My 9 year-old's team played soccer against a team of giants. They had 3 kids at least a foot taller who manhandled them and could kick the length of the field and score. It wasn't fun and we were annoyed, but we didn't call the police.

At best, they're half as stupid and twice as hateful

Fuck i never even thought of this. Back in the days, the worst thing was an overbearing parent next to the field. Now you have people uploading your child durectly to social media.

Got so many pop-ups I just gave up on reading it.

Where was the coach for this game? Why weren't people talking to him about a solution?

Most youth leagues dont do substitutions like pros do, they swap out every quarter or so. The goal is to have the kids play about equally, or else parents lose their shit that their kid sat on the bench the whole game.

Yeah, we've got a vicious killer on our hands here, he's a big orange/white floof and about 6 times in the 7 years we have had him, he'll bring a baby squirrel, or little fledgling bird to us. Nothing approaching the size of an adult squirrel, much less a hen. I suppose if he were hungry enough he might try, but... with all the other wildlife around it's irresponsible to not protect your henhouse with hardware cloth to prevent predators from digging under the wire in the night (which, somehow the camera surveillance managed to miss - although why snowflake didn't just make his coop more secure like the neighbors do is just... a him thing.) His next door neighbor watched a hawk grab the wire on the top of their run, in the middle of he day, and try to fly up with it / lift it off. We have had a young hawk grab a hen from the new neighbors' open run that was a little too big for him to carry far, made it 100 meters to our driveway and set down there, as I rounded the corner I spooked him away and he left his prize, 15 minutes later he had returned to take it away.

So, yeah, bruiser the cat is capable, but about as likely to bother with his hens as he is to attack the FedEx delivery guy.

Okay, then why is the viral video of them kicking this kid out of the league and having him escorted out with police instead of a video of the coach having a conversation with the father about live streaming the games?

Because if that was the issue, then that should have been the conversation. Not "your kid is too good we're going to kick him out of the league because he's making the white kids feel bad about themselves."

GUARANfuckingTEED to be the same parents who won’t shut the fuck up about participation trophies, how kids these days are too soft, and how nobody deserves anything they haven’t earned through white-approved work. Always preaching meritocracy, personal responsibility, and how losing builds character. Fucking snowflakes.

Neither you nor I know what conversations the league had with the parents or how many times, because the parents here did not share that. The league has not shared any information on what happened, and rightfully so, though I'm sure they will now that it's hit the news. I'm just cautioning against automatically jumping to the worst conclusion on very little info, and also sharing that I'd have a serious problem with this parent live-streaming my son on Tik Tok.

Yeah this thread has been... enlightening. Lemmy might be more prejudiced than I would have initially thought.

The only information we have is from the family who were live streaming the game. Not sure I trust their statements on why they were escorted off by police. Definitely feels like there's a lot going on that they're not going to disclose.

What a lazy response to a nuanced topic.

Er ad hominem or whatever

Why would that be hilarious?

I feel the same way; I believe that this must be the goal is really not even up for debate.

As irony!

I played soccer at that age, my siblings did too, and my cousins do as well.

When you're 3/4/5 you're not playing soccer. There are no rules, positions, score, winner/loser or goalies. It's "go kick the ball around time". When the ball goes out of bounds the coaches, who are often just some dad, just give it to a player that has not had a ball in a while. No one is trying to win, there is no 'win', it's all make believe for the kids to have a chance to run around for a while in the sun. If one super-player wins every match, that sucks for every other player on the field including his team since they don't even get to "win", there are no winners. They just have to sit around bored with the other team because there is no point.

So the league refunded the parents fee and asked them to not come back (trespassed them). They are no longer legally allowed on the field and for that matter, have no claim to participate in the league seeing as they were refunded. They weren't kicked out on the basis of race, it was many parents complaining "Hey, I paid ~$600 for 'go kick the ball around time', and you are facilitating a situation where my kid doesn't get to kick the ball". This isn't a competitive format it's gym hour and they are not receiving the product they paid for.

A 3 yearold hogging the ball all game, isn't doing anything wrong. He's 3. He's should be instructed to share more but he isn't doing something that warrants the cops involvement. The parents however, that understand the situation and failed to correct it / their kids ability to share, do. The adults that received their money back, understand it. The adults that received a trespass notice, understand it. The adults, who the cops talked to not the kid, understand it. The parents of the superplayers here at being assholes and injecting their kid in a situation they already KNOW will cause problems. All the kids are just being kids and the other parents, as far as I can tell, just want their kid to receive the product they paid for.

Too many people in this thread letting their emotions control their opinion due to a scary headline about a subject they apparently know very little about.

Selective editing. That conversation could have already occurred and the parents refused and were trespassed. They knew the rage bait of having a cop come and kick them out would get views so that's the only thing they published. I will never trust influencers, especially one's who involve their own children. They are almost always complete scum of the earth.

The other parents repeatedly complained about their kid not being able to participate in the make-believe form of a soccer played at age 3/4/5

And the other ~15 4 yearolds were not

The 'coach' is probably a volunteer (or more likely a voluntold) with no training or authority if it is anything like what goes on around me. Where I am, they'd be lucky if the coach has played soccer before.

Too many people in this thread letting their emotions control their opinion due to a scary headline about a subject they apparently know very little about.

This is my Lemmy experience in a nutshell. I really wanted this to be a good reddit alternative, but it seems kinda like maga for the left. Which obviously is better than maga, but still exhausting.

“Hey, I paid ~$600 for ‘go kick the ball around time’

Just go to a park...

If it was a matter and refunding and asking people to leave why was police involved? I can think of 100 ways to handle this without police starting with giving the other kids another ball.

If I were the cop, I'd show up just to yell at the guy who called me, and to tell him that if I ever again show up to a call he made that turns out to be as idiotic as this one, I'll arrest HIM for abusing public services.

