Youth baseball parents put on notice

Which also means teams aren't about ability or hard work, they're about kissing ass.

 

Of course. Some coaches are more concerned on maintaining top-to-bottom control from HS varsity down to grade school.

I've also heard PLENTY of stories about 5th and 6th grade kids being ordered to quit all other sports by their club team coaches, claiming "the varsity coach only wants players who are committed year-round."

Soccer vs. softball is a big battleground around these parts. It's very common for 6th grade softball stars to quit softball "because the varsity (soccer) coach says so."

 

Which would leave a funny dilemma, if say, the next great superstar wanted to play more than one sport, or didn't want to play in the feeder system. What then? Make exceptions, and look like a hypocrite to the other parents, or tell the kid, "Sorry, you're an awesome player, but I can't put you on the team because you didn't play in our feeder programs."

 

If you're an incredible athlete, a coach will say fuck the feeder system pretty fast.

 

Bingo -- especially if you're an incredible athlete the coach has recruited away from some other school. All the 'feeder system' bullshit goes out the window then and Transfer Boy steps right into the starting lineup.

 

Fighting recruiting has essentially become a lost cause in high school sports. Heck, Florida just passed a law that basically allows unfettered transfers of athletes, to the point you can play football at one school in the fall, and then basketball at another school in the winter, in certain situations.

 

I look forward to the day when Nike, ESPN and other similar monsters come up with a national high school league that recruits from public schools and competes not just within a state framework, but an NCAA-type framework. We're already into nationally televised HS games. It's closer than you think..as public funding for HS athletics becomes tighter and tighter.

 

That's already happening. MaxPreps a few years ago split its top 25 so that there are separate listings for high schools and "academy" schools like Findlay Prep, which isn't even, technically, a school (the players go to a school in Nevada not called Findlay). It just so happens at LaLumiere in Indiana, Chief Justice John Roberts' alma mater, the admissions director is also the basketball coach.

Then again, some of these so-called legit schools are sports factories, too, something easier to do thanks to school choice and charters. It used to be Chicago had intense competition among multiple public schools in the city for boys basketball. Now it's pretty much Simeon uber alles, with a few schools in the second tier. Hell, Simeon doesn't just recruit in the city -- it has players transferring in from other parts of the state.

 

hahahah, LaLumiere.

I used to work at a couple papers who covered teams which would occasionally play LaLumiere in nonconference games.

These teams were bad. God-awful horrible bad. Losing games 50-60 to nothing, week after week after week. In Class D, the smallest division. Usually they had barely enough players to field a team. We'd see them matched up against other teams with poor records (3-6, etc etc) and they'd lose THOSE games 42-8, so there was no doubt whatsover these teams sucked total ass. Usually going into the seventh game of the season they had been outscored about 400-18.

Then we'd get phone calls. "Hi, this is coach Doofoose of Punchingbag High, and we want to report our game."

I sigh and roll my eyes. OK fine, another 64-0 loss.

"Fine, coach, go ahead. Who did you play and how did it come out?"

"We played an interstate game with LaLumiere. We won, 44-14!!!"

Those of us on the desk look at each other with those WTF looks. :

I swear to god, if you grabbed 11 posters off this board, Punchingbag High would have a hard time beating them by more than a touchdown.

We later got some secondhand stories about the conditions these games were played under. Suffice it to say the term "varsity athletics" was being applied very very loosely.

This happened in both football and basketball. I have heard that since then there have been several regime changes in the athletic programs and I guess they seem to be taking things much more seriously.

 

Check out Bob McConnell at George Jr. Republic in Grove City, PA. They have to announce hometowns during pre-game introductions. McConnell had "boosters" in every major city's juvenile court from Philly to Indy...if a kid was tall, black and athletic they would somehow usually get sentenced to George Jr. Republic.

One year they had a center from Cincinnati, a forward from Cleveland, a forward from Detroit and two guards from Pittsburgh. They had B.J. Grove, a 6-11 center that went on to play at Cincinnati under Huggins for a bit until he flunked out. I swear, Grove could barely write his own name.