Central Illinois Xpress Emerge as Unlikely Force in Fifth-Grade League

> Too many youth coaches, Mr. Toran said, spend their time designing intricate plays.

I could not agree more. So many coaches at this level of play want to try out the fancy stuff before establishing the basics.

> At the time, he said, he was an assistant coach with a semipro men’s team and was eager to escape what he described as the “whining and complaining” of players who were resistant to coaching.

> In search of a more mature audience, he turned to a group of 9-year-old girls.

> “You can actually teach them basketball,” he said.

I already posted this comment on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8910371), but I think it relates to this article as well:

I play women's football and coach high school guys football. Football is one of the most teamwork-dependent sports out there. Everyone has to be doing his job every single play. There's no way for one player to carry the team.

Before I started coaching guys' football, I had heard consistently from other coaches in my women's league that women are way easier to coach than men in the game of football. Reasons given included less attitude, less individualism, less ego, more willing to work together, etc. When I started coaching high school ball, this was exactly the case. So much of my time was wasted beating the individualism out of these boys and getting them to play for each other, not themselves.

Maybe it's that football attracts a certain type of male. But I think women might be more naturally disposed to working on a team than men on average.

We have a team of girls who are doing mighty fine (shocking, I know) and a newspaper that turns their story into such an unbearable headline (for profit). Pretty good summary of where we're at right now.

A professional coach can out-compete the local yokel coaches with a team a year or two behind.

And, at that age, girls on average are bigger than boys.

Um, okay. This is news, why?

We updated the HN title to the subtitle of the article.

This article has some nice points about what the girls are learning (team work, discipline etc), but it's not nearly "breaking down barriers" as it seems. I coached swimming for 8 years:

Girls are 10x easier to coach than boys (on average). At that age they are also more coordinated, taller and sometimes stronger.

Also at that age: continual year round well coached practice is infinitely more important than gender. The boys teams in this article are seasonal recreational, while the girls team is a year round club team. I can tell you from swimming that a 5th grade year round swimmer would easily crush a recreational swimmer, regardless of gender, on average.