Is this Legitimately levelling the Playing Field or is Arkansas just worried by 'young',...

My son's basketball team was absolutely awful last season. Just a city league thing, and he's 8 and at that age the difference between the average kid and the kid who actually has gotten his coordination is astronomical.

We discovered that they never went down by more than 20 points. The league would keep track of the baskets, but if the other team was up by 20 then scored again it didn't go on the scoreboard. If our team scored, however, both teams would get 2 points (the 2 we just made, 2 of theirs that hadn't gotten on the scoreboard).

Add to that, at halftime our team got a free throw for every point they were down. If they were down by 15, they shot 15 free throws and those points were added to the board to try to keep things close. I believe they had to be down by 10 or more to get the free throws, but I'm not positive on that because this team was so bad they shot free throws every week and the kids actually thought it was a normal part of the game.

It's just society now. We don't want to reward the kids who are excelling too much. And we probably don't need to as the parents of those kids are almost always insufferable and doing a fine job of propping up those little egos on their own. The focus seems to be on the "also rans" though. We don't want to get to a point where any kid feels totally outclassed and stops having fun.

I dunno. Getting my ass kicked a few times was actual character building in sports which I thought was one of the points.

Yeah, watching my friend's kid participate in organized team sports in which they don't keep fucking score is mind-blowing. It's just a bunch of eight-year olds running around "doing a really good job". I'm not sure what lessons they think are being taught by such nonsense.

 

To paraphrase The Impossibles: When everyone is special, no one is special.

When I was in Little League there was a rule that the game ended if the difference in score exceeded 9.  I guess it kept kids from getting too depressed if they were trailing by more than that only a couple innings in.

 

Then again, the Rays came back from being down seven to win against the Yankees a little while ago, so who knows.

I've never thought it's a good idea for kids to pin their hopes on a future in major league sports (in fact, it's a darn terrible one), but it seems like the district could be doing this particular child harm by hurting his ability to develop his natural talent and garner attention for it. If he really is somehow crazy good at the game, at the least it could get him a scholarship down the line (though you'd hope he'd keep up with academics as well)

Look,

Personally I don't care for competitive team sports, and so I didn't play any in school. In gym class when everyone else was playing badminton, my friends and I invented an intricate game using the same equipment centered around non competitive competitiveness. The fun part of badminton, we felt, was volleying back and forth, and so the only way you could lose our game was if you failed to return the shot more than five times. If you hit the shuttlecock in a way that made it virtually impossible for the other team to return though (made them run for it ETC), then THAT team gained a point (first to five points lost). If you run and swung at a shot that was a really tough one, and then missed, then your team would gain a point rather than the team that served the bad shot

It was fun, and it served it's purpose for us people who didn't like normal games

What I don't approve of though is changing the rules of existing games and then pretending they're the same thing

This rubs me the wrong way, and I can only think this kind of attitude ('self esteem' being prized more highly than victory) is doing great harm to future generations of Americans. When they get out to the real world, they'll realize with a shock that there is no longer a ref to safe guard their feelings, and when under pressure, they'll crumble

This is fucking stupid. If the kid is awesome let him be awesome. Tough shit for the kids who can't keep up with him. Train and practice better or else suck it up.

Hell, I still remember calling bullshit when I was in little league and, even after we lost, coach took us all out for pizza and Bakooka Joes. Sure as fuck didn't help me hit a fastball any better,

Well I support that. Nothing wrong with reminding kids that losing isn't a bad thing so long as they remember they're a team and give it their best next time

I love this key difference between America and the UK. In Britain we've still got a mindset of 'It's the taking part that counts', whereas America seems to hate losers with a passion.

And yet, football hooligans.  Heh.

I think Hooliganism is more about general violence than anything else. There's no correlation between violence and the results of the respective football teams.

I just think it's amusing that Gabe thinks that kids should only be rewarded for success, that he's pissed that his coach tried to treat his team even when they lost. What a fucking monster.

Even in youth some people are just geared more towards competition or pushing themselves to see how far they can go. At 11 the kid clearly has the desire to be the best that he can be so it's a bit silly to hold him back. I'm not sure what the age restrictions are like but if he's kicking that much ass and there's a league that takes kids a bit older he should just move up. If there's no option then he's biding his time until high school I guess.

