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While much of the nation has been focused on the economic stimulus plan, health experts believe now more than ever America’s youth needs a physical and mental stimulus plan. Orlando based company GeoFitness has taken steps to improve overall youth health. GeoFitness’s “Get Moving America” Campaign was launched on March 31st at an American Alliance for Health convention in Tampa Bay. The campaign promotes the basic but effective exercise of dancing. “Get Moving America” has teamed up with rapper Rikshaw to engage youth with a prominent musician many of them would enjoy. According to an Arizona State University professor, the campaign gets his “best in class” award for creating a new and innovative physical education program to stimulate children’s interest in exercise.
SCITUATE — A girls soccer coach who told parents of his 6- and 7-year-old charges that he expected his players to “kick ass” has resigned.
Michael Kinahan says he “meant to give parents a chuckle” but that people took his message on a the team he dubbed “Green Death” the wrong way.
In an e-mail message to parents last week, Kinahan wrote that the girls on his team would “fall, get bumps, bruises and even bleed a little. Big deal, it’s good for them (but I do hope the other team is the one bleeding).
“The political correctness police are not welcome on my sidelines,” he added.
Kinahan resigned after parents protested to league officials. Other parents have said they support his approach, said Chris Park, the registrar for the Scituate Youth Soccer League.
“He’s got a wry, sarcastic sense of humor. I think this whole thing just blew up on him,” Park said.
Kinahan also wrote that he expected “that the ladies be put on a diet of fish, undercooked red meat and lots of veggies ... Protein shakes are encouraged, and while blood doping and HGH use is frowned upon, there is no testing policy.”
Park said a major concern for league officials was Kinahan’s comments about referees.
“My heckling of the refs is actually helping them develop as people,” he wrote.
Park said a 12-year-old referee refused to return this year because of the way Kinahan treated her last year.
“That did lend some truth to what he said in the e-mail,” said Park.
Kinahan said his message was “largely (albeit not completely) meant in jest.”
“It was also meant as a satire of those who take youth sports too seriously for the wrong reasons,” he said.
Mar 31, 2009
The Patriot Ledger
Little League baseball season is here again. But not for everyone. This week, an anguished mother in my neighborhood told me that her daughter, who loves baseball, was "treated differently" from the boys. The coach's unwillingness to recognize the girl's skills and to include her fully eventually discouraged the child. "I will never play baseball again," she told her mom.
This mother's story brought up for me the words of the Sage of Baseball, Yogi Berra: It's d j vu all over again. When girls succeeded in the early 1970s in taking their plea to play Little League baseball all the way to the Supreme Court, Little League shifted from opposition to containment by creating a separate and unequal league for girls. Girls still have the legal right to play baseball, but most don't know that and are channeled into softball.
Why have we created this sports ghetto for girls, and how do we explain the continued commitment many adults have to enforcement of this gendered boundary? Counterintuitively, while overt discrimination against girls still exists, the problem may have far more to do with our prehistoric views of boys.
Specifically, many coaches and parents seem to believe that girls need to be protected from a harsh process of hardening that is considered a normal part of a boy's experience in youth sports - but that reduces masculinity to a narrow caricature.
03/28/2009
©2008 Los Angeles Newspaper group
At one time, the most promising swimmer in the Phelps family was not Michael. His older sister, Whitney, was a national champion at age 14. But by 16 her best days were behind her. When Michael was winning his eight gold medals in Beijing last year, Whitney was a spectator in the stands.
Whitney faded from glory because of a chronic back injury, the result of too much swimming practice in her early teenage years -- so Mark Hyman reports in "Until It Hurts," an indictment of America's over-intense and even abusive youth sports culture. Mr. Hyman is especially hard on the coaches and parents who have engaged in what he calls a "hostile takeover" of child's play. Athletics for the young today, he believes, is often joyless, hyper-competitive and nerve-racking, and it results in a rash of injuries, not least in "overuse" injuries, like Whitney's, that are entirely avoidable.
To make his point, Mr. Hyman offers examples of the harm that sports have done to young bodies and psyches. We learn, for instance, about a 10-year-old girl in Atlanta who is rising in the Georgia state junior tennis rankings but who also has an aching shoulder. An orthopedic surgeon detects a stress fracture and recommends a six-month break from tennis. His recommendation sends her mother into a screaming rage -- the family's goal is for the girl to reach a number-five ranking within two weeks -- and the woman insists that physical therapy is all that's needed.
DAN ACKMAN
Wall Street Journal
Alexia Mickles lunged the wrong way, heard a loud crack and her softball season was over. Mickles, a soccer and softball student-athlete at Penfield High School near Rochester, New York, went to the ground holding her knee.
She had torn her anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL.
