Youth sports results ...

Good to hear, and apologies for letting my subversive side get the better of me.

 

Not keeping score is the new popular trend in youth sports. I'm not sure if your area has "Upward" sports, but it's church-sponsored and it is all over Ohio across many denominations. It's usually cheap for kids to play and pretty popular.

My personal opinion is they are missing out on a lot of lessons they can give kids on winning and losing. There also is a lot of strategy that goes out the window when there is no score kept, but I guess that is a bit off topic.

Thankfully, all the league has submitted here is just briefs on sign-ups and things like that. I'm not sure how you can put in results when there is no score or stats.

I have a freshman coach who submits football scores with team totals. He says he doesn't want to name individuals. At freshman level, I'm fine with that. But he does submit a score, win or lose.

 

dammit, i had 50 bucks on the buttscratchers

 

We have Upward leagues here, and thankfully they do not turn in results. I think leagues that don't keep score, at least at a certain age, are a good thing.

Example: Two soccer teams/leagues in the area, one keeps score for U-6 and the other doesn't. League A would always have the most lopsided scores -- 10-0 and things like that with no net or goalie; worst I saw was 17-0 last fall -- and the other would just list outstanding players. What does Kid A learn after beating someone that bad with no goalie?

 

For a while, I made the mistake of letting the Upward league manager submit a mini-press release for the Sunday edition so that the kids could receive some kind of recognition. But what started out as a little thing making kids and their mommies feel good that I could stick in a bottom corner of a page turned into some kind of wild, ego-stroking weekly scrapbook, so I trimmed them back to just turning in "Players of the Week." They started out just naming one off of each team, and then they went berserk with that, too, and started listing every child in the league. Eventually, I just had to face the fact that trying to please these "no winners, no losers" youth leagues is basically impossible. And quite frankly, if you're not keeping score, you're not playing sports. I referred them to the "Community Living" section, where their reports are now published alongside school and college honors, club notes and things of that nature.

 

We had one youth swimming team last summer that sent me an e-mail a couple of weeks before their first meet asking if we could take photos and send someone to the first meet. Hey, any youth organization that give me more that two HOURS notice is OK in my book. I figured the least I could do is use it as a wild art centerpiece, because we don't even staff high school duals, where all we do is regurgitate agate anyway.

So I sent a shooter, got the centerpiece, and a day later got the agate and they asked if they could send in their own photos of the next meet. Sounded good to me, and it frees our only shooter at night for something else. Day after the next meet, they send photos, but said they had no results to submit. Those photos remain in my inbox to this day, unrun. You want to put out a club newsletter or yearbook with pictures of all the kids, fine ... but you're not going to use the newspaper to do it.

 

I'm just not a fan of putting youth sports in the paper, unless it's something completely outstanding or bizarre.

My hometown paper does this, with a youth sports page once a week. The section has two or three sports pages daily (crazy, considering it's roughly a 40K), and dedicating one of those pages to youth sports seems absolutely absurd. Here's my belief: in a city of any size, how many youth teams are there? 200? 500? 1,000? So you're going to take two or three teams a week and talk about their week/season?

Who cares? Aside from the 20-30 parents of said team, I can't think too many people really care. Maybe I'm wrong.

I'd certainly rather see more local (colleges, high school, outdoors) and/or national copy than a recap of the Sunday youth bowling league. I understand the "more names in the paper" argument, but my God, this is ridiculous.

Give 'em a stand-alone photo once a week, but a full page, in a two- or three-page section? Too much, way too much.

And if no scores are submitted, I'd never, never write anything about the team/league. Then you're just spewing cliches to eat space (Little Billy was on fire all game, while Little Jim kept feeding Little Billy, because he was on fire and playing really superb basketball). Or something like that.

God, I miss quality journalism.