A Youth Hockey Team In New Jersey Suspended A Bunch of 10-Year-Olds And Their Parents After A Group Of Moms Egregiously Made Custom Jackets To Wear To Games
Well if you've ever wanted the perfect story to show everything that is wrong with youth sports today, this right here is the one for you.
The main focus of youth sports should always be the kids. I don't feel like that's all too crazy to say. Now I get that in order for youth sports to work, there is absolutely a business that needs to be run. There is ice time and travel cost and insurance and coaches to pay and equipment and so many other things that go into running a youth sports team that most people wouldn't realize. The rising costs of youth sports isn't as much of a blatant "cash grab" as much as it is a necessity to keep the team afloat.
But then you get to a situation like this. A situation where a few moms on a U10 team decide to make matching customized jackets with the team name on it. It seems wildly innocuous. Maybe a little bizarre because this is the type of thing you'd expect to see out of a group of WAGs for their professional athlete husbands. But innocuous enough that nobody would ever expect there to be even the slightest issue to arise from this.
Instead, the owner of the Jersey Hitmen decides to suspend the kids until a "15% royalty restitution" is paid. A group of moms decided to make some custom jackets, and the owner of the club is going to suspend a bunch of 10-year-old kids because he wasn't able to make a cut from it. Instead, he is going to force everybody to only be allowed to buy apparel from their team store. So that, once again, all the money ends up in his pockets.
Suspending kids from playing hockey because their moms made jackets with the team name on it. The main focus of youth sports should always be the kids. I don't feel like that's all too crazy to say. But if you ask Jersey Hitmen owner, Bobby Reiss, clearly those kids can go eat shit unless he makes a couple hundred extra bucks off of these jackets. That is insanity in its purest form.
What's crazy is that he knows he's a piece of shit for doing it. He says in the email "I don't relish taking it out on the players". But he does it any way because he clearly cares more about the dollars than the kids. His brain was trying so hard to tell him that he's being the biggest prick on the planet over this, but he still went through with it anyway. And at a certain point, that just starts to be a terrible way of doing business. Because why on Earth would any parent want to play for that club now if that's the way your kid is going to get treated?
And lastly, let's just allow this to be a quick cautionary tale for parents out there. Don't let your kid's youth sports teams become your entire personality. It just starts to blur this really weird line where it's hard to tell if everything is more for the kids or for the parents to post about on social media.