This Week in Youth Sports: Parents Gone Wild

Welcome to the inaugural CTG youth sports roundup, featuring a variety of youth sports news worth sharing.

Hi youth sports friends. Let’s try something new. Diving in the deep end of the youth sports space with the launch of Changing the Game means I’m following a lot more youth sports people and youth sports-related news and trends. It means I’m always on the prowl for useful tools and stories to share with you all.

Instead of blasting you every time something catches my eye, I’m going to save it all for Fridays. And by ‘all’ I mean the real news, ridiculous news, horrifying news, good reads, and anything else I think is worthy of sharing.  

Presenting our first CTG roundup…

Could athletic scholarships finally be coming to the Ivy Leagues?

In an antitrust lawsuit that should have come years earlier, a former men’s basketball player at Brown and current women’s basketball player at the school filed a federal complaint against the Council of the Ivy League Presidents and the eight member schools. (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth Harvard, Penn, Princeton, Yale). The suit alleges that the Ivies have conspired to not provide “any compensation” to Ivy League athletes.

Tamenang Choh, who graduated from Brown last May, and Grace Kirk, a junior at Brown, filed their complaint this week and are seeking class action certification to represent all Ivy League athletes recruited over the past four years. You can read more about their legal argument over at Sportico but key to their case is the fact that the Ivies are constantly poaching professors from each other with no limits on spending (a free market) yet have agreed to limit spending to zero when it comes to their student athletes (no market). A win would presumably set a precedent for Ivy League athletic scholarships in the future.

Alabama youth girls basketball team not awarded trophy after defeating boys team in championship.

I know what you’re thinking. It’s not that. So this one’s a bit odd. Apparently, there’s a rec league in Hoover, Alabama where, like many rec leagues, teams are selected by evaluations in a quest for balance. But this league also allows outside “elite” teams with hand-selected players to play games against the rec teams for development purposes. For some reason, they are also allowed to play in the season-culminating rec tournament.

Well, a group of 5th grade girls who have played together for three years and constitute an “elite” team wanted a step up in competition, so they entered the tournament in the 5th grade boys’ division. And they won the whole shebang (girl power!) only to be told, sorry, you’re not eligible for the trophy.  

Sounds like there was a breakdown in communicating rules and expectations based on one girl’s angry mom who posted about the experience on Facebook.

More women youth sports coaches, please.

Appreciated this piece in the L.A. Times focused on how to attract more women to coaching at the youth level. The story cites two stats from the Aspen Institute that are somewhat disheartening but not surprising: 74% of youth sports head coaches are men, and men are twice as likely to coach the opposite sex. Nothing against male coaches – my kids have had great ones, including my husband – but a little more representation would be healthy, especially as we aim to increase participation of girls in all youth sports. There are a few organizations like WeCOACH designed to empower women to coach at all levels with training tools and resources if anyone is looking for that sort of thing.

In other news….

Great news on the softball front. For the first time in its history, the Little League Softball World Series championship game will air on ABC….Kudos to two parents in Shasta County, CA. who unraveled some major embezzlement going on in the area’s youth football program….In more disgusting parent behavior we head to Charleston, SC where some parents went bonkers on a ref during a 12-year-old girls basketball game (these people REALLY need to read our post from earlier this week)….And finally, a 4-year-old traveling to Houston to play in a hard core baseball tourney? This is real and I just can’t.

Thanks so much for supporting Changing the Game. If you like what you’re reading, please consider sharing our newsletter on social media. And if anything crosses your universe that you think we should share in our weekly roundups, please email me at melissa@thefootballgirl.com, DM me on Twitter, or drop a comment here.

Have a great weekend!

👊Melissa