re: Jimmy Detail is on the warpath...

quote:

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That's absolutely repugnant, and in another field would be considered malpractice. Hurting the future of 17 year olds for crying out loud.

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I pretty much agree with shea and those of you who say it's reprehensible for a coach to withhold letters from a high school athlete based upon the coach's bias, but I can see a flip-side to it, as well. Good coaches who care about their players could temper the rate and amount of letters that a player receives based on the the player's best interests. Say, for instance, a HS coach knows that his player can be successful in a structured environment but that such and such college coach lets the inmates run the asylum. The HS coach might de-emphasize that coach/college insofar as he thinks that doing so is in the player's best long-term interests. I'm just hypothesizing, though, and have no idea how likely or unlikely this scenario is. Further, my hypothetical isn't aimed at the situation Shea is pointing out, but is just an observation about why some coach's discretion might not be an inherently bad thing for HS players.