A youth football coach in Toms River, N.J., told his team on Sunday that he was canceling the rest of its season because of ongoing issues with bad attitudes and poor sportsmanship among players. After which a father of one of the players ran across the field and tackled the coach.
Even better, the father in question claimed afterward that he acted in self-defense because the coach “took an aggressive stance.” Witnesses at the scene debunked the story, telling police that the father was the sole aggressor.
Wonder where the bad attitudes may have come from in this one, right?
As a former youth basketball coach who was once threatened by an opposing coach in front of a large crowd of spectators, not to mention players and game officials (none of whom did anything to defuse the coach, who was angry over a player substitution), I’ve long since come to think that youth sports should be banned, in favor of giving kids the ball and letting them do what kids for generations did without adults mucking things up for them.
I love basketball, and my mind still wanders on long drives to what kind of offensive and defensive systems I might be able to get a group of 10- to 13-year-old kids to learn how to run, but I’ll never, never, never coach another team, and I wouldn’t recommend to parents that they invest in getting their kids into a league unless they’re willing to admit to themselves that their child isn’t the next LeBron James or Diana Taurasi, and most can’t do that.
And then there’s football, which I write about professionally, but am otherwise conflicted over as the studies continue to roll in regarding the long-term negative health effects on players caused by repeated violent blows to the head. Football may very well be on the path that boxing has been going down for the past 30, 40 years, though if it is we’re still in the very, very early stages to that end.
Baseball: now there’s a sport that you can only flub but so much, mainly by playing your kid at shortstop and pitching him twice a week when his fastball couldn’t break a pane of glass.
Which gets me back to, just let kids be kids, running around, inventing their own games, enforcing the rules amongst themselves, and when they get to high school, then you can make ‘em wear uniforms.
– Column by Chris Graham
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