GG Galore: What Not to Name Your Youth Sports Team

Plus, one sport losing its luster thanks to astronomical prices

Good Game is a 1-2x/week publication aimed at educating youth sports parents and coaches so they can best empower athletes. Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Thank you!

Photo: Canva

If you’ve been here long enough you know my great aversion to including the term “elite” in team names, especially when kids are still rocking single digits. Super talented 8-year-old with a ton of potential? Sure. Elite? Um, no. But it sounds high-level and, in many cases, gives parents the subconscious sense that paying elite fees will equal an elite kid. Still, I’d take a misused name like elite over some of the garbage team names I’ve eyed recently.

One such name is Hit N Run Academy. This CA-based baseball organization appears to have gone out of business. With a name like Hit N Run, it’s no wonder. I get the wannabe play-on-words element but literally this team is/was named after a crime. Also, this is baseball. The terminology/punny options are endless.

What really inspired this deep thought about team names is one I came across yesterday while looking through a travel ball group on Facebook.

9- and 10-year-olds calling themselves bullies. Parents cheering for bullies. Of all the team names that exude confidence these people couldn’t come up with something better than bullies? JFC. Anything worse out there?

….

Ok onto the Galore part of GG Galore, a little jaunt through the youth sports news and commentary that caught my eye this week:

• AP has a somber report on the declining participation in youth hockey in the sport’s nucleus, Canada. Between equipment and renting ice time, hockey is among the priciest youth sports to play. At a certain point, people are simply priced out.

• Speaking of costs, there’s a graphic about annual expenditures making the rounds on social media. Look at the numbers and then like all the others, have a good laugh. Imagine if these prices were accurate.

• Larry Alioto of Peabody, Mass. was honored for his FIVE decades of umping youth baseball. Much respect.

• Sadly, per this Newsday documentary, the decline in officiating on Long Island is directly tied to verbal abuse.

• Cool report on the rise of girls’ participation in wrestling, the nation’s fastest growing high-school sport.

• The West Coconut Grove neighborhood in South Florida has long been famous for the substantial numbers of Black professional athletes its churned out. Look at any NFL roster ten years ago and someone from The Grove is likely on it, including my fave, Frank Gore. But now, per ABC News, economic despair and gentrification is stripping away the special sports culture this neighborhood once stood for.

• Produced by University of Chicago Medicine, I appreciated this simple yet useful look at what young athletes should eat before and after games.

Have a good weekend, Good Gamers!