Plenty of problems plague youth basketball
Sunday was a busy day. In the morning, I officiated a charity basketball game at Edina High School. The game, featuring men’s league players, was played to raise money for Edina A Better Chance (ABC). Edina ABC is a program that takes promising inter-city kids from New York City and brings them to better environment in Edina, where they attend high school. Many of these students go on to some of the most prestigious universities in the country. The game was fun, with the Green team defeating the Gold team 104-101. Plenty of dunks; lots of good ball.
That afternoon I worked my three regularly scheduled games for a program through Augsburg College. The program provides an opportunity for high school kids (not on their school teams) to play basketball with other kids in their Lutheran church youth groups.
I got home for an hour to see my family before heading to Target Center for my first Minnesota Timberwolves game of the season. Kenny Mauer, my friend who wrote the foreword for BasketCases, was officiating the Wolves-Thunder game along with Tommy Nunez, Jr. and David Guthrie. Kenny secured tickets for a group of us to attend the game, and we went out after the game in downtown Minneapolis. (By the way, Oklahoma City’s Kevin Durant is the real deal. He scored 30 points. I think it was the 28th game in which he scored 25 or more points. Incredible.)
At the end of the night, the subject turned to the ugly assault in Burnsville in which a parent and, perhaps, another individual or two, assaulted a youth commissioner following an in-house, sixth-grade boys’ basketball game. Joining Kenny and I in this discussion was Frank White, a legendary Minnesota basketball official who was elected to the Minnesota State High School League’s Sports Hall of Fame and speaks across the country about sportsmanship issues. We spent so much time talking about the problems, we didn’t have a chance to address the solutions. Some of the problems include:
* Officials who try and maximize revenue by working eight or 10 games per day for one or more assignors. These officials stop calling fouls because they need to get across town and work at another gymnasium.
* Lazy assignors who allow their officials to work more than five games in a day and don’t make that extra phone call. When I was younger, I worked eight (and one time) nine games a day. Looking back, it was wrong. Perhaps I still had the energy to officiate better than most referees working three games, but by the end of the day my mind was mentally drained, which isn’t fair to to your partner or the players or spectators.
* Uneducated parents who yell at their owns kids, opposing players, their coaches and the officials. Remember that in some instances that verbal abuse leads to physical abuse.
* School administrators who don’t control the spectators at their home games. Is it right to allow a group of students to react to an official’s call by saying “bullsh_t, bullsh_t” at the same taxpayer-supported institution that during the day they are subject to rules in school? I don’t think so. What if a math teacher told a group of students to open their textbooks to page 43, and the students react with the same cheer. I assume, or at least hope, that the behavior would not be tolerated and the students would be severely disciplined and likely suspended. The same behavior can’t be “suspend-able” during the day in class and ignored/tolerated at night in the gymnasium.
* Youth tournament directors who add pressure by telling the officials (or the assignor or both) to keep the games on time with a wink, wink. In other words, swallow your whistle and put kids at risk to maintain convenience for the fans and tournament sponsors.
* Governing bodies or officials associations who don’t help their officials improve through observation/training/feedback, but simply have a required meeting at the beginning of the year to go over logistics and pay scale.
* The obsession of winning in this country, and what that does to normally rational human beings. What is it about sports? If you don’t like a note that came out of the trombone section during a concert, would you as a parent start screaming at your son or daughter for screwing up? Would the conductor? Of course not. So, why do we accept that behavior as commonplace at our sporting events?
* Coaches who are so obsessed with winning at the elementary level that they press all the time instead of truly developing basketball skills. It’s that mortgage-the-future attitude to win at the youth level which prevents basketball from rising to a higher level.
At the end of the night, we concluded youth sports are plagued by numerous issues that are not easily solved. We adjourned and decided to come up with solutions another night.