A coach explains when to move a young player from local ranked tournaments to harder competitions like AJJAs: when their ranking scores stay consistently high. Start with tournaments in your home state, then expand to adjacent states, before traveling nationally.
It's always from the perspective, what does your child need, right? If your child's not ranked, then you're playing ranked tournaments. You don't need to go beyond that. Um, if they're playing in ranked tournaments and they're getting to the point where their scores are getting good enough that they need to play in some of these harder tournaments like the AJJAs, that's when it's appropriate to make that jump. In which case, you do not travel all over the country. You play in your state first, then you play in the adjacent states. Hopefully you can get to your, your target number of tournaments just on that, right?
