This system can be used to create teams by a draft or by a single person assigning children to teams.  Bear in mind that with a draft, this system may end up with teams that are slightly uneven because a coach might select a child for a reason other than for the child's playing ability (i.e. wanting a parent as an assistant or selecting a friend of their child's).

Teams are put together one grade at a time, starting with the older grade first.

For ease in selection, Sort the Registration file into a smaller filed that includes the following information: a column to put the team number once a child has been selected; the child's name; last year's coach's skill rating; stacked rating, which denotes where last year's coaches as a whole would rank the player in the league; unavailable practice days; whether the child is a travel player or not; sponsorship info, if applicable, and coaching availability, if applicable.  Most of the information should already be in there, but you might want to check it against other documents provided (i.e. the sponsorship spreadsheet to make sure that all of them made it to the spreadsheet, and the comments column in the general registration form to see if there are any requests to be placed on the same team as a sibling.  We do not honor requests for friends to play together.).
                                 
Create a ranking system for each grade using as much information as possible.  This should include player evaluations from the previous year as well as input from travel coaches or other people knowledgeable about different children's abilities. These rankings are most important for the top 15 to 20 players in each grade.  After that, it works fine to consider all players rated a “2.75” as equal to each other, all 2.25's as equal, etc.  If two players are close according to their evaluations, and one is on a travel team and the other is not, rank the child on the travel team higher because they will be playing twice as much soccer during the season and by virtue of that, there is a good chance they will progress a bit faster in their skill development.

One thing to remember is that some players did not play in our house league last year, so they won’t have ratings and thus fall at the bottom of the ranking sheet.  If a player has no ranking but is listed as a travel player, you should assume that they would rank similarly to the other travel players.

Please note: remember that this rating information should be kept fairly confidential, limiting its exposure to only people who have a valid reason to see it.  This will help avoid hurting anyone's feelings or creating animosity between coaches and parents over children's ratings.

Sort the spreadsheet on the ratings, from strongest to weakest.

If a draft is being held, have the coaches review the rankings you have provided and ask them if there are any ratings that seem inconsistent or incorrect so that all coaches have fair information.

Determine which night and time each team is going to practice based on coaches’ availability.  Remind coaches that they might want to avoid days/times when the related travel teams practice, or other nights when many kids say they cannot practice, because it will limit their selections.  If you are assigning teams and see that a coach's preferred practice day/time might severely limit the availability of players, you might want to go back to the coach and give him/her the option of practicing at a different time.

Determine the team selection order by pulling numbers out of a hat. The selection is done in a serpentine fashion.  For example, in a league with four teams, team 1 picks first, then team 2, then team 3 and then team 4.  For the next round, the order is reversed, team 4, then team 3, then team 2 and finally team 1.  This up and down order continues until all players in a grade are on a team.  For the other grade in the league, the start order is reversed, with team 4 choosing first.

As the selection/assigning is going on, there are a number of things to keep in mind:

1. A coach's child must be assigned/”selected” to the team in the round that she would naturally be selected if her parent were not a coach.  For example, if the league has 6 teams and the child is rated 10th overall in the league, then the coach's child must be the second player on the team because she is rated in the second group of 6.
   
   
2. Try to make sure that children's whose parents volunteered to be assistant coaches are spread around all the teams so that all coaches have some backup.  Requests for coaching pairings should not be granted.  Years of experience have shown that honoring requests for parents to be put together as coaches only causes hurt feelings among others, and more often and much more troublesome, unbalanced teams because good players’ parents are often friends with each other.  It is only fair that all coaches have an equal shot to select a player.
   
   
3. Available practices nights is one of the most difficult things to work around because it limits on what team a child can play.  In a draft situation, keep watch that coaches remember to consider no practice days when selecting players.  If you are assigning kids to teams, and generally just going down the rankings, be careful to avoid the tendency to skip over all the children who can’t practice on a certain night and just assign the next available kid to a team.  If all available children are of roughly the same ability, then you can go this.  However, if you are dealing with decently skilled children, you might have to review equally skilled children assigned to other teams and doing a little swapping to match practice days while at the same time maintaining balanced teams.
   
   
4. A team can only have one sponsor, so once a sponsoring child is selected/assigned to a team, then the other sponsoring children are no longer available to that team.
    
   
5. It is rare when each team in a league has exactly the same number of players.  It is also rare that the number of registered kids is such that each team has the same number from each grade.  Remember that it is a minor disadvantage to have more players because of the league's equal substitution policy; the stronger players have to sit more on a team with more players.  As such, if there are two or three players at the bottom of a league who are ranked as very weak, they should be assigned to one of the teams with fewer players and spread out among the teams (not automatically put on the next team in line because if you are at the bottom of the serpentine, that team get two very weak players).

When all the players in a grade are on a team, repeat the above process for the other grade, reversing the selection/assigning order.  Once the teams are complete, review them to make sure that they are fairly even in terms of overall skill level.  Remember, that while it is fun to win games, the point of house league is to have fun and teach kids the game.  If the teams are severely unbalanced and some team get destroyed every game, it is disheartening to the kids and often results in them leaving the sport.