SportsLetter

With apologies to Sports Illustrated ...

This headline to a story from the Chicago Tribune may be a "Sign of the Apocalypse:"

Is he the best 5th grade basketball player in the country?

Apparently Chicago 10-year old Jaylin Fleming is quite a basketball player.  He may even be the best fifth grade boys basketball player in Chicago to take the floor this year.  Indeed, Chicago Bull's Derrick Rose (who once attended the same school as young Jaylin) coached Jaylin this summer and has said "he's better than me  ... his talent is one of a kind. Kids his age rarely do the stuff he does ... He does moves that a grown-up does."

But, per the article:  "Fleming is regarded by some as the most talented 10-year-old basketball player in the country."

Really?  In the country?  There are people out there who have seen every 5th grade basketball player in the country?

Sadly, the answer may be yes:
 
Because there are no official national rankings until kids reach sixth grade — for the last six years, HoopScoopOnline.com has been the only service scouting children that young — Jaylin is not yet ranked as best in the nation, but he'll no doubt top the chart this summer.

And that may be the most disturbing part of this story.

A spike in youth sports participation

Ten thousand teenage girls were in Denver, February 27 - March 8, attending Colorado Crossroads, one of USA Volleyball's 10 annual junior qualifiers.  These regional junior qualifiers determine which players advance to the junior national championship.

This was an increase over last year's attendance, says event founder and operator Kay Rogness.  Rogness also runs a similar event in Atlanta -- the Big South National Qualifier -- which also has seen an increase in attendance in recent years.  Rogness opines that parents are more likely to trim other home and personal expenses in order to keep spending on their kids.  She may be right.

According to an article in Street and Smith's Sports Business Journal the Denver event pumped in $13 million into the Denver economy and an estimated $30 million into the Atlanta economy, not an insubstantial amount in these tough economic times. 

The growth in attendance in these events, as well as an increase in participation numbers in organizations like Pop Warner and AYSO, seem to confirm that interest in youth sports isn't slowing down.  In fact, as school districts and interscholastic sports adminstrations trim costs by eliminating all but varsity teams, community-based sports organizations and may continue to see their numbers climb.

High school sports on TV

Last month SportsLetter told you about the desire of New York City's Department of Education to create a media network for high school sports in New York.  Yesterday in Multichannel News, author Mike Reynolds reported that the city's Public Schools Athletic League was looking at responses from Time Warner Cable, Cablevision and MaxPreps, and now is in the "request for proposal" stage of planning.  Said PSAL's Executive Director Donald Douglas, "we haven’t solidified a time frame yet, but we don’t want to miss a school year ... Our goal is not necessarily to find one network.”

And while it may seem odd to see CBS Sports.com's MaxPrep's name on that list, Reynolds tells us that MaxPreps has "developed a low-cost proprietary Internet-based sports video editing system" it calls "Hudl" which would help high schools load game footage onto MaxPreps.com.

Reynolds also wrote about other high school-centric network operations that currently are up and running nationwide, including:

--Teaming with the Indiana High School Athletic Association, Comcast and Bright House Networks are making the top high school basketball games in state history available to their subscribers on demand, including contests featuring Oscar Robertson, Damon Bailey and Greg Oden.

--Time Warner Cable in North Carolina just produced eight boys’ and girls’ North Carolina High School Athletic Association state championship games, two of which were telecast live on News 14 Carolina across the state, while all of the contests were streamed live and are now available on Carolina on Demand.

--... [New York's] MSG Varsity has 120 full-time staff ers and has already partnered with some 250 schools in the tri-state area. By the end of this school year, it will have professionally produced more than 400 live-to-tape games under its “High School Sports Showcase” banner. A crawl, a la ESPN’s “BottomLine,” updates scores from throughout the area. The network presents an hour-long news show, High School SportsDesk, that features action from 200 schools over the course of a week.

--[Sports Time Ohio] has been the home of the Ohio High School Athletic Association championships since the fall of 2007, producing a minimum of 32 events every year, covering football, boys’ and girls’ basketball, volleyball, softball, ice hockey and boys’ and girls’ bowling, a number in high-definition. In 2009, the RSN added a regular- season “High School Football Game of the Week” franchise.

Let's be careful out there

Last week the National Athletic Trainers’ Association (NATA) released a number of suggestions and recommendations for providing  young athletes with a safe athletic environment.

Among the suggestions:

1. Assess the financial and time impact on your family

2. Determine if your children are physically and mentally “in shape”

3. Have your children obtain a physical examination

4. Find out who’s taking care of your kids 

5. Provide coaches with your child’s medical history

6. Make sure your children are eating and drinking to win

7. Ascertain coaches' qualifications

8. Ask if the school/league has an emergency action plan

Read the press release for more information on these suggestions and the NATA.

Pediatric Sports Injuries: the Silent Epidemic

Two medical experts warned Wednesday at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) of increasing injuries among young athletes as a result of overuse and overtraining.

