yes, another kids coaching story (Update: 2016-17 edition)

It's just typical of the tug-of-war between the hell-bent-for-leather winning-is-everything Vince Lombardi acolytes and the kool-aid and cookies, kumbayah-singing, everybody-gets-a-trophy anti-competition flower children who dominate so many kids sports organizations.

 

Totally understanding the impact a superior player can have in youth ball, I have trouble understanding how any coach can't see what he needs to know about a kid from a 90-minute workout the day of the draft, available to all the league's coaches. I mean, that's what my Little League always did.

On the other hand, here's what happened in my league growing up. It was a major league-minor league system. And if somebody was in the minors past their 10-year-old season, they were probably going to stay there through 12, because the coaches had a dynasty mindset. They didn't want to draft a 12-year-old for one year of productivity. They'd rather take a 9-year-old and have four years to groom him.

I honestly believe there were some 12-year-olds playing minor league in that system who could have made the tournament team that year. On Saturdays, the minor leaguers would play "interleague" games in the main LL stadium, and you'd have the older kids knocking the ball out of the park. Today, they have secondary tournaments so that pretty much anyone can play after the regular season. But still.

 

There's a middle ground, you know ... it's called "Follow the damn rules!"

 

Starman is on target here, @Webster .

I was requested quite a bit as a coach when my boys were in soccer. It had nothing to do with whether we would win; we'd usually be around .500. But parents liked my non-yelling, non-stressing style.

We all know the super-teams will be stacked. Mostly we laugh at those teams and feel bad for the normal families that got stuck at the end of the bench on them.

 

Just had our best player - our only point guard - but with controlling and backstabbing parents - quit my daughter's sixth grade team.

This kid is why the team is on its third coach in three years and why I'm the coach. No one else wanted to deal with her or the parents. Talented but a sulker.

The mom just left practice after telling me why her kid was quitting and all of the things I lack as a coach. Mind you, I'm trying to make all of the players better but I gave her daughter the green light to shoot.

As she is listing these, I stopped her and pulled out a $50 bill.

"what's this?"

"your Refund for the rest of the year."

"I don't want it."

"Then give it to her next coach. He'll need it for a therapist." I put the Grant in her purse and walked back to practice.

We are 1-11. Bring on the Ewing Theory.

 

Well yeah ... but what are the "rules" ?

From the example above, I think most people would agree example #1 is, #2 isn't, and #3... uhh, probably is.

If Dad-Coach tells Son-PG to take notes in a pickup game against Howie Hotshot, and also asks 2-3 other players for an opinion, almost everybody would say it was scouting.

If Dad-Coach picks Son-PG up from summer basketball camp, and watches Howie Hotshot on three trips down the court? Probably not scouting. If he watches him for 20 minutes and jots down notes and charts shots?
Scouting.

What if Dad-Coach stands on the sideline at summer camp while Howie Hotshot is playing, but spends the whole time talking to Mama-MILF of one of the players? Probably not scouting. (Or maybe scouting but not in a basketball sense.)

But who knows, while everybody else was checking out Mama-MILF in her running tights, Dad-Coach might have had one eye fixed on Howie Hotshot in the background and was sizing up his crossover dribble move and his defensive footwork.

I think you see where this is going. Any time you draw a line between it's OK to do this "for only a minute," but not OK to do it for "several minutes" -- or "it's OK if you weren't really paying attention" or "it's OK if you were just going by memory but not OK if you were taking notes" -- you're heading into a mess.

 

We haven't had one person leave yet.

This is the lowest level of basketball played in our town. There is a travel program, two different church leagues and a regional program where a couple of kids play. In the past, with both the current 6th graders and in the kids who are now 7th and 8th graders, there were a few stacked teams which led to parental complaints and apparently lower enrollment (7th and 8th had very low retention rates). So we weren't going to allow that and separated the kids by class year and quality.

Looking at the enrollment spreadsheet, there were over 50 requests for 73 girls (including quite a few to play with me). It was going to be impossible to accommodate even half of them without completely throwing off class year/competitive balance and I don't think I could have even made 8 teams if I had tried given that the rosters are 9 per team. So I told every coach that their reward for signing up was that their daughter could pick a teammate but otherwise my random selections went.

If a parent tells me that their daughter "will be emotionally devastated" if she doesn't play with Ava or that "her 2 best friends in life" are the only reason she signed up (even though the other girls didn't request that she be on their team), I'm just not buying it.

 

Sounds like it's under control then, so no issue.

I do wonder about the impact on next year's enrollment. If I were in that situation, I'd have my daughter play the season, but she probably wouldn't want to come back next year to play with a bunch of kids she doesn't know.

 

Back in StarSis's grade school glory days in the Starrville Rec League (when I was coaching and on the league board for a couple seasons) they assigned teams by random from the city's (then) six elementary schools (plus St. Sissy).
The whole idea was the kids would expand their circle of friends outside their own school.
Of the 10 players on her 5th grade team, 8 are still on her Facebook friends list about 30 years later.
Now, participation is down about 50 percent overall and they break teams up by schools. In StarSis's grade, they had 8 teams of 10 players; last season her twins had 4 teams of 9-10 players in their league (plus two teams from adjoining districts).

 

12 hours before the first game, one of my coaches dropped out saying his daughter refuses to play and no parent has responded to my e-mail seeking volunteers. So I am coaching 2 teams the first week.

 

The very instant the final buzzer for your "extra" team goes off in that first game, tell the players that the (first) practice this week is mandatory for at least one parent of each kid to attend, and it will start promptly and precisely on time. Any kid who doesn't show for practice with at least one parent will be given a refund and dropped from the league.

The minute practice begins, tell however many parents who show up: "One of you has to coach. I don't care who or how you pick them. We have this gym for one hour; I'm leaving in 15 minutes and it's up to the new coach to figure out what to do for the next 45. If nobody is willing to coach, we'll eliminate the team and disperse the players out to the other teams by random assignment."

 

One of the parents stepped up and coached. He's not exactly Steve Kerr, but none of the girls in the league are Steph Curry. We lost a lot of the better players to the CYO league.