HEALTH & SAFETY

My 13 year old son has been involved in organized sports since he was 4 years old. Over the years, he tried a wide variety of activites and chose to focus on baseball and soccer. He's always loved the competition, made good friends, and the sports were different enough that they provided lots of challenges. His dad and I have loved watching him - seeing him mature physically, emotionally, and mentally and compete at a select level.

At what point does a parent step in and say, "enough is enough." I have a highschool football player, who is one of, if not the best player on his Varsity team. In films the other day, the coach broke down each play and critized him for everything that went wrong on the offensive side of the ball. He was call a "pussy" and not sure what else, but know it was bad. I even got an e-mail from one of the players mom's asking me if my son was ok. Another parent also told me that her when her son came home, he told her the same thing about the coach.

My 12 year old son has a partially torn ACL from being injured at a Middle School Football game. We have seen 2 orthopedic surgeons. One is well known around the area and treats most professional athletes in our area. The other is a pediatic ortho surgeon. Each has given us a different course of action to take. The pediatic ortho wants to repair the ACL with surgery and the other wants to rehab it and use a speciallized brace until he has finished growing. He still has open growth plates which makes him nervous to perform surgery.

There was a Wii tournament held at my local mall a couple of weeks ago. Do you think Wii video sports provide the same fitness level and social learning that traditional sports do?

TRAMPOLINE: Stupid Kids Or Stupid Idea? Great Forum idea. I hope this helps:

have a wrestling horror story I want to share with everyone as I think it can help many kids..

My name is Lorri Jordan, we live in Knoxville, TN. We have three girls and one boy. Since we relocated to Knoxville, they have all started in the past two years to play sports, from basketball, soccer, gymnastics, football and wrestling.

I am so tired of watching my son dissolve into tears when he realizes that he really isn't considered good enough to play equally, when he sees that he is at the bottom of the batting order AGAIN, that he is punished for missing a practice even when his father is in the hospital.
In our town, we seem to have a real problem with the coaching in our little league and it has started to get a bit of press in the local paper. I am actually thinking of writing a column and submitting it to one of the news magazines.

I was looking into things about this subject, and it hit close to home with me. My wife has experienced many bizarre things while she was a gymnast, most of her life. Everything which happened to her started at the age of 13, and dealt with her gymnastic coaches. It went on into her early 20's, but it wasn't her fault. They preyed upon her, knew she was weak emotionally, she found out that these guys have done this many times before her, and while "with" her. It's all very disturbing. Have you ever put any pressure on the United States Gymnastics organization?

hello, I am trying to find out what laws protect kids from coaches in public schools. My 15 yr. old daughter plays softball. Her coach uses the f-word and g-d word in front of the girls. He also salutes the other teams with the middle finger as they are traveling to away games. He told the girls that if they told their parents they would be kicked off the team. My daughter just recently got kicked off the team for taking the ACT test. She told her coach she would not be @ the game a week prior to the game. He called her the day of game, told her she wouldn't play next year and hung up on her.