Thomas M. DeBerardino, MD, an orthopaedic surgeon specializing in sports medicine for the University of Connecticut Huskies and Associate Professor of Orthopaedics at the University of Connecticut Health Center, led a session on what he labeled an "epidemic" of adolescent sport-related injuries.  “More adolescents are participating in year-round sports without seasonal breaks, or they are playing on multiple teams simultaneously,” he says. “This increased exposure means there will continue to be growing numbers of significant musculoskeletal injuries, both traumatic and chronic overuse.”  

A second presentation, dealing primarily with young gymnasts, was called “Pediatric Sports Medicine Operative Challenges and Solutions: A Case Based Approach.”   It was led by Dr. Theodore J. Ganley, M.D., Director of Sports Medicine, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Associate Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery, The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.  Dr. Ganley stressed that year-round gymnastic training and repetitive weight-bearing routines are resulting in osteochondritis dissecans (OCD) injuries, which is "a softening of the bone underneath the cartilage that can lead to cartilage breaks and pain." 

“While patients requiring surgery for OCD injuries can benefit from arthroscopic surgery, understanding the warning signs can help prevent athletes from presenting with more extensive lesions," said Dr. Ganley.

Read the press release for more information on these sessions and the AAOS Annual Meeting.

Character building

ESPN's Rick Reilly is no fan of basketball coach Greg Wise of Houston's Yates High School.  Earlier this year Yates High, in an effort to reach 200 points in one game, beat Lee High School 170-35, leading to a game-time scuffle and hard feelings all around.  As Reilly points out in his ESPN the Magazine article:  "Wise is to sportsmanship what tsunamis are to beach chairs. So far this season, he's beaten teams by 135, 115, 99 (twice), 98, 90 and 88 points. Trying to get to 100 points in a crushing of Westbury, his players intentionally fouled to stop the clock."

While Coach Wise's motivations and sportsmanship have been called into question, high scores by teams and individuals are not an unusual occurrence in high school basketball.  Last year The Covenant School in Dallas beat Dallas Academy 100-0 in a girls high school game, a game that cost The Covenant School's coach Micah Grimes his job.  And last week MaxPreps.com's Kevin Askeland had an article pointing out that:
 
... 100 points in a game is certainly not a unique achievement in high school basketball. In fact, 20 players have broken the century mark, ranging from Danny Heater’s all-time mark of 135 points for Burnsville High in West Virginia in 1960 to the most recent effort, Tigran Grigorian’s 100-point outing in 2003 for Mesrobian (Pico Rivera, Calif.)

Take off (to the Great Green South)

Toronto's Globe and Mail had an interesting article last Friday about the increasing number of Canadian high school kids who venture south to enroll in US high school programs in order to play basketball.

According to the article:

It's estimated that as many as 100 Canadian teenagers - primarily boys from the Toronto area, though there are girls and boys from every region in the country - are chasing their hoop dreams in the United States, often as early as the ninth grade.

"It's growing, it's not going to stop if we don't do something," says Guy Pariseau, technical director for Basketball Quebec, who says nearly all of the province's 10 best players have left for the U.S. "Everyone is shopping."

At the top of the list is a lucrative scholarship to a top Division I school and dreams of a professional career.

Like  many such ventures, however, there are experiences good and bad:

... says Mike George, founder of CIA Bounce, another top Toronto-area club that has had several kids head south for high school. "For some parents, they see it like sending their kids to boarding school, it gives them a sense of security. I've had kids get full scholarships to [elite East Coast private schools] Proctor or Brewster. That's worth $45,000 a year. For them it's a no-brainer."

Not all kids are so fortunate. It's estimated about 80 per cent of them have to pay some or all of their tuition, with only the elite getting scholarships to prep schools.

Then there are rumours of kids sleeping three or more to a room, 10 to a house, with minimal adult supervision, essentially fending for themselves at schools with dubious academic standing and scant record of developing elite basketball players.

Are you fitter than a fifth grader?

Scientificblogging.com is reporting on a paper presented at the American Heart Association's 2010 Conference on Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism which shows a connection between physical fitness and academic performance in fifth grade students.

The paper, titled "Long-Term Physical Fitness Is Associated with Children’s Academic Achievement," with research conducted by Dr. Lesley A. Cottrell of West Virginia University, Dr. Richard Wittberg of the Mid-Ohio Valley Health Department in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and Karen Northrup, Wood County Schools, Parkersburg, West Virginia, was part of the Poster Program at the conference.

 According to a press release from West Virginia University:

Researchers found that the children who had the best average test scores in reading, math, science and social studies were fit at the start and end of the study. The next best group academically in all four subjects was made up of children who were not fit in fifth grade but had become fit by seventh grade.

Those who lost their fitness level between grades five and seven were third in academic performance. The lowest academic performance came from those who were not fit in either fifth or seventh grades ...

“ The take-home message from this study is that we want our kids to be fit as long as possible, and it will show in their academic performance,” Cottrell said. “If we can intervene for those children who are not necessarily fit and get them to fit levels, we may also see their academic performance increase.”