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Lupica on Today show

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by 21, May 17, 2007.

  1. zagoshe

    zagoshe Well-Known Member

    How much money does it cost to play the higher levels and the travel teams? The easiest way to exclude people -- and a lot of adults in a lot of areas have figured this out -- is to needlessly make shit so expensive that the only ones who can do it are the ones whose parents can afford for them to do it.
     
  2. Rough Mix

    Rough Mix Guest

    What age groups are AA and AAA?
     
  3. Simon_Cowbell

    Simon_Cowbell Active Member

    Loopy must have HATED Judge Smails.
     
  4. finishthehat

    finishthehat Active Member

    I guess this depends what age we're talking about. If it's kids whose ages are in the single digits, I don't see anything wrong with "nice try" after the 14th strikeout. I agree it's stupid and counterproductive to say "the umpire stunk."

    My kid's grammar school was a magnet school near a Y. He went to the Y for after-school care and played his sports there. Completely low-key, everybody plays. When baseball season started we had a set of two twins and their sister at the first practice, waiting around because their mom was rushing to a sporting-goods store to buy their gloves. So yeah, the competition was not the best, and the fields were pretty torn up since they shared space with soccer, but he had fun.

    To get to the Y from his school, he had to walk past the facilities of the Little League (and younger divisions) for one of the richest parts of town. Fancy brick press box, lovingly manicured fields. Seven-year-old kids climbing out of gigantic SUVs toting $50 bat bags, hitting in high-tech batting cages, coaches on them like Lee Elia going off on Cubs fans.

    I'm glad he played in the former instead of the latter.
     
  5. JR

    JR Well-Known Member

    They're not age groups, they're skill levels. They start at Atom up here (9 & 10 year olds).
    Then there's Peewee (11 & 12), Bantam (13 & 14), and Midget (15, 16, 17)
     
  6. JR

    JR Well-Known Member

    Hockey is an obscenely expensive sport.

    And I had two goalies in the family.

    Costs vary. At the AAA level, a parent could shell out $5,000 or more a year just for registration, practices, tournaments. That doesn't include equipment--like $200.00 hockey sticks.

    Part of the problem is that because it's so expensive a lot of kids have had a sense of entitlement drilled into them at an early age. The fact that they're the best of the best just makes it worse.

    That's one part of hockey I don't miss. Fucking AAA parents and their snotty kids.
     
  7. JR

    JR Well-Known Member

    Agree.

    I coached house league (not Little League) baseball for about five years.

    I had kids on some of my teams--9 & 10 year olds--who for whatever reason, didn't know how to catch or throw.

    And I don't mean that they caught and threw badly--they couldn't do it period--mostly because their parents were immigrants and didn't have a clue about the game. But the 'rents thought it was important for the kids to learn.

    Best moment--bar none--we made it to the championship game, down a run and the last at bat for us with runners on second and third was a kid who didn't have more than two hits all season. My buddy at the time ---the other coach---worked with him all season just to try and teach him to make contact with the ball.

    Kid hits a double to win the game. And I am NOT making this up.

    Now that's a thing that kid will remember until he dies.

    A parent telling him 1) "It was the umpire's fault you never got a hit all year" or 2) "You might as well give up, you'll never learn this game" needs an attitude adjustment
     
  8. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    Ragu what you discribe is exactly the situation I've observed in my newphews program. The focus is so much on travel all star teams that the rec league just becomes one big tryout for all star travel team.

    I am of the mind set that any kid should be able to play little league baseball until they are at least 12.Because there is so much focus on all star teams marginal players get driven out of baseball which is a shame.

    Leagues play loose with age requirments which allows them to put older group into tournaments. For example kids playing in the 11 year old Cal Ripkin tournament might really be 12 because of league age
    definition. Works fine for tournament but in regular season you end up with kids way over matched - 5th grades playing against 7th graders.
     
  9. Birdscribe

    Birdscribe Active Member

    This is why my wife and I got involved in our kids' soccer league, because we saw that the only ones making All-Stars and tournament travel teams were the kids of the league insiders.

    My son, a goalkeeper, tried out for his tournament travel team three years ago, had a poor tryout and didn't make it. Nor should he have made it.

    The next year, he stood on his head during the tryout, to the point where I had strangers coming up to me -- including one guy who played college and semi-pro soccer -- talking about him and complimenting his play.

    Didn't make it. My wife overheard the coach a month later bragging to a couple other parents how he had his keepers picked out already. My wife shot him a look and he immediately started back-tracking over himself.

    They added another tournament team and he was the starting keeper throughout the season, with a better coach than the assclown he would have played for on the 'A' team. Now, my wife is on the region's board and I'm serving as a head coach for his team.

    Perhaps this is a back-door way to ensure parental involvement and guarantee volunteers. If so, it worked.
     
  10. zeke12

    zeke12 Guest

    Bird --

    I have no doubt that guy was a dick and didn't pick his keepers for the right reasons.

    But I do have to say that tryouts suck as a way to pick a team, and I've ignored good tryouts and I've ignored bad tryouts if I thought they were genuinely a bad reflection of how good the kid was/could be. This is all magnified when it comes to goaltenders.

    Most of the time, though, I try and go with a good tryout can only help you. But one time -- and only one time -- we had goalies play exactly backwards of how all the coaches had them ranked before tryouts. The weaker kid played great, the stronger kid couldn't stop anything.

    We took them both and split time early. Thinks shook out like we thought they would. Still a hellish process on a coach.
     
  11. shockey

    shockey Active Member

    back a million years ago in the little league i played in, the coaches were lifers, with none of their own kids on the team. it was great. there were never accusations of favoritism.

    today, my sons have always been screwed because i can't be one of their coaches. the inside politics and favoritism is incredible. the only way to be sure your kid gets a fair shake is to be one of the coaches or have him/her emerge as such a superstar he can't be overlooked.

    my boys have always been solid athletes but certainly not stars. they play because it's fun and we make sure they know having fun is all that we require of them -- oh, and to do their best.

    F.U.N. when did that become secondary? ??? ??? ???
     
  12. zagoshe

    zagoshe Well-Known Member

    That all started when they started to raise the stakes with travel teams. I have always said, split up all the kids until they are like 14 and let every player play equal time. That will never happen though and because some parents get a rise out of saying "my kid is on the traveling team" there will always be politicking and bullshit when it comes to picking these teams.
     
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