My son has long played in a recreational soccer league where there are no scoreboards or team records, but he can tell you the score without error, as well as the name of every kid who put the ball in the back of the net.

Yet the fact that results aren't official has a pacifying effect on adults. No one gets too worked up over what happens on the field.

Compare that to another sport my son has played - baseball. There, our local league has playoffs for kids as young as 7, and you'd better believe everyone knows the score. That makes people go a little crazy: Once, when my son was 8, two opposing coaches nearly got into a fistfight in the middle of the diamond.

My boy never said anything about it. But guess which sport he quit playing?

Kids have no motivation to improve if the games don't count - This is the criticism I take most seriously. Sports should be fun, but they should also help kids learn that getting better at anything requires effort, dedication and focus.

I doubt, however, that keeping score is the best way to do that.

I played a lot of sports as a kid, but the one I got serious about was swimming, where the color of your ribbon tells you exactly how you stack up (I got a lot of green ones, which were only slightly better than "participant").

The funny thing is that I never cared about them. Swimming is a mercilessly objective sport, and it's not a ribbon that tells you if you're getting better - it's the clock. Dropping time meant a lot more to me than winning a race. That was the driving force that kept me swimming competitively all the way through college.

It's harder to get that kind of incentive in a team sport, but I salute the Canadians for trying something different. I suspect they'll find that when they do start keeping score - and to me, the age of 12 or 13 sounds about right - a lot more kids will still be around to reap the sport's benefits.

So make it Ontario Soccer Association 1, Caps Lock Mike 0.
Twitter @JohnKeilman

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Youth sports that don't keep score? How un-American! Canadian soccer league drops scores, standings for kids 12 and under

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Canadian soccer group doesn't keep track of children's goals, and that's a good thing Straight from Canada, the land of loonies, politeness and socialized medicine, comes the latest concept to baffle Americans - a youth sport that doesn't keep score.