 

I can see the reasoning behind the rule. So many people are adamant about winning, and not just playing that their kids physically react to loss. I've seen kids at Pop Warner and PeeWee games throw up because their parents get them so worked up. 

 

I help coach a bunch of kids at the Jiu Jitsu gym I train with and 10-12 is when most of them either quit or start taking it serious and you see a big leap in their forethought and performance. Kids's good, he's good and the most important thing is that he's pushing the ball into the end zone. If it's on the scoreboard or not whatever. If I was the coach, rule or not, I'd just have him running the god damn ball in. If they don't want to count it, fine. But don't stifle him because he can perform.

 

If anything it gives the other coaches a reason to actually coach and try to shut him down.

 

SWEEP THE LEG!!! j/k

 

As far as the title of this thread, which asks if there is racial bias involved...

I noticed that the defunct rule they brought back to cripple this kid's game is called the 'Mandre Hill' rule, which was instituted in order to hamstring another talented youth player of that name. I look at the name 'Mandre' and can't help but wonder if this other kid might not have been black, and then I must ask if they're only busting out such rules when there are talented black players stealing all the attention

Yeah. I ignored the race based shit entirely but I tend to.

I totally agree with that sentiment (the British one), and that's how I remember it being when I was a kid. Win or lose, the important thing was to do your best. And somehow, I and a whole generation of other people turned into reasonably well-adjusted adults despite growing up with the psychologically crippling handicap of knowing that sometimes we might lose at baseball.

 

I think this whole phenomenon is symptomatic of this Generation Y parenting method in which children are excessively coddled and given constant validation for everything they do. And all society will end up with is a bunch of dangerously self-entitled adults.

Too late we are already there.

 

 

For the record, we got the same pizza and Bazooka treatment after wins as well. For me, when I was younger, I stopped understanding the difference between when we won and when we lost. It's not at all comparable to this situation at all, but it definitely threw me off when I was little. Also, to finish those seven innings (less for kids) and then to have to read one of Bazooka Joe's Sphinx-like perplexing riddles? MADNESS.

Yes, it's the south. But race doesn't seem to be an issue here. I got my ass kicked in sports going up. It made me take losing much easier in life. It also made me work harder. It's about building character. As Mr. Carlin once said. With kids, their are a few winners and a whole lot of losers.

"It's the south." Seems to be a pretty common phrase on the boards when it comes to anything remotely race related. Maybe it's just me, having grown up in "the south", but I don't find this sort of thing to be nearly as rampant as is implied. Let me be honest. I've been in Hawaii since I got out of the service and it's, by far, the most narrow minded, racist, bigot filled place I've ever been.

 

It could be my blinders are so tight in regards to the actual topic on hand that I missed any race related undertones in the news article. I took it as the little motherfucker can play ball and some people are butt hurt by that. I didn't notice any old white men in robes sitting at an athletic counsel meeting in the background or anything.

 

Maybe I should have put that in the tired shit thread.

 

Again to try and make a valid point, kids are kids. It's a game. There will always be kids that are better coordinated and more interested than the average one. And once more, as someone that does a fair bit of dealing with them in an athletics capacity, most of them are lazy as fuck and not nearly motivated. If anything they should be giving him credit for busting his ass.

This seems like much ado about nothing.  The kid still gets to run up 3 touchdowns and it all goes away when he moves up to the next level.  I'm not overly concerned about the sporting feelings of a bunch of grade school kids, but hey, if this phenom has lit it up enough to get that big of a lead, let him have some well deserved rest.  This sort of protectionism goes away in high school, so I'm not worried about the whole idea of raising entitled kids.  Hell, my adult men's soccer league stops adding goals if one team gets ahead by 7, and non of us have gone off the reservation.

 

The "it's the south" slams are from people doing their own sort of lazy stereotyping and bias. Consider the sources...

Haven't you heard?  "The South" is the last bastion of people you're allowed to hate on indiscriminately.  Of course they're all KKK members and such.