Published: Sept. 28, 2012 Updated: 3:53 p.m.
Mickadeit: Football for 35 pounders?
By FRANK MICKADEITCOLUMNIST / THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Film Night. That's when this lunacy really hit home to me. I had asked an
11-year-old member of last year's Tustin Red Cobras Pop Warner team when he
first heard a coach talk about cash-for-injuries. "At Film Night," he'd said. He
became the third player to tell Keith Sharon and me about the bounty
program.
Film Night? Film Night for 10- and 11-year-old boys should be "Old Yeller" or "Toy Story." The notion that kids' football has evolved – devolved – to the point they are dissecting game films (on a school night, no less) tells you how far off track Pop Warner has gotten. And film nights are apparently within the Pop Warner rules. Other tactics employed by last year's Tustin team were not.
The import of Keith's report today is it shows that a Tustin Pop Warner bounty program that has caused a national ruckus and the suspensions of two local coaches is just the culmination of – the tragically logical progression of – a well-intentioned youth program gone haywire.
It's important to note that the New Orleans Saints bounty scandal wasn't made public until well after the Tustin coaches had already instituted their program. The Tustin coaches weren't copying the Saints; whatever they did arose organically out of their own twisted sense of values.
To start, the Red Cobras capped their roster and cherry picked the best players from Tustin, which deprived the other Tustin teams in their division from starting the season on the same footing. How would you like to be a player on one of the other Tustin teams, knowing that the league all-star team essentially had been decided before the season started and that your team had virtually no hope of being competitive?
As if Tustin's preordained super team wasn't loaded enough, the coaches went outside the league boundaries and recruited a top player from Anaheim.
Then, in the most egregious act outside the bounty program itself, the coaches allegedly fudged a player's weight. This 11-year-old "Player X" had dieted, worked out in a plastic suit and spat Skittle juice in a desperate attempt to defy the normal march of prepubescent growth that tens of thousands of years of human evolution has wrought. He actually went to the hospital at one point for chest pains.
Bad enough. But when they finally realized Player X didn't have one more gram of body mass to give to the cause, they allowed him to be weighed in pads that had been shaved and bored out. In some cases, the player had to play in these altered pads, which might put his own safety at risk, and in at least one other case he was able to change into the correct pads, which put opponents at risk because they were facing a player who was over the weight limit.
In the playoffs, Player X's teammates were told to stand around him while he changed pads so league officials or opponents wouldn't catch on to the scheme. Thus, by the end of the Tustin's 2011 season, the coaches had completely co-opted their players with this win-at-all-costs ethos.
The whole weight issue in Pop Warner also deserves some abstract analysis.
Pop Warner knows that regulating player weight is one of the most important ways to ensure safety and competitiveness. Leagues have a "weight master" to ensure players meet the prescribed weight for their age and division. (One of the great ironies of this whole debacle is that Darren Crawford, the Tustin Red Cobras head coach who was suspended on Thursday, is also the Tustin league's weight master.)
Anyway, there is an elaborate set of rules about how much a player can weigh, and it even varies week-to-week during the season. This has been reduced to a series of matrixes that look something like the periodic table of elements – but more complicated. The rules also get very specific about what types of equipment can be included in a weigh-in, when players can be weighed and when they can't, etc.
The Tustin Red Cobras violated those rules, no question, but the very existence of such an elaborate set of rules gives pause. These weight rules are in the 37-page "Weight-Master, Player Administrator & Spotter Handbook." Lets' add to the Pop Warner statutory scheme: an 18-page set of By-laws," a 65-page "Administrative Regulations" manual, a 27-page "Coaches Risk Management Handbook," and what appears to be the Bible of it all, the 115-page national "Pop Warner Administrative Manual."
And still, even following the rules, you can have a 5-year-old kid weighing as little as 35 pounds playing tackle football in something called the Tiny Mite division against 75 pounders. Thirty-five pounds? We used to have a cat bigger than that. (Pop Warner has seven divisions of tackle football, Tiny Mite, Junior Mighty Might, Midget, etc. The 2011 Tustin Red Cobras played in the Junior Pee Wee Division.)
I posit this question: If you can't regulate a way to keep a kindergartner from being clotheslined by a second-grader roughly twice his size, what is the point of such ponderous rule-making?
Maybe what this is telling us is that youth tackle football has just become a game of rules and not a game. Thus, the global question: Has an organization that now requires (at least) 262 pages of rules to administer a kids' game – and still can't keep administrators from embezzling, coaches from cheating and 10-year-old from playing for bounties – has such an organization lost its value to society?
Pop Warner football has a wonderful heritage. It was founded in 1929 to take rowdy kids – young rock-throwing vandals – off the streets of Philadelphia. Those kids were teenagers. By contrast, the current fanaticism to introduce kids to tackle football at ever earlier ages seems to have no limit. Coming soon: the Junior In Utero Division (zygotes 12 cells or fewer).
