Dear dimwit on the phone

How else are you going to determine a champion!?! Give everybody a trophy! That's SOCILISM! In 'Merica we have to have all-star teams and county championships and state championships and national championships even for TEE BALL!!!

 

When I was 5 y/o my team went to the district t-ball tourney. We beat the socks off everybody there because our coaches actually taught us how to play baseball. One of the coaches told my dad, "Y'all get people out!" To which my dad replied, "Isn't that the point?"

What I'm saying, I guess, is no matter the age, teaching the game is more important than winning until you get to HS ball. We won state and went to the World Series because we were taught the game. As a 5-yr-old, though, I had no idea what the World Series was...

 

I think 9 and 10-year-old AS teams are okay. That's around third or fourth grade, if I'm doing the math right in my head, and by that age we were playing one-on-one hoops and what not on the school playground. That's roughly when the local Little League split kids up into Minors and Majors divisions, with minors having a pitching machine instead of pitchers, and majors you'd see the bigger kids and bunting and what not.

 

Well, the practices aren't official, but yeah, it's football season. Our preseason questionnaires were sent out a month ago and our football section goes to press Aug. 3. Prep season kicks off Aug. 16.

 

Wow. Wrong on a whole lot of levels right there.

 

Unless you are in Alaska, that's insane!

 

Yep. The KHSAA-mandated dead period ended Monday.

 

How about having all-star teams for 7 and 8 year olds?

 

did they pick mvp by who sold the most candy bars?

 

NOLA already has its forms up for football coaches to fill out.

 

When I was a teen, one of my local paper's columnists wrote a piece suggesting that instead of All-Stars, they should just have the team that won the championship represent the town in the tournaments as the fairest way. No politics. Just settle it on the field.

Caused a bit of a shitstorm, even though the columnist pointed out the fallacy of the emphasis on winning (there's still pressure on kids either way, either during the regular season or the All-Star tourneys) as well as his ripping on the concept that the league's main purpose was to cull the herd to find the 14 or so kids who were going to make the All-Star team.

 

I don't have a problem with that, because quite often it takes a month or so to get the data collected. So an early start beats a late on, especially if you have a ton of schools to cover in your preview.

I was talking about actual practices and stories and stuff like that being published. Heck, when I was doing a major feature or enterprise piece that I knew was going to require multiple interviews, I would start as early as I could.