Youth sports have a purpose. They can be wonderful environments to teach valuable life lessons. Or, they can be culture cauldrons to develop bias and hate.
I love youth sports. I also love the effort to win. Excelling is a basic human nature and vital to the perpetuation of mankind.
Winning and compassionate youth sports are NOT incompatible.
I once ran a youth basketball program with about a thousand participants. The players were boys and girls ages ten through fourteen. Our program fed into three high school programs.
The teams were unisex and segmented by grade in school.
We had some unique rules. These rules were promulgated by what would make the program more enjoyable for the MOST players. We knew that by seventh grade, about twelve to thirteen, seventy percent of players drop out of sports. We wanted to better that with more players staying in the program, longer.
We knew that most programs are based on identifying the better players and making them better. This is done by slotting players into A, B, and C teams. We randomly selected teams and all teams played each other. We reasoned that if a player was identified as not good enough for the top team this would drive them out of the sport.
There are dozens of known incidences of players not making their high school varsity. Michael Jordan was one. I have a friend whose son didn't make varsity as a Sophomore, he grew eight inches over the summer and later made $14 million a year in the NBA (Job Leuer). I also know of dozens of kids who were stars in grade school who for many reasons didn't flourish in high school.
You just never know so the best thing to creating an ultimate winning varsity ?is to play the numbers game and keep the most players involved as long as possible.
Some of our rules:
Equal play for all.
Start the score over at 0-0 at the start of each quarter.
If something happened on the court that needed attention or clarification the refs stopped the play and explained things to the players. I was a ref and spent seven to eight hours straight every Saturday doing this labor of love.
We got a lot of pushback from "knowleadgeable " parents. However we persisted for five years.
I moved out of the community and the program was immediately reverted to a traditional win program.
It was with great satisfaction that I noted the graduates of our program - the group that we had for all five years - took first, second and third in state their senior year.
Wanting to win is extremely imprtant. Winning is not the point. All the talk about the sanctity of sports being preserved by excluding trans athletes is nonsense.
My daughter was captain of her college soccer team. Some of the girls she played against had a lot of male secondary characteristics.
Jill
Comments
Trans sports
We have 3 forces active in this arena.
1) hate the trans and must not let them have fame/recognition
2) protect our weak female athletes (what a joke a female athlete is) from competition with those East Germans
3) win by any means. Including disqualifying competition.
At the peak of competition females might not win against males. Think Olympics or Wimbledon (Steffi Graf against Andre Agassi?). At high school levels? We have winning football teams with female players. We also have illegal steroid use in male players. So?
The whole issue is a tangled mess.
BAK 0.25tspgirl
Not a Tangled Mess
Throwing up your hands is what the bigots want. We've had four years of concentrated disinformation campaigns in this country designed to make people do exactly that. Where's that gotten us? I have dozens of good friends who are convinced our election was rigged. Even if they agree Biden should be president they think there was massive fraud. The results of all this are self-evident.
Here's a simple guideline for youth sports. Do what it is that will make the most participants have genuine smiles. Genuine smiles are not those prompted by cruelty.
One of my sons played on a basketball team with a boy with Down's syndrome. Based on basketball skills, that boy didn't "deserve" to be on the team. Based on desire he was the first pick. The lessons those boys learned by having him as a teammate are invaluable.
Banning kids from competing as they present themselves is cruelty in the nth degree.
There's nothing confusing about that.
Acceptance starts with making decisions for the right reasons.
Jill
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
This thought needs to be repeated...
This thought needs to be repeated:
"Here's a simple guideline for youth sports. Do what it is that will make the most participants have genuine smiles. Genuine smiles are not those prompted by cruelty." --Angela Rasch
It is too often forgotten in teaching sports.
charlie
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/missing-without-a-trace-cha...
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/832524
Win at any cost
Texas football is the evil example. You start your boys out in PeeWee football at 5 years old. By 5th or 6th grade you identify the good players. They’ll be more valuable if they are bigger and older. You hold them back a grade before middle school/junior high despite passing grades. They will be a year older and bigger and more (sports)experienced in junior high football. Then you do it again in 8th grade. This kid is now 2 years older and bigger and more experienced starting his high school eligibility. He’s also learned that football excellence is all that matters. The high school teachers play along and give him the grades needed to play even when he doesn’t do the class work. All the LEO’s protect him too. He can do anything as long as his team wins. The best even get their SAT’s fudged so they can play college ball. Most just get a job pumping gas, marry a cheerleader, and get on with breeding the next generation of football players.
Winning in sports is the greatest source of corruption in America.
BAK 0.25tspgirl
Grooming our boys to sell beer
It's been noted here and elsewhere It's painfully obvious. There is big money in grinding out a pool of say 1000 boys to the age of 20 or so with enough ruthlessness and skill at handling a ball so that they have a chance to play "professional sports" It's sick and it is twisted and pretty perverse if you ask me. Those few that finally make it onto the field spend their skill so that those who failed the grind can see advertisements for beer.
Your friend
Crash
Biggest Irony
Several years ago I attended a seminar where the main speaker was John Anderson. He is going on his fifth decade as coach of the Minnesota Gophers baseball team. Despite the handicap of playing at least 75% of his season on the road due to weather, he has been very successful. He has developed several MLB players including Paul Molitor and Dave Winfield.
He stated that the number one reason athletes fail to have a great college career is. . .burnout.
Overbearing parents who get excited about non-issues, such as trans players, put stress on their children. Those parents are probably a major factor in player burnout.
Jill
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Cost of athletics programs vs academics.
If schools put as much effort into educating children as they did with overblown athletic programs, maybe the United states would not be falling behind in STEM.
You want school sports programs? fine, but not at the cost of the basic education of ALL students. The financial burden on parents and schools to support scholastic sports should not come at the cost of an unreasonable burden on students education. I also see parents at work taking kids to athletic events and multiple sports training sessions, dragging into work tired, "oh, we had an away game, didn't get home till after midnight". This was on a School night, how are these kids supposed to be learning when they are using what free time they have playing school sports?
I know it won't change, "school pride" is so tied into pointless "championships" that the idea of curtailing the waste, fraud and abuse the current school athletic system in this country would generate howls of outrage from parents, coaches and sporting goods equipment makers.
"But it teaches discipline and responsibility!" Sure it does, but it also doesn't require this organized idiocy. schools have had sports programs for a long time, but it's only in recent times that you have it consuming such an unreasonable amount of parents and schools limited resources.