Character Development

12-year-old Canadian Pee Wee hockey player Mark Mannarn "Feel Like a Pro Day" raises money for cancer research and teaches that life lessons about how to respond to adversity can be taught by players too.

This month's column tells of two high school athletes who, after suffering catastrophic injuries, quickly forgave the opponents who meant no harm, but who will bear deep emotional scars for the rest of their lives. and how forgiveness in the face of adversity may require the greatest courage of all.

What a star point guard on a high school basketball team did after won $40,000 in college scholarship money in a free-throwing contest was a testimony to his generosity and to the power of team sports to teach a critical life lesson.

Four blind youth athletes who refused to let their disability stand in the way of playing sports are this month's youth sports heroes.

Coaching today may create pressures and occasional frustrations, but earning the players' lasting respect pays a coach dividends for a job well done long after their memories of other heroes grow dim.

This month's Youth Sports Heroes are the organizers of the annual Sticks for Soldiers Lacrosse Classic in Fairfield, Connecticut and the Patriots Challenge Cup Hockey Tournament in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which exemplify the best of civic responsibility in sports.

Generosity is learned behavior, and teaching the importance of giving is a lesson that can begun to be taught at a young age. By supporting worthy causes, youth leaguers, guided by their parents, can have a positive impact that contributes to meaningful change, as this month's Heroes column illustrates.

On a late-April Saturday morning in 2006, eleven members of the Centralia High School varsity football team were working on a community service project when they were asked to use their brawn to help safe a man's life.

At Detroit's Comerica Park on the night of June 2, 2010, the nationally televised Detroit Tigers-Cleveland Indians game offered children - indeed, Americans of all ages - enduring lessons in compassion and personal responsibility. The teachers were a pitcher, Armando Galarraga, and an umpire, Jim Joyce, improbably thrust into the limelight after years in relative obscurity, and their dignity and grace created a "teaching opportunity" for parents, teachers and coaches who seek to shape children's values through sports.

A 2010 Reuters News/Ipsos poll caused a stir by concluding that parents in the United States are the world's worst behaved parents at children's sports contests. Sixty percent of adults who attend kids' games have seen parents verbally or physically abuse coaches or officials, a higher percentage than in any of the 21 other nations polled.  Nationally-recognized youth sports expert and longtime coach, Douglas E. Abrams, believes the poll seriously distorts the state of youth sports in America.