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To what extent do parents influence team selection in middle school sports? A kids mom called up the coach and asked him to give her kid a spot on the basketball team. The kid is short, mediocre player, overweight and unfit. But he got the spot over other more qualified kids. Is this common?

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You have got to be fck ing kidding. Terrible coaches. How does a school allow this to happen?

Basketball only needs 5 players at a time on the court and 5 more to play at practices and perhaps an additional 2 or 3 if someone can't make it to practices. That's 12-15 max. There are way more people trying out. If they don't already have it, each middle school should also create a everyone plays group for anyone who tried out. Thats really horrible if they are cutting interested kids who are still developing their game, height and interests. Boo.

Basketball is the hardest sport to make at pretty much every area middle school. The team size is pretty small. You often need to be really good to make it as a 6th grader, if your school even allows 6th graders. Sometimes for girls soccer is the most competitive sport.

Anonymous wrote:At our Silver Spring middle school, 18 girls are trying out this week for 12-14 spots on the basketball team. Definitely depends on the school.

Is there a JV team for the 4-6 girls who will not make it onto the "main" middle school team? That's so rude to cut students at the middle school level. They are in frickn middle school!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s unfortunate how few kids at MCPS middle schools get to play on sports teams. There are so few teams and so few are selected, particularly in the larger middle schools.

I went to public school long ago and there were a lot more sports offered, and anyone who really wanted to be on some form of a team could find something to do. Not the case for MCPS

If you want sports, you need lots of coaches. Coaches are usually teachers. When teachers are overloaded with non-instructional duties, they start dropping their extracurriculars. We haven’t been able to keep coaches at my middle school as a result.

Yes. This. It's a lot to manage a class and grading and planning. Who is going to coach?

Apparently politics in MIDDLE SCHOOL sports:
https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1305514.page

Anonymous wrote:Middle school sports are an absolute joke. Which is why any kid with serious athletics prospects has to either go private or do club leagues.

Many kids do both. Who cares? I think it's great that middle school sports exist at all. I didn't have them growing up.

At our Silver Spring middle school, 18 girls are trying out this week for 12-14 spots on the basketball team. Definitely depends on the school.

In case it wasn't clear: the no 6th graders thing is (or at least was a few years ago) a county-wide rule, completely independent of how popular/competitive the particular team is.

And to underscore the previous point: whether there are try-outs/cuts will be very sport and school dependent and is almost always just a numbers game (how many kids want on the team). For some sports -- eg soccer or basketball -- it's just not realistic to say that 80 or 100 kids should all be allowed on the team, not just because of limited numbers of coaches, but also because of limited field space and the desire for these schools and teams to want to win games, which means practicing with kids who reasonably might expect playing time in a game (and typically, to enable teams to scrimmage in practice that's going to be at least double the number of kids on the field/court in a game at any given time)

Middle school sports are an absolute joke. Which is why any kid with serious athletics prospects has to either go private or do club leagues.