Youth Football Must Go On!
At least that is what they are acting like here in AZ. While restaurants shut their doors, teams prepare for the largest season on record. The 11u grouping alone is 23-44 teams deep divided into Division I and Division II. We are going to be in Division I and challenging a handful of teams that believe themselves to be unstoppable. Among those are the 4 time defending champion Chandler Bears who not only win but hardly ever get scored on until the national championship.
The Bears are our nemesis team this year alongside a new squad called the Badgers. This new team is formed off the smoking corpse of the Savages organization with help from one of our coaches, our top DE and starting running back, the backing of the Bandits organization, and cherry picked players from across the league. The Bears have already spoken out against this team, wondering why super-teams need to be formed just to go against them. The problem with super teams is that most of the time you are talking about a clash of cultures in terms of coaching and in terms of parents who really just want to see their kid get the ball more. I brought my kids to the Argonauts organization for the opposite reason. I wanted them to be surrounded by players as good or better than them so their egos would get bruised and their work ethic would get a boost. It worked. Now we are part of a culture of learning about the sport in a pipeline of players that terminate with the Arizona Cardinals who presently boast three former Argos players on their roster. It helps. It helps because the kids get to see what is possible with hard work.
So, will we have a season? That remains to be seen. AZ is locked up right now, and while the orglist for the league has swelled over the past week to 93 organizations and over 280 different teams, we really ought to be pausing to recognize that we are talking about youth sports in a time where the hospital ICUs are filled with sick people who are all contagious. I am starting to get a grip on my the band kept playing on the Titanic. After all, here I am writing about this on the wire–namely because there isn’t real football to talk about and there is a part of me that wants to see how my Argos stack up against the competition.