Were you around last year when the commissioner had to send multiple emails about bad behavior from coaches and parents alike? Cops were called to a post-game brawl after a girls’ game and multiple coaches getting into it with each other on the boys’ side (including our coach). |
| "The refereeing is terrible" because parents and coaches are so awful to the refs that leagues can't find people willing to do it. The behavior towards the referees in our rec league 4th grade games was just terrible. These were young teenagers. |
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Parents and coaches don't seem to grasp that rec leagues are developmental at the elementary ages. The referees aren't going to call every travel or three second violation or every foul. You would be there all day and the kids wouldn't have fun.
Screaming "Travel" about opposing players when you are on the sideline of your 3rd grader's game makes you the AH. |
That part doesn’t bother me. It’s the ridiculous imbalance in what are supposed to be evenly distributed teams |
Most leagues do a skill evaluation and draft once the grades start keeping score. People blow off attending or try to game the system. Evaluating players skill level in ten minutes at a eval is difficult. A few bad apples can ruin an entire age group's league. |
It is very hard to make evenly balanced teams. Kids want to play with classmates or be on a team with a friend. Practice days, times and locations don’t work for everyone. Parents request a coach that their kid liked in the past. Some new players are absolutely terrible, while others are natural athletes that immediately pick it up. Some teams work well together and gel and improve over the season, others don’t. Kids grow and improve from before the season until the end. All those things can contribute to wildly different teams. |
Has to be something you can do. Been to too many games where the end score is 50 to 6. |
| Rec basketball will never be perfect. Despite the best efforts to balance the teams (pre-draft evaluations, requiring parents to note practice day conflicts, etc) you will always have kids who have game conflicts (especially when the league won't tell you before the season what days games are). Our 5GG team got destroyed this year b/c our 2 best players had conflicts for between half and 3/4 of the games. |
What do you suggest? |
Rec games are on Saturdays or Sundays. If your kid has conflicts for most Saturdays or Sundays, its unfair to the other players and coach to sign your kid up to play. |
| VYI? I have seem someReally terrible behavior this time. |
| OP coming back to this thread for the first time. I am sad to hear that this is apparently a pervasive problem. We saw more bad behavior this past weekend, particularly on the part of a top team coach and one of their players who is going to seriously hurt other kids if the refs don't get things in check. It's just ridiculous. Basketball seems to bring out the worst in people. |
This is the nature of youth basketball to some extent. When a slight worse team get intimidated, they start failing to get the ball over half court, and it just spirals. |
| Nonsense. Even a mediocre rec coach can keep a game from becoming a blow out by letting his worst player be the PG. |
We'll it depends. Are there enough teams to break rec into divisions. Thus, you have better teams in the top division, average in the next division below and terrible teams in a lower division. My kids leagues have coaches submit evaluations on their team talent level compared to others. Then the county runs seeding games in December to make sure a coach didn't sandbag his team. Generally, after 5th grade, everyone knows which teams are good and which teams aren't. |