Yeah but when they get there, there isn't a marked soccer field with 2 goals and 15 other kids all wearing matching uniforms.

You're paying for the orchestration and scheduling of the games

Home boys gonna fucking roll more than he has since he played sonic in the 90s.

If those cops ever live that down....

I thought it would be better than corporate social media. Seeing as there has to be some reason you came here rather than the 'easier' options.

But no it's mostly people just being emotional and slinging mud. I've already been called a bigot in this thread even before that wall of text.

I'd like to take a moment to point out that the child's race is mentioned exclusively by the people reporting this story. At no point was the child's race mentioned by the police or by the parents who called them.

Although those parents may have privately considered race a factor, there is no indication that they explicitly mentioned it or that it played any stated role in their decision to have this family trespassed from the property.

And that's precisely my point: the child's race is completely irrelevant to how petty and ridiculous this situation already is. Having a family trespassed because their child was supposedly too good at soccer is absurd enough on its own.

I hate that the article's headline goes out of its way to mention the child's race, seemingly for no other reason than to generate clicks and stir up controversy. And, of course, the comment section falls for it hook, line, and sinker. Suddenly, everyone is convinced that race must have been the issue.

Maybe race played a role behind the scenes, or maybe it didn't. We don't have enough information to know. But the people reporting this story have made it a central part of the narrative, and the comment section has run with it as though it's an established fact.

The underlying story is already ridiculous enough. We don't need journalists injecting racial controversy into it without evidence just to generate engagement.

I'm going to wait for more details before I get worked up about this. Not gonna take the word of a family of influencers.

Source? All the article says is "i9 Sports, which operates youth leagues, camps, and clinics for children ages 3 and up in sports including soccer, has not issued a public statement on the incident. Local police have also not released information confirming details of any call or escort."

Too many people in this thread letting their emotions control their opinion due to a scary headline about a subject they apparently know very little about.

What you're describing is not just some more reasonable interpretation of the info in the article. You're describing facts other people have no way of knowing. It's not "letting emotions control their opinion". It's simply having opinion about facts at hand.

There's no nuance involved in systemic racism and Karens weaponizing the police to protect white fragility.

That's pretty cut and dry.

The family states that the league banned them from the field via a trespass notice and that officers then escorted them away in front of the other children. They say they later received a refund for the 2026 fall soccer league registration.

The same article, but what I'm having trouble finding is whether they had been banned before this game or as a result of this game.

What I can tell for sure is that the article reports the kid's parents side of the story and their side only. They obviously make the claim that the cops were called because their kid was too good at the sport. The video they edited opens up with the father saying that. But if you read between the lines of what they tell the cop afterwards it is clear that there was a clash between the parents before the cops were called and the article fails to even mention that. If there is recorded footage of the events somewhere whoever wrote that article couldn't find it, just like they couldn't find anyone else who was there to tell what they see happened.

This is far from being high-end investigative journalism and I'm pointing that out.

The only thing we can deduce with some decent level of certainty is that it is the league that fucked up first. Kids are usually grouped by skill level to avoid things like that and they failed to correct that situation for quite some time it seems.

to be fair to people, the headline is just lying to us about why the police were called

I think it's reasonable to expect headlines to be correct, and that the blame lays almost solely on the publisher who is stating incorrect information

you know what, I had assumed that naturally the ban had already occurred and that this was not the initial trespass notice that the cops responded to

if they called the cops and issued the trespass at the same time, that's weird. if they issued the trespass and then they refused to leave, well yeah duh call the cops that's what they're for

Exactly, this says they were kicked out, not that they still came back later. Those are two completely different situations.

I understand where you are coming from, but I don't think that is a reasonable assumption in 2026.

We have several of those temporary neighbors here, too. I wish the one next to me was a renter. Or, maybe I don't. I suppose having a new neighbor every year or so has it's downsides, too. You never know what you're going to get. Although, rent is so high now, renters pay more than most owners pay on their mortgages here. In my case, renting a house here is double what I pay in mortgage.

I don't think it's been a reasonable assumption for a long time lol

All the houses in my neighbourhood have sold to some kind of commercial endeavor. Rental or airbnb.

A lot of people live here but no one "LIVES" here.

Not fucking $600 I'm not. That's a car payment. My friends and I were always able to make do with sticks or fence posts or whatever and organize games. That was before we even had cell phones. You don't even need organized teams and uniforms for a bunch of little children to just fuck around.

The fact is the police were called and legal action was taken. Now that it has been escalated to involve the power of state force, that invites a challenge to the charge based on equal accommodations laws.

Considering the state of the society is such that John Oliver's most recent LWT segment is about neo-nazi entrenchment in the party in power, we can't look at this incident and not see a racism mattar. We have to consider if the response of the other parents to invoke law enforcement would have occurred if the color of the offending family was a few shades lighter.

Can't speak for your jurisdiction, but around here, and most of America I think, if a private business tells you to leave and you don't, that's trespass. In Florida it's trespass if you ignore certain property signage. The police don't "issue" a trespass, it's automatic.

You'll be called a bootlicker any moment now. Wait and see. :)

Seems it was a parent that called, not i9 Sports.

Living in a society sometimes means suffering opinions and attitudes you don't like. I know I don't always agree with the Lemmy consensus.

I don't think the notions of respecting equal accommodations, and approaching potentially racist situations with an abundance of caution — especially considering the current party in power — is radically left, id est MAGA for the left.

Feel free to block people whose opinions you can't stand.

Lots of downvotes, yet no one actually defending Lemmy.

They know. They don't like it. But they know.

You don’t develop talent simply by forcing players to share the ball. You actually kill it. Keeping the ball is the number one skill to be learned by a soccer player.