My 10 yr old niece plays in a park district basketball program. Either 10-11 yr old or 4th-5th grade girls. They played their first game yesterday. The other team was a team from a parochial school that was allowed to join the park district as a team. They practice and compete regularly at school.
Suffice it to say they dominated. When the score was 20-0, the officials agreed to turn off the scoreboard.
My niece still enjoyed herself - which is the only thing that matters. But I had never heard of an existing team being allowed to join a park district team as a unit. Is this common? What would be the reasons for allowing that?
Seems odd for rec league. Rec league is the dominion of kids who just need to get some exercise and try out a sport to see if they like it. It’s not travel league.
While I generally hate the idea of travel league, I’d rather the serious kids go there than join the rec league and complain that the other kids/coaches aren’t good enough to effectively elevate their skill set.
If the rec league is hard up for members, okay, but if a pre-existing team wants to join as a contiguous group, rather than join as regular members of the league, their games should be exhibition, not for league points.
It does seem quite odd. Parochial school teams would typically compete in school leagues against other school teams. I guess subsequent games will tell you whether your niece’s team is mismatched in talent with the other teams in the league or the school team was.
The first game was a fair match up. This was the second game my grandniece played. (I have no knowledge other than what I hear from my sister (the grandmother) who drove out to watch this game.) What I understand is that this other team scrimmages at school during gym class, and plays other schools. Just seemed to not be consistent with what I’d expect of a park district rec league.
And while this is not a “travel” team, it is a semi-rural area, so the teams are drawn from a kinda large area. Grandniece’s park district fields a total of 2 teams. I wondered if they allowed this team in just trying to get enough teams.
Our 9 yr old grandkid played softball over the summer. As I understood it, the better/more dedicated kids were in the travel leagues, so the rec league did no thave enough players to make up a league. As a result, they had to travel to play in other towns. Just made it more of a commitment than if it were entirely local. Plus, since the better kids were playing travel league, the overall skill level on my grandkid’s team was not awesome.
Yeah it sounds like the league was in need of players maybe, or another team to round-out the schedule. However, skills should have been taken into account and the team not just dropped into the rec league like that. I can see how they’d dominate given different practice regimens and such (probably elevated coaching as well, versus volunteer parents).
When my son was playing rec basketball, he and his friends always tried to get on the same team, and they were able to get together most of the guys most seasons. Our league has a draft at the start of the season where coaches (volunteer parents) evaluated each kid and assigned them a number representing their skill level, and during the draft each team was required to take the same number of skilled players as unskilled, so the teams were mostly even strength. Adding a team of skilled players as a unit like the OP shared would have really upset the volunteer parent coaches not to mention a large number of other parents. I, for one, would have voiced my concern in the tone of “WTF?!”