Red Wheelbarrow
New legislation would take 2% of sports betting revenue and apply it to youth sports
So it’s not the Amalfi Coast, but the view from my tiny home office upstairs is sweet …. I see a rusty red wheelbarrow, standing upright, serving as part strike zone/part catcher for my son’s baseball games. These aren’t games really. Every game is part of a “season” and every season has winners and losers and, if you ask the players — Eli, Dylan, Alex and Jackie — every game is life and death. There are arguments on almost every play and sometimes these elementary age kids will storm off after losing. The kids are geniuses really: each half inning is one out, ghost runners can’t advance more than a base, unless a ball is hit over the deck for a home run, and typically games are finished inside 30 minutes. MLB should stop by to consider this model. I’m pretty sure the boys like it better than the actual little league games they play with real uniforms and stressed-out parents. The beauty of these games is we don’t have to interfere – the kids make the rules, the decisions, and they settle their own arguments. They self-organize. This was in 2008 and games like these have largely faded in society. But a new creative bill from Connecticut has the makings of bringing back the wheelbarrow backyard game. The legislation, HB5493, would take 2% of revenue from sports betting and apply to youth sports. Despite what I think of online sports betting and the public health crisis it has launched particularly amongst young males, this at least leans into the trend in a positive way. “We are often just doing triage in schools, not focusing on proactive physical and mental health—and funding youth sports is really the best way to do it,” says long-time school counselor and coach Steve Boyle who testified on the merits of the bill. If done right, the state’s allocation from the “betting pool” should go to investing in programs that help make our public schools our rec centers, Boyle contends, and to help kids learn how to play again without a coach and useless swag – to just self-organize the way these boys did circa 2008. Even if it means sometimes kids like Alex storm off and take the wheelbarrow with them.