SportsLetter

Boston high school sports: give & take

The Boston Globe had two interesting stories this week on Boston high school sports.  The first centered around Boston's Scholar Athlete program, which has been "providing money and manpower to the city’s overburdened athletic department. The mission is to address deficiencies in equipment, facilities, coaching, participation, and academic eligibility" with the primary goal of helping high school athletes perform better in the classroom.

The article continues:  

The Boston Scholar Athlete blueprint calls for upgrading one boys’ and one girls’ sport each season, beginning this year with soccer, basketball, baseball, and softball. The first step has been providing players new uniforms for home and away games, as well as practices, a marked improvement over the mismatched look previously familiar to many Boston teams. The program also bought eight regulation soccer goals for practice fields that previously had none.

As an unanticipated bonus, the initiative has inspired action by numerous nonprofits, most notably the Play Ball! Foundation, which last fall launched the city’s first middle-school football league with a three-year, $100,000 contribution.

The second story was about Friday’s National Hockey League Winter Classic game between the Bruins and the Philadelphia Flyers taking place in Fenway Park.  When the Red Sox opened up the rink to area high schools, coaches and players jumped at the opportunity to have a part in the historic event ... until they found out that an hour or two on the ice would cost the schools between $10,000 and $30,000.  Said one coach, "here was an opportunity to promote the game at its elementary roots - as an outdoor pond game - and they completely botched it for the sake of money.’’

If loving this story is wrong, we don’t wanna be right

The case of former Mississippi Congressman and soccer dad Chip Pickering refuses to go away.  Pickering, the family-values-Republican accused of attacking a soccer coach whom he said was verbally abusing his son, faces a misdemeanor assault charge and wants to clear up the matter by sitting down with his alleged victim, Chris Hester, “man-to-man” without lawyers to shake hands and “set a good example for the kids.” 

AP reports that Hester, who claims to have undergone neck surgery a few weeks before the incident, responded, “Funny, he wants to put the burden on me to stand up and be a man, but what kind of man attacks a man in a neck brace?”  Hester’s attorney, Mac McCool, – really, that’s his name – added that he has not been contacted by Pickering’s lawyers about a resolution. 

The soccer contretemps is the second legal embarrassment of 2009 for Pickering.  In July his estranged wife filed an alienation of affection suit against his alleged mistress, Elizabeth Creekmore Byrd, claiming that Byrd ruined the Pickerings’ marriage by carrying on an affair with her husband while then Congressman Pickering lived in a Christian residence in Washington, D.C. operated by the Fellowship Foundation.

High hits, head cases and hockey

While the Texas Tech football concussion controversy has grabbed headlines in the past couple of days, it’s important not to overlook recent developments on concussions in the sport of hockey. 

In the Texas Tech controversy the James family made specific reference to the issue of concussions in youth football: "At virtually every level of football coaching, cases where children and young men have sustained concussions have generated serious discussion of the importance of correct treatment and diagnosis." 

Meanwhile the NHL, former professional players and academic researchers are confronting the problem of hockey concussions not only among elite adult athletes, but in youth players as well ...

NHL concussions video released in September:

http://www.nhl.com/ice/news.htm?id=499020

The Messier Project:

http://www.themessierproject.com/the-project.html

http://thehockeywriters.com/messier-interview-war-on-concussions/

Boston University research:

http://www.bumc.bu.edu/busm-news/2009/12/18/first-hockey-player-diagnosed-with-degenerative-brain-disease-caused-by-repetitive-brain-trauma/

http://www.bu.edu/phpbin/news/releases/display.php?id=1807

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/hockey/former-nhler-had-condition-linked-to-concussions-at-time-of-death/article1404651/

And we thought Canadians were nice

It seems incidents of misbehaving parents, coaches -- or ex-politicians -- are not unique to the United States.

Toronto's Star.com today had a story about youth hockey in the Greater Toronto Hockey League and the "startling number of hothead outbursts against officials by adults behind the bench, from profane attacks to threats of violence."  Examples included a father/assistant coach who "amassed 19 game suspensions and seven major penalties for disputing officials' calls – six of them including verbal abuse of the official."

