Positivity: Top 10 Youth Sports Stories of 2006
Dan Abrams, a law professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia, does a list like this every year (last year’s was a Positivity post here).
This year he concentrated on exemplary conduct seen in youth sports. Good for him:
Kids in Sports: Who Did Themselves Proud
Wednesday, December 13, 2006They continue to make headlines: parents facing jail time for assaulting coaches, referees or other parents at games for children as young as 6. Some observers take these incidents as evidence that participation in sports actually can damage the character of children as they grow up.
I disagree. After coaching for nearly 40 years, I know that most parents and the adults who supervise kids in sports successfully teach fair play and instill good values through athletic competition. My annual “Top 10″ list profiles youth athletes who demonstrated these values from coast to coast in 2006:
10. Sophomore Aaron Boss lost in the finals to Michaela Hutchison, the first girl to win an Alaska state high school wrestling title against boys. “I don’t look at it as losing to a girl,” said Boss. “I lost to a wrestler.”
9. The South County (Va.) Raptors football team was disqualified from the playoffs after the league commissioner fired the team’s coach. The coach’s offense? Shifting the commissioner’s son from defense to offense for a game. “I own the league,” the commissioner reportedly said, and “the entire league exists so he can play defense.”
The commissioner offered to hire another coach so the team could compete in the playoffs, but the kids rejected the offer. According to 13-year-old linebacker Michael Holland, the fired coach “is nice. He listens.” The commissioner subsequently backed down, rehiring the coach (and his staff) for the playoffs.
8. Freshman distance runner Sarah Lopez of Hacienda Heights (Calif.) was named the winner of a high school race after the initial winner was disqualified for cutting her off. But Lopez knew that the fault for the incident was hers, so she gave her medal to the disqualified opponent. Said Lopez’ coach: “Kids will make the right decision” when given the opportunity.
7. The Roberson High School (N.C.) boys’ soccer team scored an apparent goal to defeat a rival battling them for the conference title. But when Roberson players told their coach that the ball actually never crossed the goal line, the coach declined the goal, and the game ended in a 1-1 tie. “I’d rather have a tie than win on an unfair call,” said John Mitchell, the student who took the shot.
6. Drew Cvancara disqualified himself from his North Dakota high school’s regional golf tournament by reporting that his recorded score of six on one hole should have been a seven because he hit out of bounds twice. If the senior had remained silent, he would have qualified for the state tournament by one stroke.
5. Teams of the Central Missouri Eagles Youth Hockey Association - I serve as their coaching director - collected hundreds of stuffed animals and delivered them, one by one, to hospitalized, abused and neglected children. The Eagles “play to win,” said 12-year-old Haley Bartow, “but we also play to help other kids out.”
The Jefferson City-based Eagles received an “Honor the Game” award from the national Positive Coaching Alliance at Stanford University and a special proclamation from the Missouri Legislature on the floor of the state House of Representatives.
4. Senior Kevin Pawlos, an honors student and hockey all-star at Bishop Canevin High School near Pittsburgh, won a $500 scholarship for his athletic accomplishments. He donated the money to his coach, whose wife had just given birth to a disabled child.
3. Adam Callahan, a varsity wrestler at Carlisle High School in Ohio, also plays soccer and tennis. Born with dwarfism, he stands 4 feet, 8 inches tall. When he was 12, he declined surgery to make him taller because “this is the way God made me.”
2. After winning a tournament, the Whitestown (N.Y.) Wolfpack pee wee hockey team voted unanimously to send its trophy and a sympathy card signed by the 11- to 12-year-olds to a team that had withdrawn from the tournament a week earlier after one of its players died.
1. Eleven Centralia High School (Ill.) varsity football players were working on a community recyling project when a pickup truck slid off a hydraulic lift at the store where they were collecting used tires. A mechanic was trapped underneath. The players lifted the multi-ton vehicle off the man, saving his life. Player Travis Patten dismissed suggestions that they were heroes. “If I was in that spot,” he said, “someone would have done it for me.”
* * *Sarah Lopez’s coach is right about kids making honorable choices, but those choices are result of values instilled in them by millions of parents and coaches. Those adults join the children as quiet heroes of youth sports for 2006.
