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Comment by Teever | Hacker News Reader

> Yes. Yes, it is actually reasonably hard to coordinate 18+ kids and thier familes (thats the minimum size for two baseball teams), have an experienced adult coach them, and hire a referee (if that is judged to be necessary), coordinate field usage, advocate for local governments to set aside sports and play space and protect existing space from development.

How did people coordinate this before the invention of all these digital communication devices that we now find our selves so desperately dependent on like we're stuck in The Matrix?

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>How did people coordinate this...

I think you might be referring to a time when kids could play unsupervised and before independence-building play was replaced with wall-to-wall no-trespassing signs and overseen by a system that makes sure each minor transgression is forever leveraged into multiple, life-harming punishments.

Sports leagues have been a thing for generations, so it's worth noting that the answer to "What did you do before all this digital stuff" isn't "kids just did their own thing" -- they still organized leagues.

(Fewer of them, to be sure.)

If I recall right, sports leagues are a thing of 20centure. It was not much of a thing before.

It may or may not qualify as "generations".

Many of the kids in little league today had grandparents and even great grandparents who did little league.

1970s: Our rural town had a little league field. Up by me was another plot of cleared land where we hillbillies would play.

The decades before this favored informal games. Afterward, league play dominated kid-ball.

Pen and paper, the way most organizing was done before the digital age. You went to a community center, signed your kids up. Can you imagine organizing 18 kids without all these devices? Little League has been around since 1939, the need for a coordinating organization isn't a recent change.

And that’s pretty much how it’s done in the LL my kid played in a few years ago. Parents show up to a local pizza place during a registration day. They bring the filled out paper enrollment form, the kid tries on some jerseys for size, and then pay the fee. Congrats, Johnny (or Jane) is signed up for LL.

I read in a history book that human beings managed to coordinate entire empires that stretched across continents with out digital electronics.

Facetiousness aside, I'm flabbergasted that I'm reading people on HN defend these kinds of abhorrent data collection and retention polices and using the difficulties of coordinating 18 people as an excuse for them.

It's like some cyber stockholm syndrome where people feel the need to make justifications for the behaviour of malevolent entities that they have wilfully shared their data with. The requests are so unbelievably intrusive that they remind me of the Ivy League nude posture photos[1]

I give it 6-24 months before we're reading a story here about a mass data leak from Little League or something equivalent like Boy Scouts of America or whatever.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League_nude_posture_photos

> I read in a history book that human beings managed to coordinate entire empires that stretched across continents with out digital electronics.

You asked specifically for little leagues. The across continents coordination is done by a.) delegating rulership to local warlords b.) keeping military power strong enough to keep those you those in check. It had massive limitation in terms of what it could achieve and has zero to do with organizing of competitions for kids.

Plus, the central power would not bother to micromanage little teams. It is our culture that finds little leagues important, not theirs.

To be clear, I’m not defending the collection of the data; that’s stupid, and is a good example why there should legislative minimum fines for data breaches and bond requirements to process certain types of data, as well as standardized privacy policies and regulation

However, the comment I was responding to was regarding the need to have any coordination at all. It’s good and right that these organizations exist, they just don’t need to collect PII as described in the article.

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