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May 7, 2021
10:11:29am
thecave Contributor
I suspect another coach in my little league had his players throw the tryout
Should I do anything about it (such as talk to the league or to the other coach)?

Background-I coach my son's little league baseball team. It's a pretty typical rec city league, not super-competitive. Middle School age. There's a pretty big skill level range. Some kids have never played before, while a few will make high school teams. We did a typical tryout before the season starts where each kid takes a couple of swings and throws the ball from 2nd to 1st, etc. Each team gets the head and assistant coaches' sons, but the coaches pick everyone else. Kids that don't come to the tryout get randomly assigned to a team to try to make that fair as well.

We're a couple weeks into the season, and 1 team is obviously WAY better than the rest in the league. We still haven't played this team, but I'd heard from the other coaches how good they were and I finally got to watch them some this week. They have 5 or 6 kids that would be close to the top player on any of the other teams in the league.

After watching them, I decided to look back at my draft notes, and 3 of their good players that they drafted I had rated as very low, nearly the bottom of my list. I even noted that one of their kids batted with his hands reversed (thinking he had never played before). Now that kid is hitting home runs over the fence. It looks to me like either I am a terrible judge of talent or these kids did it on purpose to be on the same team. I'm not certain that their coach knew them before the season, but that's my guess. I didn't know any of those 3 kids before the draft (or the coaches and their sons that are also very good).

I certainly don't have any proof that they did anything wrong. I don't know how anyone would have proof. But should I do anything about it? I understand that those kids wanted to be on the same team (if that is the case). But I feel like it really spoiled the league for the other 80 kids on the other teams. If those kids all wanted to be on the same team, there are other leagues that they could've signed up together as a team. This league is not on the same level as those.

Maybe this is just sour grapes because my team is likely the 2nd best team in the league after them. Thoughts?
thecave
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BYU-man
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thecave
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Oct 5, 2006
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Apr 24, 2024
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