As a follow up to the last blog post about my son's basketball team, I contacted the rec and let them know that they had just inadvertently taken almost an entire travel basketball team and dropped them into a rec league, intact. I got a follow-up e-mail that said they were working on it.
Not sure what they meant by that. As of last night, the rosters hadn't been changed at all. Maybe they'll act, maybe they won't, but at this point, my conscience is clear. I've made sure they are aware of a potentially disastrous situation.
Now, some might wonder why this is such a concern for me. It's not like my son will be on a losing team. As I posted last time, though, anybody else in the league will view this as my son's team being an unfair bunch of bullies.
A bit of this goes back to my belief in recreational sports. My son doesn't play much of those anymore, and I think they're great. Travel sports are great for kids who have at least a little talent, a whole lot of drive and parents who can afford the finances and time involved. That's a very, very small minority of school aged kids.
Rec sports are for everybody else. There are a whole lot of us who didn't meet all the preconditions for travel sports. However, sports are fun, and everybody should be able to enjoy them.
There are, however, things you can do that makes sports not very fun. We used to call it stacking a team. For instance, you took all the good players, put them on one team and then let them whip everybody else in the league. Various leagues do this for various reasons. For instance, the kids on the stacked team are the ones most likely to be named to an all-star team and post-season play. So, you get them used to playing with each other all season.
Personally, I don't agree with that. One of the huge benefits of travel leagues is that you no longer have an excuse to try and prep a tournament team in a rec. league, etc. The recreational leagues are now free to be exactly that: recreational.
Despite this, it's amazing the lengths that some parents will go to in order to try and stack a team in a rec league. For instance, many rec leagues will make reasonable accomodation if you have kids who all need to car pool to practices together. This reasonable accomodation will, in the eyes of some parents, be an excuse to say that all the talented players their kid knows all belong to the same car pool.
My friend Stevie pointed out that what I was doing was exactly the opposite of this. Those parents are trying to stack a team to create an unfair competitive advantage in the league. I'm trying to unstack a team to prevent an unfair competitive advantage.
Even in the travel leagues, for instance, there's one travel baseball team where instead of putting together a strong community-based team, they take kids from all over the metro area. Fine if that's who you're playing against, but a bad show if you're doing it so you'll be able to easily defeat all the other community based teams in your league.
I'm all for competition. However, there's a fine line between competing as hard as you can, and doing things to gain an unfair advantage. I guess each person needs to let their own conscience be their guide on this. My take is that if a league is composed of randomly selected kids, then all the teams should be randomly selected kids. If one team ends up, by luck of the draw, to have more talent than the others, oh well.
Again, nobody TRIED to make this happen. In some ways, this is really great... FOR US. Also, the other teams will only play us once this season. So, maybe they figure, hey, we'll have one disastrous game, but the rest of the season won't be any different. I just worry.
As of today, it doesn't look like anything has changed at all. So, I guess the rec has decided to go through with this. It's just that sometimes your conscience tells you that something isn't right. We'll see how this goes. In a way, this is very positive for the travel team. Their rec practices and games will essentially be tune ups for their travel tournaments. I just hope we don't end up being the bad guys of the league.
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