For the past few seasons, Silent Sideline asked one group — parents — to give players room to play without a running commentary from the touchline. It worked, and we're keeping it. But this season we're widening the idea, because keeping matchday healthy was never only about the sideline.

It's My Game is the club's standard for this season, and it applies to everyone who's part of a matchday: parents, players and coaches. Same principle, three different jobs.

Why now

Football at underage level runs on emotion. Players care, parents care, coaches care — that's exactly why people give up their weekends to it. But that same intensity is also where things can go wrong: a decision goes against a team, frustration builds, and for a moment nobody's thinking about the bigger picture. Most weeks, that passes without incident. Some weeks, it doesn't.

Rather than wait and react each time it doesn't, the club is being upfront about the standard we're asking for, before the next whistle blows rather than after. This isn't a response to any one team or any one player — it's every team, all season.

Players are being asked to own their own behaviour: respect the referee, play hard but fair, and represent their club well. That doesn't mean pretending frustration doesn't exist — anyone who's played the game knows a bad call stings. The distinction we're drawing is between feeling frustrated and behaving disrespectfully. You're allowed the first. The second is what we're asking players to manage.

You'll hear a phrase a lot this season: next play. Bad call? Next play. Missed chance? Next play. It keeps the focus where it belongs — on the game in front of you, not the one decision you can't change.

Every team is holding a short pledge session this season, where players talk through what these standards actually mean in their own words, and sign a team pledge together. It's deliberately not something sent home to sign unread — the conversation is the point.

The ask for parents is simple, and it's the same one Silent Sideline made: let them play. Let players make their own decisions and their own mistakes. Encourage rather than instruct. And extend the same respect to referees that we're asking of players — most of the referees at underage level are volunteers, some of them still teenagers themselves, and how they're treated has a direct bearing on whether they keep showing up.

Coaches carry more weight in this than any poster does, because players copy what coaches do far more than what they're told. So the coach commitments are specific: no dissent shown from the bench, no re-litigating a decision in front of players, and any real concern about officiating goes to the club afterwards, not in the moment. Coaches are also the ones managing the room in real time — calming a frustrated player or parent themselves, rather than leaving that job to the referee.

This season, team captains and vice-captains are going through a proper briefing on what the armband actually means: setting the tone, helping teammates reset after a bad decision, and speaking to the referee on the team's behalf when it's needed. You'll see every team start their matches with the same huddle line — "Respect the whistle, next play" — led by the captain, every week.

For our youngest teams, there's no referee to respect — which doesn't mean the standard disappears, it just moves. Without someone else making the calls, players make them for each other. "Respect the referee" becomes "be honest when there's no whistle" — calling it fairly even when it's against your own team, and accepting the other side's call the way you'd accept a referee's.

This isn't a one-week campaign. You'll see it in posters around Marleys Lane, in a short article series on ClubZap over the coming weeks, and in team meetings and pre-match huddles every week from here on. The shift we're making is from telling people what not to do, to being clear about the kind of club we're building — and asking everyone, players, parents and coaches alike, to help build it.