Continuing:

A study of 6,622 critical incidents in the GTHL during the 2007-08 season found coaches responsible for the largest number – 2,537 – of problems reported by referees.  Sport consulting firm Justplay, which conducted the research on behalf of the GTHL, defines critical incidents as events demonstrating "poor" or "very poor" sportsmanship and no redeeming examples of good sportsmanship.

Texas QBs

The December 7, 2009 issue of Sports Illustrated has an interesting article by Austin Murphy on the high number of Texas high school quarterbacks playing for leading college teams.  “That a state with 8% of the nation’s population accounts for . . . nearly one fifth of all starting Division I-A quarterbacks,” writes Murphy “is . . . remarkable.”  Murphy credits specialization in the position from an early age, the state’s policy of allowing "athletic periods" in place of PE classes and the prevalence of seven-on-seven summer football tournaments. 

Murphy isn’t wrong, but the 8% figure is a bit misleading.  One side effect of Texas’ love affair with football is that more kids play football in Texas than in any other state.  About 14.5% of all of the nation’s male high school football players play in Texas.  That percentage is considerably higher than any other state.  California is second with 9%.

It also is interesting to note that of the quarterbacks who started for the top-25 Division I-A teams in the final game before the December 6 BCS poll, 5 were from Texas, 5 from California, 3 from Florida (which has one-fourth as many high school football players as Texas), and 2 each from Ohio and Pennsylvania.  So, is the number of quarterbacks from Texas the result of a superior “system” in the state, a bigger talent pool than any other state, college recruiters following a fad, or some combination of all of these factors? 

Soccer dad

In a case of he said-he said, Mississippi’s Clarionledger.com reported that former congressman Chip Pickering, a “family-values” Republican from Mississippi who served 12 years in the US House of Representatives, was involved in a fight with a soccer coach after a youth soccer game.
 
According to the article, Pickering was upset by what he thought was verbal abuse heaped on his son by Christopher Hester:

…Hester, who coaches a South Madison County Soccer League team, contends the former congressman pulled him from his vehicle as he was trying to leave. The men scuffled and had to be pulled apart by spectators … Hester, a nurse who coaches 10- and 11-year-olds, played against Pickering’s son’s team at Liberty Park on Sunday. Pickering approached Hester about the way his son was treated, and the incident escalated from there.

For his part, Pickering maintains that:

Hester “verbally abused and physically intimated my son, visibly upsetting my son to the point of uncontrollable crying. I approached the coach, who was sitting in his vehicle, and asked him to not address my son in such a manner again. I did not say anything further to him, nor did I ever threaten him.”  Pickering said Hester then removed his seat belt and exited the SUV, “attacking and assaulting me, and I was forced to defend myself by restraining him.”

While the ex-Congressman has asked the Mississippi State Soccer Association to suspend Hester, it appears Pickering, who already is going through a divorce and probably will spend some time in court over custody issues, may have another court date in his future.

Numbskull teenagers

On Wednesday the NFL announced strict new return-to-play policies for players suffering from concussions.  Safety advocates hope that the change in attitude at the professional level will influence policies and protocols at the youth level.  Changes to the tough guy, or “team first,” attitudes at the youth level, however, may take a bit longer, according to an article in today’s New York Times:

Sitting outside their locker room Thursday, linebacker-fullback Wade Minshew and defensive end Kuresa Moaliitele both said they would not tell anyone if they sustained a concussion during Friday’s big state playoff game …”It’s our mentality toward football — you put the team first,” Minshew said. Moaliitele added: “I’d keep playing. It’s the dedication I have to the team.”

Just then their coach, Myron Miller, walked in. Informed of his players’ comments, he calmly explained that he would do the same if he was 16.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Miller said. “They shouldn’t do it, I’ve told them not to do it, but it takes a lot of maturity to put your health ahead of the team. If I was playing in the game tomorrow night and got a concussion, I don’t think I’d tell anyone either. I’m not a hypocrite.”

Viewed in light of Pittsburgh Steeler Hines Ward’s comments about the decision to have teammate Ben Roethlisberger sit out a game with concussion-like symptoms:

"...it's almost like a 50-50 toss-up in the locker room: Should he play? Shouldn't he play? It's really hard to say. I've been out there dinged up. The following week, got right back out there. Ben practiced all week."

Perhaps a change in attitude at ALL levels in the game will be a long time coming.