Although the research varies, female athletes are two and a half to four times more likely to tear their ACLs than men, depending on the sport. Understanding the reasons behind these disproportionate numbers is “the million dollar question,” says Dr. Michael Maloney, director of the sports medicine division at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
Through a local grant, Maloney is leading an effort to train area female high school athletes, including Mickles, about how to protect their knees from injury.
By Marta Lawrence
The NCAA News
Once a rite of passage, playing school sports is becoming a thing of the past for many Minnesota kids. Today's athletics eat up too much time and money and, for many youths, they aren't even much fun anymore.
Like a marathon runner with a leg cramp, school athletics are hitting a wall.
A study by the Pioneer Press shows that the percentage of Minnesota boys and girls who participate in school-sponsored sports has dropped more than half in one generation.
For many youths, said dozens of parents, children, coaches and experts interviewed by the Pioneer Press, sports have become work — not fun.
They say participation is dropping because:
Sports are hyper-competitive. Today, children who don't correctly pick their high school sport at an early age can't catch up, and they quit. Intense pressure comes from parents, eager for their children to get college scholarships.
Sports consume soaring amounts of time. Some parents spend 40 hours a week — literally a full-time job — coaching, watching and driving their young athletes.
Sports are expensive — in a time of recession. Parents supporting a young hockey player can easily spend more than $4,000 a year. Sports are costly for schools, too, which are cutting sports programs as they struggle with budget deficits.
Sports are suffering from competition. Increasingly, kids are choosing to work, play video games or watch cable TV instead.
Bob Shaw
03/23/2009
Pioneer Press
What kindergartner would want to wrestle Joey Flores?
With a Mohawk buzz cut and a flare for takedowns, the 6-year-old exudes the cockiness that comes from three years of competitive wrestling.
"I feel good at wrestling," puffed Joey during a break in a recent tournament in Inver Grove Heights.
For a 45-pounder, he is intimidating. Few kids would want to tangle with him.
And therein lies a problem for wrestling — and every other sport Minnesota youth can play in middle and high school.
When parents and children see elite athletes like Joey, they think they can't compete.
They are daunted by a standard of competition that includes traveling teams, summer camps, specialty training centers and programs that start before kindergarten.
Even elementary-age latecomers find they can't catch up with the Joeys of their sport. So they quit — by the thousands.
Bob Shaw
03/23/2009
Pioneer Press
Ashley Ehlers didn't seem bothered by the tiny cheering section of 14 people.
She didn't seem to mind that the opposing team had three times as many players.
She didn't care that four of her six teammates had never played team basketball until this season.
She didn't notice the footwear. Her inner-city Arlington High School in St. Paul couldn't afford shoes, so each girl bought her own — one girl playing in ballerina flats.
"We are having fun," panted Ehlers during a timeout in the March 4 game against Hill-Murray. "That is what matters."
What she didn't see — but what permeates high school sports — is money.
Bob Shaw
03/24/2009
Pioneer Press
At 6 feet 4 inches tall and 330 pounds, Steve Hodges is a pretty intimidating figure. But in 40 years of officiating, he has taken his share of abuse from fans.
"One time I had a mother of a player on a varsity girls basketball team follow me almost all the way into the dressing room, cursing me and telling me I was the worst she'd ever seen," he said. "I told her 'I'm getting ready to shower, so unless you want to scrub my back, you're going to have to leave.' "
Hodges laughed when he told that story, but he and other officials are concerned about an upswing in bad behavior. Hodges, a Democratic state representative from southeastern Missouri, is co-sponsor of a bill with Rep. Jason Grill, D-Kansas City, that would stiffen penalties on anyone who attacks a sports official.
Whereas most of these incidents are minor, the National Association of Sports Officials gets more than 100 reports every year about physical contact between coaches, players, fans and officials. In Missouri, the confrontations are classified as third-degree assaults and are punishable by up to a $300 fine. But Grill and Hodges want the penalty for an official's attacker to be up to $1,000 or one year in jail. Illinois already has a similar law.
Anyone whose been around youth sports has seen the ugly side of these athletic contests. There's the parent who taunts the referee the entire game or the one who screams at the coach about playing time.
Hodges said he hoped this legislation was just the beginning of a discussion we should be having about youth sports in Missouri, and I couldn't agree more.
03/17/2009
Susan Weich
Copyright 2008 St. Louis Post-Dispatch
They’re full of caffeine and can pack a punch. Last week, energy drinks were the topic of a public standing committee hearing.And what’s being said about the high-caffeine drinks should serve as a wake-up call to parents who allow their children to consume these beverages.
According to the president of the P.E.I. Medical Society, the drinks could potentially cause death and should be banned.
“In some energy drinks there’s more caffeine in a single can than the daily recommended amount for even an adult, never mind a 12-year-old child,” Dr. Bill Scantlebury told the Standing Committee on Social Development.
The Journal Pioneer
03/09/09
While parent-coach conflicts are a national problem,
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