Douglas E. Abrams, J.D.

In this month's Heroes column, MomsTeam contributor Doug Abrams explains how a title-winning youth baseball team valued giving to a cause above personal recognition.

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.

It was only the second inning, but the Allegany-Limestone High School Gators varsity baseball team was already losing big. Apparently angered that the Wellsville High School Lions had bunted with a 6-0 lead, the Gators' coach went to the mound and instructed his pitcher, James Whitney, to hit the next batter, Sawyer Korb. Worse yet, the coach reportedly told Whitney to throw at Korb's head.
Whitney refused, dropped the ball on the mound, and sprinted to the dugout. Gators relief pitcher Kyle Christopher also refused the coach's command to bean Korb, who struck out on the next pitch.  For demonstrating the courage of their values in the face of their coach's command, James Whitney and Kyle Christopher are Doug Abrams's youth sports heroes for the month of May.

In sports, as in other areas of American life, the path to equality often awaits someone with courage to stand alone, supported perhaps only by family and friends, when acceptance of the status quo might seem easier. Maria Pepe's entire Little League baseball career lasted only three games, but her courage remade American youth sports. 

 

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On March 1, 2011, the 20th annual National Sportsmanship Day again urges Americans of all ages to embrace wholesome values that professional and amateur sports too often lack these days -- values such as competing with grace and respecting your opponent, as this month's Youth Sports Heroes, Kele Steffler and Connor Sherwood, each did.

In 1989, Spike Lee earned an Academy Award nomination for his drama, "Do the Right Thing."  As Douglas E. Abrams writes in this month's installment of his series, Youth Sports Heroes, more than 20 years later, the command perfectly describes the noble split-second decisions made by three pairs of high school athletes and their coaches who set a standard of sportsmanship in following their best instincts to do what was right. 

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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.

On March 3, 2010, senior Rebecca Wong finished tenth in the Massachusetts state high school alpine skiing championships, the final medal position. Or so she and everyone else on the slopes thought. When Wong watched a film of her slalom run afterwards, she realized that she had missed a gate near the bottom of the course and should have been disqualified. Race officials had not seen the miss, and neither had any spectator. What happened next made Rebecca January's youth sports hero.

Varsity wrestler Reid Paswall had an idea. In November 2009, with the team's opening match only days away, he approached the Somers (NY) High School athletic director to suggest that the captains for the opener be two classmates who were not even team members. The two -- Adam Stein and Matthew Moriarty -- were special-needs students with Down syndrome. "I thought," Paswall  (in red singlet in photo) told the athletic director, "that we can have our special-needs kids go out and shake the other team's captain's hands, and . . . represent Somers."