We had a terrible experience with our daughters sports program. I don't believe this is an isolated incident, and I believe this happens all the time at all levels.
My daughter attended a catholic school system west of Milwaukee. They offered a variety of sports programs starting at the 5th grade, but it wasn't until the 7th grade that I really started to notice how a few families controlled the league, and the conference.
I will use the girls basketball program as an example because this is where the majority of the funny business took place.
The girls coaches (on the sly) got a team together for the summer. This was to get a head start on the other teams. This isn't against the rules if the head coach isn't on the bench coaching the girls, but she was. This happened for 2 years. Officially the team coach was the assistant coach during the regular season. Another really good example is how the conference manipulated the schedule in the 8th grade so none of the good teams played each other until the selection for the Padre Serra Tournament took place. The top seeds in each of the 4 divisions of the tournament came from our conference. The teams are selected very early in the season for this tournament, so they just had to get past about 4 weeks without playing one another. I would like to add two things to this. The conference held scrimmages prior to the season to see who the top 4 teams were, and when the schedule came out there was a mad scramble to redo the schedule at the last minute, because some of the schools dropped out of the league because they saw what was going on and didn't care for it one bit
I just want to add one more thing that struck me as a little odd. We had one family who actually held all their children back from starting school one year to give them an edge in sports, and learning.
Have any of you had similar experiences with childrens sprots?