The original Pop Warner idea was that by exposing kids to adults who could teach them about sportsmanship, it would keep them from becoming thugs.
Has Pop Warner become the very thing it sought to crush?
Contact Mickadeit at 714-796-4994 or fmickadeit@ocregister.com
Film Night? Film Night for 10- and 11-year-old boys should be "Old Yeller" or "Toy Story." The notion that kids' football has evolved – devolved – to the point they are dissecting game films (on a school night, no less) tells you how far off track Pop Warner has gotten. And film nights are apparently within the Pop Warner rules. Other tactics employed by last year's Tustin team were not.
The import of Keith's report today is it shows that a Tustin Pop Warner bounty program that has caused a national ruckus and the suspensions of two local coaches is just the culmination of – the tragically logical progression of – a well-intentioned youth program gone haywire.
It's important to note that the New Orleans Saints bounty scandal wasn't made public until well after the Tustin coaches had already instituted their program. The Tustin coaches weren't copying the Saints; whatever they did arose organically out of their own twisted sense of values.
To start, the Red Cobras capped their roster and cherry picked the best players from Tustin, which deprived the other Tustin teams in their division from starting the season on the same footing. How would you like to be a player on one of the other Tustin teams, knowing that the league all-star team essentially had been decided before the season started and that your team had virtually no hope of being competitive?
As if Tustin's preordained super team wasn't loaded enough, the coaches went outside the league boundaries and recruited a top player from Anaheim.
Then, in the most egregious act outside the bounty program itself, the coaches allegedly fudged a player's weight. This 11-year-old "Player X" had dieted, worked out in a plastic suit and spat Skittle juice in a desperate attempt to defy the normal march of prepubescent growth that tens of thousands of years of human evolution has wrought. He actually went to the hospital at one point for chest pains.
Bad enough. But when they finally realized Player X didn't have one more gram of body mass to give to the cause, they allowed him to be weighed in pads that had been shaved and bored out. In some cases, the player had to play in these altered pads, which might put his own safety at risk, and in at least one other case he was able to change into the correct pads, which put opponents at risk because they were facing a player who was over the weight limit.
In the playoffs, Player X's teammates were told to stand around him while he changed pads so league officials or opponents wouldn't catch on to the scheme. Thus, by the end of the Tustin's 2011 season, the coaches had completely co-opted their players with this win-at-all-costs ethos.
The whole weight issue in Pop Warner also deserves some abstract analysis.
Pop Warner knows that regulating player weight is one of the most important ways to ensure safety and competitiveness. Leagues have a "weight master" to ensure players meet the prescribed weight for their age and division. (One of the great ironies of this whole debacle is that Darren Crawford, the Tustin Red Cobras head coach who was suspended on Thursday, is also the Tustin league's weight master.)
Anyway, there is an elaborate set of rules about how much a player can weigh, and it even varies week-to-week during the season. This has been reduced to a series of matrixes that look something like the periodic table of elements – but more complicated. The rules also get very specific about what types of equipment can be included in a weigh-in, when players can be weighed and when they can't, etc.
The Tustin Red Cobras violated those rules, no question, but the very existence of such an elaborate set of rules gives pause. These weight rules are in the 37-page "Weight-Master, Player Administrator & Spotter Handbook." Lets' add to the Pop Warner statutory scheme: an 18-page set of By-laws," a 65-page "Administrative Regulations" manual, a 27-page "Coaches Risk Management Handbook," and what appears to be the Bible of it all, the 115-page national "Pop Warner Administrative Manual."
And still, even following the rules, you can have a 5-year-old kid weighing as little as 35 pounds playing tackle football in something called the Tiny Mite division against 75 pounders. Thirty-five pounds? We used to have a cat bigger than that. (Pop Warner has seven divisions of tackle football, Tiny Mite, Junior Mighty Might, Midget, etc. The 2011 Tustin Red Cobras played in the Junior Pee Wee Division.)
I posit this question: If you can't regulate a way to keep a kindergartner from being clotheslined by a second-grader roughly twice his size, what is the point of such ponderous rule-making?
Maybe what this is telling us is that youth tackle football has just become a game of rules and not a game. Thus, the global question: Has an organization that now requires (at least) 262 pages of rules to administer a kids' game – and still can't keep administrators from embezzling, coaches from cheating and 10-year-old from playing for bounties – has such an organization lost its value to society?
Pop Warner football has a wonderful heritage. It was founded in 1929 to take rowdy kids – young rock-throwing vandals – off the streets of Philadelphia. Those kids were teenagers. By contrast, the current fanaticism to introduce kids to tackle football at ever earlier ages seems to have no limit. Coming soon: the Junior In Utero Division (zygotes 12 cells or fewer).
The original Pop Warner idea was that by exposing kids to adults who could teach them about sportsmanship, it would keep them from becoming thugs.
Has Pop Warner become the very thing it sought to crush?
Contact Mickadeit at 714-796-4994 or fmickadeit@ocregister.com
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