Question about crossing routes

When designing something that has crossing routes on one side, how do you decide which is the short route? Is there a rule of thumb? In the past I've generally had the short route the one heading away from the center, but I found that that player tended to drift too short, sometimes almost coming back across the LOS. So for this season I've switched that, where the outside player coming back over the middle is the short route. It's looked ok in practice but I am having second thoughts.

7v7 flag, u13, rec league https://old.reddit.com/user/Tweedledee72/comments/1s9ux1l/45_cross/?ref=share&ref_source=link