Too good

Ah, youth sports:

Jason Hanauska found out Friday his high school team with Rogers Area Youth Basketball Association (RAYBA) was kicked out of their own league.

“We found out on Friday they were not going to be allowed because according to the league our girls were too talented,” Hanauska said.

Their winning streak cut short ahead of this weekend's 3-on-3 tournament.

I don't find this scenario particularly surprising. A few years back, Fearless Maria was on a summer softball team that represented the Arden Hills Parks and Recreation Department. The team played a round-robin schedule with the parks departments for two other neighboring towns, Shoreview and Mounds View. Maria's team was, to put it mildly, loaded. Most of the Arden Hills girls were multi-sport athletes and have gone on to be varsity performers in various sports at both Irondale and Mounds View high schools. The other two teams had girls who were (a) younger and (b) didn't have nearly the same level of athleticism, so every game was an utter mismatch. Maria's team would win games 30-4, or 36-2, or 33-5. The other two teams, when they played each other, were competitive, but they had no shot against Maria's team. It had to be frustrating for the other teams to show up to the field and know they were going to get destroyed.

Our family has also been on the other side of the ledger. Benster played on some, ahem, challenged teams during his youth sports days. I wrote here about a game his team played in back in 2006 in which his basketball squad was edged 70-6. 

So why does this happen? As I wrote back in '06, sometimes the league is to blame:

For some reason, the grandees who run the program didn’t consider the wisdom of balancing the teams. Our inexperienced 5th graders were playing a team that was filled with experienced, talented 6th graders. The result was unsurprising. Ben is one of the more experienced kids on our team. He is not a big kid, though – about 4-8 and less than 80 pounds. He knew what was coming but he didn’t have the physical skills to deal with bigger, faster, more aggressive kids.

While Ben was playing on an Irondale Youth team, his team also played against kids from St. Anthony and Roseville and the IBA might have decided to put the good kids on the same team to ensure they would beat the St. Anthony and Roseville kids. I can't prove that was what happened, and 10 years on it doesn't matter, but it's a typical situation. Two years later, Benster played on a different Irondale Youth team with some of the kids who had kicked his butt in the past. By then, he was older and more ready to play and he was a contributor to a team that won most of its games.

It was the same dynamic in Maria's situation, but for different reasons; most of the Arden Hills kids knew one another growing up and had competed together in other sports; they decided to play in-house softball during the summer just to have fun. There wasn't anything particularly pernicious about it, but I'm sure the parents from the other teams didn't think so highly of our team.

You can learn from playing a superior team and you can improve. It's difficult to see that when you are in the middle of a whipping. The lessons you learn from youth sports often aren't understood until much, much later.