Lawsuit after kid gets cut

I don't understand why you'd set a team knowing you would replace 9 of them. 2 or 3 maybe, but the coach had to have known that some of those kids were not going to make it. Were they practicing through the fall?

We are not allowed to have "tryouts" until very specific dates around here...

The only way a football player would miss basketball tryouts is if the football team is in the 14th week of football (state championship) and I'm sure the bball coach would be okay with getting those athletes 1 week later for a "2nd tryout".

If Arkansas has bball and football overlapping then football kids can't play basketball and that is something the parents should be upset about. If I was the bball coach I'd go in screaming as well because I want those tall athletic WR's, QB's, and TE's playing basketball.

OK. In Virginia our first official practice date is the week of the last regular season playing date for football. If a team makes a deep playoff run they'll be missing some football players for basketball games. Our league allows teams that make the football playoffs to postpone basketball games until the playoffs end. That would lead us to where this Arkansas team was.

Of course the issue is that at a lot of schools basketball "tryouts" are a sham. They play and practice all year and the basketball coach knows his roster the day they have "tryouts".

Depends how you define "creep". Here in Virginia, as I said, basketball practice starts in early November. The playoffs start then and lasts until the second weekend of December. That's been true since I moved here in 1977, so that's nothing new. Since this is the playoffs every week half of the number of teams is affected.

I looked up Maumelle. They played a football playoff game on Nov. 11 and their first basketball game was Nov. 10. I don't see how situations like this can be avoided unless they drastically change either/or basketball and football seasons or vastly shorten or eliminate the playoffs.

In NY basketball should start after Thanksgiving. It starts 2 weeks earlier than that and is affected by playoffs. If it was after Thanksgiving , states would be over. But basketball dictates football.

So, everybody should get a part in the school play?

And I'm not really arguing with you.

There are classes that get to pick and choose who gets in. They may take everybody into the school band but not in the brass ensemble. I taught at a school that had an International Baccalaureate program. They don't take everybody. It's not only athletics that have tryouts.

Yeah...I guess that I would like the answer just for my own thoughts.

I think the Constitutional argument will be a real stretch...there have been previous lawsuits in which parents have claimed that cuts from athletic teams violate their child's rights to due process and none of those lawsuits have been successful.



Yes. I think that is the claim she is making. And what she is going to run into is the simple fact that there are many things that we pay for as citizens through our taxes that don't directly benefit us.

What bothers me is the fact that, for some reason, these boys thought they had "made" the team and then all lost their spots once the football season ended. Unless the boys who lost their spots knew that was a possibility from the beginning, I do think that it was pretty sneaky and underhanded to string these 9 boys along until "better" talent became available.

Once these 9 boys lost their spots, did they at least get assigned to lower-level teams? The boy whose mom filed the suit was a freshman, I believe. So, did he at least get assigned to the freshman squad? Did that bump someone else off the team?

Look...I understand that in a sport like basketball, cuts have to be made. I just think that the way this school went about was not handled very well.

Often, we automatically want to blame the parents for being unreasonable but sometimes, school officials make stupid decisions, too.

In a court of law, she probably doesn't have a leg to stand on. However, this has to be one of the stupidest coaching moves ever. This isn't a matter for the courts, it's a matter for the school system. You don't have kids practice for 3 months and then cut them. Dumb coaches. Dumb administration.

Why not? They had a bunch of guys finishing football. Somebody was going to have to go. The coaches should have warned the kids that this was coming (in fact, we don't know if they did or not) but obviously they couldn't keep nine extra players.

If you can't see the harm in having kids practice for 3 months and then cutting them, then I certainly can't explain it to you. Open gym would be one thing. Required practice is entirely different. I'll bet if they had you conduct offseason workouts for 3 months as a coach and then told you your services weren't needed come August, you'd think you were done wrong. This is another example of the ills of year-round sports emphasis.

The kids and parents knew that more cuts would take place in the middle of the season. They knew that they could still be cut but still made the choice to participate.

But, take a look at the flip side. Would it be fair to tell those football players that they can't play basketball because the schedule is idiotic?

CoachD pointed out that the August start date is only for schools that don't have football. As I said, unless they shorten one or both seasons drastically it's hard to see how they could avoid an overlap.

There is no need for a flip side. It shouldn't be an either-or situation. It's silly to require kids to practice for 3 months and then cut them and it would be silly not to let football players come out when their season is over. If you tell people in advance that you're going to do something that's wrong, it doesn't make it right just because you told them in advance. The lawsuit is frivolous, but the mom has a right to be upset. Our jobs as coaches and educators is to, as much as possible, do what is right for the young men we coach. There is no way you can defend this as being the right thing to do for these young people involved. Bottom line, these coaches screwed up. I don't think there's any recourse for this kid or this parent other than to make sure this doesn't happen again to other kids in that school.