Texas City Little League suffers epidemic of unhinged coaches

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In the northern climes in which I live, youth baseball games have not yet started. Meanwhile, in warmer climes, adults are already infecting their local fields with craziness, and none more than in Texas City, Texas.

The Little League in Texas City has suspended two coaches in three weeks, and might suspend a third as early as tonight. All three of them have been arrested, as well, for losing their shit in the presence of the way-before-preteen set.

The latest incident was April 8, and involved one Jeremy Brian Delgado, whom the Galveston Daily News identified with three names as if he was the guy who shot John Lennon. Instead, Delgado shot, as the newspaper said, “F-bombs,” being arrested on a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge for getting a little too passionate in his defense of a player. From the Galveston County Daily News:

A parent who said he was upset about how a coach handled his son made the allegation, [Texas City police Capt.] Brian Goetschius said.

The father of the child who was yelled at asked The Daily News not to reveal his name for fear of reprisal against his son. The game involved 9- and 10-year-old boys.

The father said his son was on the field but not doing anything out of the ordinary during a bases-loaded ground out to shortstop that ended an inning.

He said he approached Delgado, asking why another coach yelled at his son.

Delgado, one of two assistants, then had words with the head coach on his team, in support of the boy who was yelled at, Goetschius said.

Delgado is accused of yelling bad language at the coach and assistant coach as the argument escalated, Goetschius said. He also is accused of using the same sort of language toward an umpire when he was ejected.

A Texas City police officer saw the commotion and heard some language before arresting Delgado, Goetschius said.

Actually, if police arrested every parent who went on a swearing binge at a youth baseball game, there would be 25 adults to a lockup cell every game night. I’m not defending Delgado’s choice of “some language,” but I’ll say that parents should consider themselves lucky they don’t have the Texas City police monitoring their public profanity. Then again, as the Houston Press points out, cops in Galveston County are fairly quick to arrest and prosecute the foul-mouthed.

If the Texas City Little League decides to bounce Delgado [APRIL 16 UPDATE: the league suspended Delgado for the remainder of the season], he’ll have company in its virtual penalty box. Coaches Jose Luis Duran and Johnathan T. Kimsey got sent there after a March 27 brawl that started after one coach got upset by a trick play used in a game involving 7- and 8-year-olds. Wait, a trick play in a 7- and 8-year-old game? I hope the coach who pulled that one is proud that he could outsmart a first-grader.

The Galveston County Daily News didn’t identify who called the trick play, but it did note the argument ended with a brawl, and disorderly conduct charges for Duran and Kimsey. A third coach in the brawl got his suspension lifted when he successfully argued his role was limited to being choked into unconsciousness.

The first game of the 6- and 7-year-old baseball team I’m managing doesn’t have its first game until April 27. Certainly, I have my work cut out to catch up to the pace set by the coaches in Texas City.

You can use social media to get somebody else's kid kicked off the team!

After a federal judge refused to overturn the school’s honor code, a 16-year-old Yarmouth (Maine) High lacrosse player decided not to fight her three-week suspension, and her school-mandated alcohol counseling, after the administration got its hands on Facebook pictures of her holding a can of Coors Light. (If you’re a beer snob like me, you might argue that Coors Light doesn’t count as beer, but for the sake of argument we’ll assume it does.)

You should be able to hold this whole truck’s contents in your hands and not violate an athletic honor code, because this truck contains no alcohol.

The question I haven’t seen answered is, how did the school get those pictures? Is the administration spending late nights, like creeps, searching its students’ Facebook profiles? Or, perhaps, would a campaign to besmirch the previously unsmirched be a little more orchestrated?

I’m not saying it happened in this case. But I am saying that in a social media age, if you’re a parent, or a player, wanting to attack some rival for getting more playing time/recognition/tail, what better way to eliminate your rival without the use of a hitman than to forward, surreptitiously, a Facebook photo of that rival doing something that violates the school’s athletic honor code, a document more sacrosanct than the U.S. Constitution?

