12-year phenom .. or not

This dad seems like an absolute nightmare, and this kid is going to be the one, in 10 years, asking, "Where did everybody go?" If you watch the mixtape, not one guy is playing lock-down defense, probably because it is a 12-year-old kid.

I don't buy this, just like I don't buy those "trick shot" dude on YouTube, who likely needed 250 takes to get the one shot.

 

No kidding. Especially this part from the above linked story:

Oy vey. I feel sorry for these two children. Their dad couldn't make it and is now trying to live vicariously through his children, who may or may not have inherited their dad's limited talent.

 

Rehab by age 20.

 

Perhaps preceded by mid-major Div. I offer rejected in hope of getting something better, settling for a juco, short stint in county jail, another juco, then obscure Div. II program.

 

This. Dear god, those parents are like stage parents. Move over, Mama Rose, because this kid's dad takes the cake. I wonder if Daddy will still like his kids if they don't make it in basketball. And obviously, if you listen to the way the kid talks, he can't be focusing on his studies too hard because Daddy has told him he'll make it in the NBA. Who needs math, science and English if you're going to just play basketball? :

Also, when I was 9, if I had been sick with the stomach flu like the daughter, my mom would have taken me to the doctor and then home to bed, not to a fucking photo shoot. What is wrong with these people??

 

And their remedy was ginger ale and Tums. Right!

 

Never heard of this website, but have these clowns Hickman and Montoya ever worked for an actual news outlet? Who does stories on kids just because the parent wants it and says it's okay?

I have no idea what the NYT's excuse is for helping to publicize this bullshit garbage.

 

These charter/private schools are becoming the fucking bane of small-town sports departments (and some not so small-town). They generally fall into the category of, a) juggernaut semipro teams recruited by some AAU hustler, and b) something out of a Romper Room league for physical defectives.

They call up 3/4 of the way through the season pissing and moaning that they're 13-3 in the Crabapple County Charter Conference and how come you haven't covered us all year, boo hoo hoo. So Mr. Publisher sends out a stringer to do a feature and we are ordered to splatter it all over the sports front. Then a couple weeks later they play in the state tournament in Class D, the smallest of the small, in a first-round game against a team which was 3-17 in the smallest of our legitimate high school leagues, and lose 86-27.

First words out of the winning coach: "Hell, we hadn't even scored 50 points in a game all season." (Next game out, they play a team which is 6-14 and lose 68-42.)

Fuck 'em. As far as I'm concerned, if you aren't a member of the legitimate HSAA in your state, what you are playing isn't 'high school basketball.'

One kinda funny thing is that due to the vagaries of trying to get games scheduled, not entirely infrequently the juggernaut recruited semipro AAU teams end up playing the basket-case romper-room refugee charter school teams.

Depending how much of an asshole the coach of the juggernaut team is, these games almost never ever get reported to the newspaper or anybody else, because usually a wiser head says, "hey man, you can call in this game and tell them we led 62-3 at halftime and ended up winning 134-4, but don't you think that might actually inspire somebody to investigate what we are actually doing? You really want people to come in and look at transfer records, academic eligibility and all that shit? You want people to come in and find out the team we were playing had 3 sixth graders, a kid with no left hand and a 5-foot-2, 295-pound kid named 'Gumball' in the starting lineup? Uh, I don't think so."

From what I've been told, what usually happens at such games is when the spread reaches 50 sometime in the second quarter, the coaches agree to report it to the 'league office,' whoever that is, as 75-35, pull the plug on the scoreboard, and let's play HORSE for the next hour and a half.

 

It's interesting how some states make middle-school age eligible in some other sports. Check the grades in this cross-country state final.

http://mn.milesplit.com/meets/151451/results/273512

 

Well, in an individual-timing sport I guess I don't have any problem with it -- clock don't lie (well, sometimes it does but that's a whole 'nother discussion). "Defense" has nothing to do with it and "level of competition" is less of a factor.

Years and years ago I covered a girl who won an X-C state title in (I believe) runaway class-record time as a freshman, then lost about 20 seconds off her time each season, winning the state title a couple more times then finishing third as a senior.

She just couldn't keep that rail-thin runner's physique. The coach said, "she's probably a better runner, but she weighed 92 pounds as a freshman and 118 as a senior. That's a gain of about 1/3 of her body weight."

I suppose if there were outlaw AAU cross-country teams recruiting juggernaut squads for charter schools, they would scour the nation for skinny 8th-graders.

 

A HS friend's little brother was on his school's varsity basketball team as a seventh grader. He wasn't good.
The school had like 60 kids, total, in grades 6-12. Small Christian Academy. They needed as many bodies as possible, so he played.
Funny part was, he played youth ball for another local church and an opposing coach flipped out saying he was ineligible because he was a varsity basketball player. His youth coach laughed at that notion.

 

I was looking for it on Milesplit, but couldn't find it ... I KNOW some state(s) had fourth- and fifth-graders running in state cross-country. Saw it last year.