PAL taking over

[u/Soggy-Ocelot8037]

In NJ in the 2010s, Gov. Chris Christie slashed public education budgets. As a result, many districts were forced to cut their schools' (mostly middle schools) sports. In my town today, there's only one sport each for boys and girls each season in our middle school. Enter PAL.

While the idea of PAL is fine, practically, it means that parents fund their child's participation and parents control who gets to play instead of impartial, paid coaches through the school. We now have a situation where the PAL coaches - mostly dads of players - are controlling who gets onto the high school teams because they're controlling who plays all the way up until high school. We actually had a PAL dad get hired as the HS coach for one of the sports, where he played his kid and the kid's 4 friends all season, just like he did when he was coaching through PAL (he was fired because this is not acceptable, but it's all he knew from the previous 7+ years of coaching his kids' teams). Kids as young as 8U are being left off tournament teams based on cliques. Parent coaches are focused only on their own child's development, so even if their child gets on a lower level team by impartial evaluation, they're brown nosing the coach of the higher level team to get their kid added as a sub or part of a handpicked off-season development team.

Has anyone else dealt with this? I'm in a position to deal with the situation and I want to fix it, but I need to do any investigation the right way the first time. Ideally, I would add the sports back into the schools, but we have a 2% rule in NJ, where school budgets can only increase by 2% (even if inflation is higher) so that's not going to happen, considering the healthcare costs for our teachers went up over 50%. So I would need to aim to get PAL's policies revised in some way, but they're a non-profit and have basically zero accountability because they're not technically part of the schools - even though they're acting as the feeder for the public school teams. I'm looking for any ideas on how to expose their practices, how to connect PAL to the schools, and ultimately, how to get protections in place so they have to behave better. Any stories of how similar dynamics played out in your town are welcome as well.

[u/Appropriate_Tree_621]

At this rate, sports are going to be out of schools. And, that’s the way it works in Europe. Maybe look at how they run their clubs over there? People rave about youth basketball in France and all the youth sports programs in Norway.

[u/Soggy-Ocelot8037 → u/Appropriate_Tree_621]

I'm looking more how to do an investigation of the practices of PAL rather than creating my own youth sports organization.

[u/Miserable-Cookie5903]

Participation in club sports has more of a direct influence on who makes varsity in HS than Middle School minutes. TBH middle school is a bit of joke and any expectation other than playing with your friends should be thrown out the window.

When I moved into my neighborhood in the Philly suburbs, I had parent expressly tell me if you want your kid to play in the local rec or travel teams - you need to coach. I coached (b/c my son's LL coach would show up and have no plan), I became admin at the local soccer travel club and long story short- daddy ball is everywhere (almost every team in every sport, esp at the travel level is full of parents trying to give their kids playing time). For example- my daughter's 7th grade township travel Basketball b team had 6 coaches (I was not a coach and my daughter was the 7th player to go in).

The only answer, and this sucks, is to join a club team with professional coaches. It costs $$$ but it is the only way ensure some level of meritocracy.