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Maybe he confused her for Ryan Garcia

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He’s a colossal piece of shit

It’s an old, old story..

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I’m shocked I tell you

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A close hand slap is a punch.

“You’re going the wrong way!”

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I feel this to the core. My personal solution was to try and find a way to start an organization that would allow kids to play without all of these inverse effects that happen but I kept coming to an issue with liability. Any organization I could run would need insurance and the venue would have to be sanitized of any possible risks to the point where I was beginning to doubt it was even possible.

The current culture doesn't seem to have room for what I was envisioning. I've lately held an intense interest in some sports that seem to have popped up out of nowhere. Pickleball is never going to be a massive professional sport, but when it comes to adoption it has taken our city by storm. All of the tennis courts which were completely empty are now pickleball courts. My hypothesis is that the closer a game looks to the real thing, the pro version, the less likely that the organized youth version of it will be adaptable to children.

The more it looks like a silly "game" (pickleball is similar to wiffleball in that the ball is a plastic silly thing) the more fun it will likely be for kids just picking it up in the local neighborhood. When the game mirrors a professional sport like hockey (on real nice looking professional rinks, and baseball with pro jerseys and pristine fields, and soccer on fields that would make the second leagues in England blush) it begins to take on these high stakes qualities that lowers the accessibility.

I'm actually going to flip the script a little and argue that the INTENTION isn't to drive out community sport.

The outdoor rink example (over-scheduling) was driven by:

• Over worry about injury
• Over worry about children interacting with older people (teens/adults)
• Complaints by a vocal minority of players (for example, there are dedicated women/girls times because some people complained about feeling uncomfortable in a male-dominated space)
• Complaints by a vocal minority of parents (a handful of parent complaints about their sense that their young kid was subjected to a small amount of discomfort from being on the rink with older teens or whatever).

None of this is driven by "my kid should be a star player", but more the opposite. The "hard core" families were probably pushing for less scheduling so they can show up at the rink whenever.

But on another topic...

Hockey is also similar in its cost. The cost of ice time for youth hockey has doubled in 12 years. That drives the sport into a place that it's not accessible for many families.

But the reason for that isn't hyper-competitiveness. It's actually reasonable sounding demands.

The handful of parents who are in the "my son will play pro hockey" aren't driving the cost. They're PAYING the cost, but they're not driving it.

Here's a thing I post sometimes about how hockey rinks used to be:

The local rink (back when it was cheap and therefore accessible to everyone in the 70s) was:

• run by some local guy, who was paid shit, not given any sick time and did it mostly as a passion
• limited staffing- The rink guy would take a break and leave it unsupervised ; local coaches were given full run of the place, had keys to the building, could run the ice refinisher if nobody was around to help, etc.
• were mostly unsupervised facilities - no safety monitor, no facilities monitor, limited janitorial, etc
• were operated on a shoestring budget without a ton of concern for environmental issues (often ammonia leaks, frequently with cheap diesel generators)
• were not terribly safe. Old slippery stairs, old dank locker rooms, little supervision for participants (except coaches and team officials). I'm thinking of specific rinks in Toronto here built in the 1950s and 1960s... but I've seen hallways outside of the locker rooms had beams every 10 feet at about 6' off the ground to hit your head on, the exit to the ice going straight into a staircase (always covered in ice), player benches with a drop off directly behind them, narrow locker rooms, shower stalls just in the corner of the locker room with no barriers or otherwise, urinals directly in locker rooms with no door or separate space, etc.
• were not accessible at all. Stairways everywhere, obstructed hallways, no ramps, no elevators, no expanded shower stalls, no handrails, etc

Here's a list of things that I think drove the cost of indoor rinks to double in 15 years:

• Hiring more people to make rinks highly supervised for safety and property protection
• Paying rink staff professional wages with sick time, overtime, etc, while offering breaks without disrupting supervision (requires 3-5x the staff at 6-8x the budget).
• Significantly reducing the amount of access coaches have to facilities, players, etc (goes along with increased supervision/staffing) done mostly for safety and compliance and having multiple layers of supervision to prevent coach abuse.
• Making rinks more environmentally friendly - efficient chillers, careful inspection for leaks, regular review of energy usage, efficient air conditioning and heating in facilities, etc.
• Making rinks more safe in general (no more leaky roofs, slippery staircases, temporary patches, etc)
• Making rinks more accessible (all 75 indoor Toronto rinks had a $1m+ renovation to make them accessible - ramps, big showers, viewing platforms for wheelchairs, elevators, etc)
• Making new facilities significantly nicer. Heated viewing areas, large locker rooms, ample atriums, nice fixtures, clean hallways, etc.
• Decreased reliance on volunteers, coaches, etc. No more giving the figure skating coach the key to open up at 5am and the bantam hockey coach instructions to "run the zam and lock up after you leave". Instead, you have full-time professional staff that show up at 4:30am and leave after midnight (needing multiple shifts, etc).

