Back Porch Youth Sports

KILLEEN, Tex. -- The scene here at Leo Buckley Stadium late Friday night was reminiscent of most high school football venues across the country, as the Shoemaker Grey Wolves dealt with the reality their season was over.

Tears were shed, hugs were exchanged between players, coaches and players, coaches and coaches. Then the coaches thanked the seniors for great effort.

But this was no ordinary season-finale ritual for the Grey Wolves. Just over 24 hours earlier, many of them weren't sure if their parents or loved ones were injured -- or worse, killed -- in the deadly shooting rampage at Fort Hood, the nation's largest military base.

Melanie Hain, a self-professed pistol-packing soccer mom who was praised by gun-rights activists for bringing a gun with her to her children's games, was found dead of a gunshot wound, along with her husband, in what police say was a murder-suicide.

Here's something you don't see everyday. Or at least I don't (primarily because, other than the occasions when it's on my television, I've lost the remote, and I'm too lazy to change the channel, I happily admit to not following softball.): a fight breaking out during a game after a player was hit by a pitch.

But that's what happened yesterday at a girls high school game in Colorado Springs.

Poor France. It's bad enough that they're still living down the 1940 German takeover, which turned out to be more of an understanding than an invasion. Now they have again suffered an international embarrassment, although that may be overselling it a tad.

Whatever, the French fell to the Americans in the inaugural Football Junior World Championship yesterday in Canton, Ohio. The final, 78-0, was slightly less surprising than getting run out of their own country by the Germans during World War II. Primarily because unlike the French army, considered the most powerful in Europe at the time, there wasn't much in the way of expectations for the French Junior National Team.

A 12-year-old Colorado boy died Sunday after he was thrown off the bull and trampled in a bull-riding competition hosted by the Little Britches Rodeo at the Boulder County Fairground.

As you can see, playing sports with kids on live television is a situation fraught with peril. You probably shouldn't trash talk, back them down, and then spin and slam home a dunk on a seven-foot goal. I'm no expert, but that might make a kid cry. Especially when you punctuate the dunk with a Scottie Pippen dunking on Patrick Ewing-esque arm ejaculation while screaming, "Don't bring any of that in my house!"

Somewhere along the way, basic humanity should have set in. The back down move? Questionable. The kid is four. At most. You can probably get away with one of those old-man wacky dribbling exhibitions where you push the ball around the kid and make him dizzy on live television. Maybe.

But when you dunk on him and the kid starts crying you can't laugh, absolutely, positively, can't laugh. Or say, "I think he's genuinely crying."

Kavya Shivashankar, an eighth grader from Olathe, Kansas, correctly spelled L-a-o-d-i-c-e-a-n to win the 2009 Scripps National Spelling Bee Thursday night. Kavya won at the end of a championship round in which runner-up Tim Ruiter was eliminated on "maecenas" and third-place finisher Aishwarya Pastapur was eliminated on "menhir."

Malcolm Gladwell's article in the current issue of The New Yorker focuses on Vivek Ranadivé, a man with limited basketball knowledge who took his 12-year-old daughter's basketball team to the national championships (yes, they have national champions for 12-year-old girls) by employing the full-court press.

As you'd expect from Gladwell, it's a sprawling narrative that covers everything from Lawrence of Arabia to the fascinating research of the Harvard political scientist Ivan Arreguin-Toft, and the bottom line, by Gladwell's way of thinking, is that in every walk of life, the little guy can beat the big guy, as long as the little guy tries harder. The full-court press in 12-year-old girls' basketball is just the way Gladwell gets that point across.

No-hitters are similar to holes-in-one: they don't come around very often. Unless you're Patrick Schuster of Mitchell High School in New Port Richey, Fla., that is. See, Schuster has four no-hitters. In a row.

David Girmscheid, a junior high basketball player in Pewaukee, Wisconsin, hit the greatest full-court buzzer-beater you'll ever see, even though it didn't count.