This is not meant to cast aspersions on anyone involved in the Yarmouth case. After all, the 16-year-old had a beer, or something that had legal standing as beer, in her hand during the course of the lacrosse season in a clear violation of the school’s honor code, the law, and good taste. But if you want to fight evil with evil, it would be very, very easy to do.

In just about every high school since about forever ago, athletes and their parents have been required to sign honor codes that require action (suspension from the team, public apology, death by firing squad in the dean’s office) for various acts of moral turpitude and/or substance abuse (no tobacco, drinking, drugs, public sex with a farm animal) while the sports was in season. In my faint recollections of high school in the pre-Internet era, athletes (except for me, because I was a dork) engaged in all sorts of acts of dishonor, but the school never acted on anything unless something very public happened, like an arrest or sex with a farm animal in the parking lot of a Village Pantry.

The beauty of social media is the definition of “very public” has grown very much. Given the undiscriminating nature of teens’ party picture-taking, it would be fairly easy to pass around an incriminating photo of an athlete. For example, the two female athletes in Churubusco, Ind., who got put through the wringer, including having to explain themselves to an all-male panel, when someone got MySpace photos, off a private setting, of them licking phallus-shaped lollipops.

The ACLU took that case on, citing privacy issues, particularly the privacy in have private settings on stupid photos. So why didn’t it get involved in the Yarmouth case? I’ll surmise that the Indiana case was handled in a much more ham-handed way — the behavior happened over the summer, not during the season, and it didn’t necessarily appear to violate the school’s honor code. (Churubusco High cited a state athletic association rule as its reason for suspending the girls for a year for their Popsicle Twins imitation.) It’s harder to fight a case where the young athlete was caught doing something illegal during the course of the season.

In the Churubusco case, it was never established how the administration there got pictures that were supposed to be on a private MySpace site, for whatever that is worth. In this case and in the Yarmouth case, maybe there were concerned citizens fighting for the honor of the honor code who thought it was important their schools see what was happening.

But that seems a little weird to me. Not to defend any teenager doing something illegal or dangerous captured for posterity, but I have a hard time imagining somehow forwarding social media photos just because someone takes the honor code so seriously.

So if you’re a young athlete, I would recommend, for many reasons, you stay on the straight and narrow. And that if you don’t, make sure no one takes a picture of you. Because you don’t know whether your beer on Saturday ends up as an attachment in the principal’s email on Monday — especially if there’s someone out there who has a problem with you.

School sports recession: Not in Texas!

Most of the nation’s school districts are slashing away at their sports budgets (Just do a Google News search for “school sports budget cuts,” and wait for your community to appear).

Allen, Texas, is not most of the nation. Instead of chopping middle school sports or instituting pay-to-pay, the Dallas suburb, thanks to the largesse of the one place in the nation that passes bonds no matter what, is building a $60 million, 18,000-seat football stadium that looks a little something like this:

I’d love to opine that Allen, Texas, is a prime example of a community whose priorities are seriously out of whack, especially because the local high school already has an air-conditioned indoor football practice facility, something a lot of colleges don’t have.

Except that Allen, Texas, is a prime example of a community that seems immune from the Near-Great Near-Depression. Allen, Texas, voters passed a $119 million bond issue in May 2009, when it still looked like we might all survive on the meat of our grandparents, cooked up in squatted McMansions. Allen is a fast-growing community of 77,000 in a fast-growing portion of the Dallas metro area, and it’s a haven for Texans who actually feel like investing in education is a valuable thing, beyond buying new textbooks dedicated to the history of Phyllis Schafly. Allen has, in the past, also passed bond issues to build facilities related to actual academic education.

Plus, I come from a state (Indiana) that has something like 19 of the 20 largest high school basketball gyms, places where the arenas sit more people than live in town. So I can’t really argue too much — except to say if the economy ever goes south in Allen, Texas, that football stadium is eventually going to be a white elephant. But that day, in Allen, is a long way away.