The general idea is to place your team in a competitive flight, with the goal of each team having an equal number of wins and losses. Clearly that won't work out for all teams, but that is the aim for the league, and for each BTSC team.

For brand new teams, that's a pure guess for the first season and we just do our best. The spring will be a little easier. For existing teams, the idea is to look at teams that you think are comparable, and put your team with them. Conversely, if you see teams in your flight that you know will not be a good match, we use that to adjust.

There are three rounds, and you'll need to look at the overall flighting report, and find your team and flight. Look for those competitive teams to gauge where we should place you for the next round. Feel free to reach out to coaches of comparable teams to get their thoughts. Their makeup may have changed non-trivially since the last time you saw them, and that's good information for you to have. Be honest with them - remember the goal is to be competitive, not to sandbag so you can win the flight! See below on how to 'decode' the MNJYSA flight.

The flighting report has a number of columns, some of which are of interest.

• 'Last Season Flight' tells you where a team was last time around, which can help you find the teams you were flighted with the prior season
• 1st Request tells you what they asked for in the first round. Second request and Final appeal are the other coach inputs
• 1st Projected is assigned based on a simple algorithm of previous season won-loss record and goal differential. Note that first round flighting results are based primarily on this algorithm!
• Current Flight shows where the league has placed you at that moment in time
• The goals and record columns can help you gauge other teams, however it is only visible for U11 and up

You will get another round in the couple of weeks after initial flighting, and then we have the final appeal. That final appeal is where your input, including information on team makeup changes and records against other teams, will come into play for the final flighting. I'm happy to help you sort this out as you go, and your team mentor is a great resource as well.

Small sided U12s are presently done a bit differently. To accommodate the mix of small and large sided teams at this age, the initial flight requests for large sided are the usual 1 - 8, however the small sided are put in the 9 - 15 range. So if you want your small sided U12 team in flight 3, the initial request will show as 11.

Simple enough, until the second round and appeal, when it's changed up again for the small sided to be in the range of 51 and up!

How to decode the flight number:

The MNJYSA flighting information is a combination of several things that together describe the team flighting.

That format is DAAGFF

• D: Division - single digit, 1 - 6, where division 1 is the oldest (U19) and 6 is the youngest (U8)
• AA: Age - two digit 'U' age of the team
• G: Gender - G or B
• FF: Flight - two digits from 01 (highest level of competition in that age group and gender) to an indeterminate number which depends on the number of teams in that age group and gender. Can be as small as 4, or as large as 12. Except for those small sided U12s as noted above, where the flight number begins at 51 and goes from there

Coaching Information