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Comment by ape4 | Hacker News Reader

Why do they "need" 3 proofs of residency?!

Like any serious hobby, people are people and do stupid shit.

You know how nerds kill each other about systemd, vi vs emacs, C vs Rust? Crazy parents will pull together a group of 11 year olds from 30 miles away to beat your 8/9 year old to get into a tournament.

I've been involved in various baseball and softball leagues in two different states, and I 100% vouch for every word of the above. Anyone who's been involved with little kid sports knows this is utterly plausible and not even slightly exaggerated.

Growing up, we even saw some of this behavior in park district youth softball, which had no tournaments, tiers or scouts and even had a mission statement of not being a competitive environment.

Let’s suppose all these things are true. So what? It’s kids playing ball. They’re just having fun regardless. I’m not seeing any reasons to collect all this intrusive personal info here, just excuses.

Sorry, I didn't realize I was arguing one way or another about the data. It wasn't intentional.

You occasionally hear about faked birth certificates being used to get over age players or foreigners (Cubans) on a team. There is enough money at stake for these kids at the national level for a few people to try it. Cheating is almost minigame inside of baseball at this point.

I don’t know if requiring three forms of ID/residency is the right solution, but I at least understand the motivation. They are probably operating under the assumption that it’s harder to fake three government documents than it is to fake one. It’s definitely more time consuming and expensive, and that alone will deter some cheaters.

> They are probably operating under the assumption that it’s harder to fake three government documents than it is to fake one.

While there are government documents in all three categories, none of the categories requires government documents. Or documents which have much verification behind them.

Why can't they check this at the national level?

You could, but it would be a real mess if a state champion team got checked before a national level tournament and the league found out they had ineligible players that they used to qualify for the tournament. You could just kick those individual kids out, but who’s to say that the team would have qualified without them? You could DQ the whole team, but that is going to remove honest kids that had nothing to do with the cheating, and probably would have played for a non-cheating team if given the choice. Plus, if you DQ the whole team, what is the best way to find a replacement or should you just give their first opponent a bye? Once you start thinking about how to handle cheaters that make it most of the way through the season, you realize that it’s way simpler to catch them during registration so you’ll have fewer tough decisions to make later on.

I don’t support collecting a treasure trove of personal information, but I do support fairness in sports and there is probably a “correct” solution to this problem if the right people put their minds to it.

I played soccer in HS. There were rumors of aspiring players parents renting apartments in different districts to make them eligible for a certain league or district.

I'm guessing this takes aim at parents who are trying to easily forge eligibility of their child.

Yeah but: I volunteered in a High School in East Oakland a couple of decades back - the school football team won the state championship, people were so proud, then they were disqualified because their star player was living in a car with his mom .... didn't have a fixed Oakland address even though he lived there.

Some people don't have the luxury of an address, much less 3 forms of address .... but every kid should be able to play Little League, or school sports etc etc and any system that doesn't go out of its way to allow this is fundamentally broken

For sure. Out of curiosity, do you know of a good compromise that would allow the kid to play while still keeping the rules mostly in place for other kids?

I think you need compassionate teachers and functionaries who are capable of bending rules when appropriate, and rules that allow for such bending.

And, I guess, everyone else not trying to take advantage of such a system.

That last one seems to be the hard part to solve. I totally agree about the need for flexibility though. It would break my heart to see a kid disqualified for the reasons you gave.

I'm reminded of the scene in The Politician where they aren't letting a high school student vote for student body president because she doesn't have her school ID on her by saying "if we let anyone vote, they would just bus in kids from other schools". Feels like about the same level of importance.

I suppose you could theoretically have all the best players apply for the league in one area to try and game the system to have the best team for the little league world series, the horror!

I think the real problem comes when one area has a better run organization than neighboring areas. Then parents from the neighboring areas flood the registration and local kids end up getting cut from the team. That's the sort of thing I think Little League's trying to prevent.

Are that many parents really going to have a strong enough preference between league options to forge a document? The 3 different residency proofs seems a bit wild, though I guess based on some other comments here, perhaps needed lol

Yes, absolutely. Of kids’ sports parents, about 98% are there to enjoy time with their kid and hope they pick up some teamwork skills. The rest are convinced that their kid is the best in the state and destined for pro sports, and will do anything they can to make that happen (even if said kid doesn’t really want it).

The percentage of jerks is small, but given the number of children on organized teams it can add up.

I've been through this application process; I consider it a form of abuse and I'm sure it drives some people away from participation. And then they beg you to volunteer but to do so you have to provide tons more information to prove you're not a child molester.

Anyway I think it's all so they don't get to the final competitions and Little League World Series, only to find out they have to disqualify some team for having an out-of-district player. But maybe it would work almost as well to check only the winning team, after the series, and if they've committed fraud, the other team wins.

This is not Little League people, this is the lawyer they retained to spec this thing out.

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