Notice that none of the things that drove the complaints I have about hockey are even related to the "alpha parents" who try to push their kids into pro hockey.

Each of these sounds reasonable on its face. All of them are desirable.

But the sum total is doubling the cost of the sport and making it less accessible.

People are VERY loathe to discuss this. They want it all AND they want it cheap. When a local arena upped their ice cost by $100/hr everyone was upset.

When I pointed out that the only reason they did that is to pay for the $1m renovation whos primary goal was wheelchair accessibility (for a building that hosts ZERO sledge or other disabled hockey events) and if they didn't want that cost hike, they could consider maybe only upgrading specific arenas where sledge hockey is prioritized, rather than every single one, people were pretty upset with me for being "heartless" and "ableist". But there are legitimate tradeoffs here that people seem to have trouble discussing.

I feel like this is all driven by a "zero tolerance" of bad things, without weighing all the good things you accidentally get rid of when trying to chase away every single negative outcome.

He took a bio toilet that is visible in his last Instagram post.

This is the crux of the whole thing. In my recreational team last year I coached I took them and had to teach them how to self organize. 11 year olds that didn't know how to pick teams. So I taught them how to pick teams, including picking which coach they wanted on their team (older/younger). Then had a parent apologizing that her son and another boy got into an aggressive argument over who would be goalkeeper. Conflict is part of growing up. I had to teach the boys how to solve it without just sitting and whining. Do paper/rock/scissors or something, I don't care. Figure it out.

There are those of us out there that are trying our best to bring back the old days. It feels like an uphill battle with all this money involved, but the culture is broken at the moment. For now we have to look across the pond with envy.

remindme! 109 days

RemindMe! 100 days

From the UK, live in the US. I coached freshman soccer for a minute and asked how many played outside of organized practice. None did. I asked how many watched soccer, none did regularly.

It's sickening how much it costs parents for what could mostly be learned in playgrounds and fields. Playing against older and younger kids, organizing your own teams, getting into fights, figuring out how to play with better and worse players than you.

The investment in something that at best might get a scholarship feels like a bad risk to reward ROI.

The biggest issue I see is the travel and cost. I don't necessarily hold a hard stance that competition can come into it much earlier. Just that the level of competition doesn't scale with distance. In a city of half a million there's more than enough competition within a few miles to find and nurture a good environment for the talented kids. I don't agree about separating kids too early. Breakouts happen all the time and those kids benefit from being around kids that are showing precociousness.

In soccer in the rest of the world the structure is funded through the pro leagues down. In the US it's reversed. Most funding in the sport comes from soccer parents at the bottom. The way it works in many European countries and elsewhere is that when a kid joins an academy (for a low price or free) if the kid moves onto another bigger club the club he's leaving will be paid a solidarity payment to subsidize the process. This fosters development of the child rather than aiming towards just winning.

In the US since clubs rely on parent funding and we don't have solidarity payments the clubs are dependent on wins to sell their services as 'elite'. The knock-on effects of that are obvious.

Spending the $4000+ per year amounts to gambling if scholarship is the goal. It's a problem.

But... if the USA sneezes the rest of the world catches a cold. We will see more and more countries adopting the monetization schemes we see here. We are far ahead in the sports investment versus the rest of the world. But to see if our obsession is serving children all you have to do is ask. I know a number of families that have already dropped out of club sports. Talented kids that just stopped having fun.

How does he shit

Coached Rec level baseball for years and had kids in club baseball, soccer and track. What seemed to work best for us was rec level through 11 and started club at 12u. Our family is average athletically so our goal was to be able to complete in high school. We were not going to join a traveling team in our club because it doesn't make sense for us. Clubs will allow players to join a traveling team because they need more players to split the costs across. The kids are paying for the coaches expenses on the trip. The baseball club we are in has 30 players that traveled across the US for 2+ spring and fall seasons. Of those 30, 4 have signed to play ball at a college for a scholarship - this is baseball so that is a partial scholarship.

Ba dum tsss

Coke. Boi

Yeah i bet you’re about to enlighten me though instead of posting useless shit to make yourself feel better lol