Fairmont State Names Dan Mondragon as the New Head Men’s Basketball Coach fightingfalcons.com/news/202…

🚨 **NEW** NCAA Violation — Cal State Northridge Men's Basketball staff committed academic fraud and falsified monetary award documents for players. Penalties include: 5-years Probation, Vacation of Records, and Show-Cause orders of 1 to 5-years for several staffers.

The $25,000/yr youth sports machine is producing 14-year-olds who are injured, exhausted, and hate sports. Parents watch their kids limp into Monday's practice or fall asleep at dinner after a tournament weekend and quietly wonder if this is actually working. It isn't. And it isn't the parents' fault. They were sold the opposite of what works. Four findings the AAU industry hopes parents never read: - Loyola study of 1,200 youth athletes: highly specialized kids had an 81% higher rate of overuse injuries and 1.5x more serious overuse injuries than multi-sport peers. - AOSSM rule: kids who train more hours per week than their age in years are 70% more likely to suffer a serious overuse injury. Most 12-year-olds in club ball train 20 hours. - Stanford sleep study: extending basketball players to 9-10 hours of sleep raised 3-point shooting by 9.2%, free throws by 9%, and sprint times measurably. From sleep alone. - Aspen Institute: 70% of kids quit organized sports by 13. Top three reasons: not fun anymore, too much pressure, burnout. Talent isn't on the list. Instead kids should: - Master the sport. - Master the athleticism underneath the sport. - Master and develop the skills the sport actually rewards. - Get the rest and recovery to stay healthy and durable. - Keep the love of the game and have fun. This is exactly the philosophy at Texas Sports Academy. It's how a kid is actually positioned to compete for a Division 1 scholarship, or take a real shot at the pros, without losing the love of the sport along the way. The priority isn't middle school rankings. It's making sure the kid is still healthy, skilled, confident, rested, academically ahead, and in love with the game at 18.

What radicalized you?   For me, it happened back in my freshman year of high school in the early 2000s. The head coach of our hockey team believed in getting the team home to our own beds after road games no matter what instead of staying in hotels. Hotels were a distraction. With no hotel costs, he wanted to use the money to upgrade our road meals. Nothing fancy, just basic meat and potatoes type places like Cracker Barrel or Perkins instead of cold Little Caesars on a dark January bus ride home across rural North Dakota. The athletic director and superintendent shut the idea down and basically just absorbed the savings from his no hotel policy into the athletics budget. So after that our coach, the other assistants, the parents, and us players started fundraising in the off‑season in hopes to get better meals on the road. The first year went great. We raised a ton and were easily able to have nicer sit down meals on every single trip. We all sat together at big tables, had actual food choices, ate healthier and built even more camaraderie. It was fantastic all around. But then other sports teams and parents caught wind. It was seen as unfair. The AD, principal, and superintendent demanded we stop, in order to keep things “equal” across all sports at our public school. They even tried to force our coach to hand over the privately raised money so it could be redistributed. Thankfully, our coach was an old‑school Canadian ex‑pro hockey player who didn’t take shit from anyone, and told them to F off, and we continued with our meatloaf road meals as planned. The principal and AD eventually backed off, but the superintendent had a vendetta against our team and probably mostly just our coach so he never stopped. He even went as low as instructing bus drivers not to take us to the restaurants we’d planned for on the road. Our coach always overrode it, once even driving the bus himself since he had the license from coaching cross‑country. Over the next few years we continued the fundraising for better meals. Some of the other teams, and other parents continued to badger the supt., our coach and even sometime us players about it instead of just joining us in fundraising. Watching peers and especially some of our own “leaders” work so hard to sabotage a positive thing for us was eye opening and really stuck with us. It gave us an early look at how petty and nefarious and systems and people can be, even at the local level. And honestly, in the end, all it did was radicalize about 30 teenage hockey players for the rest of their lives who walked away believing “equality” was the dirtiest word in the English language. 😂