[DJ's left nut]

I've spoken w/ a coach once.

My 8 yr old plays on a girls basketball team. These girls are mostly in their 2nd year (3rd session) and are still struggling to dribble in traffic, find an open teammate and/or get a shot off without having to slow down so much they get stuffed.

So what's he spend 45 minutes doing? Teaching them to embellish a charge. Mind you, he doesn't teach them how to TAKE a charge (my daughter thought mere contact got the charging foul). He doesn't teach them what a charge is. He just has them get in a line and then come out to 'play defense' and when he'd bump them with a forearm they'd throw themselves to the ground.

I left the stands when my daughter was on the baseline and said "we'll talk about this at home, I'll teach you what a charge is and how to earn one, but if I see you flopping when someone brushes you out there, I'll come on the court and take you off it..."

So her coach comes over to me to discuss interrupting practice or whatever - pft. I didn't walk in the middle of the huddle and I didn't shout so the other girls could hear. I wasn't even on the court; she was at the baseline. I repeated exactly what I told her and said that he's here to teach these girls the fundamentals of the game at this age. He's here to teach them how to play the game the right way. He's NOT here to teach a bunch of girls who can't dribble with their off-hand how to work the refs.

Had he not come up to me, I wouldn't have said anything to him about it. But that's piss-poor coaching, IMO. I've coached youth baseball/t-ball and soccer and I'm pretty much impossible to rattle so it's not like I haven't spoken w/ parents in the past. I get that nobody wants to be undermined. But I wasn't going to have my daughter walking out of there thinking that being a european soccer pussy was the way to play a game that she certainly won't be playing past 12 yrs old.