this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2026
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I played soccer at that age, my siblings did too, and my cousins do as well.
When you're 3/4/5 you're not playing soccer. There are no rules, positions, score, winner/loser or goalies. It's "go kick the ball around time". When the ball goes out of bounds the coaches, who are often just some dad, just give it to a player that has not had a ball in a while. No one is trying to win, there is no 'win', it's all make believe for the kids to have a chance to run around for a while in the sun. If one super-player wins every match, that sucks for every other player on the field including his team since they don't even get to "win", there are no winners. They just have to sit around bored with the other team because there is no point.
So the league refunded the parents fee and asked them to not come back (trespassed them). They are no longer legally allowed on the field and for that matter, have no claim to participate in the league seeing as they were refunded. They weren't kicked out on the basis of race, it was many parents complaining "Hey, I paid ~$600 for 'go kick the ball around time', and you are facilitating a situation where my kid doesn't get to kick the ball". This isn't a competitive format it's gym hour and they are not receiving the product they paid for.
A 3 yearold hogging the ball all game, isn't doing anything wrong. He's 3. He's should be instructed to share more but he isn't doing something that warrants the cops involvement. The parents however, that understand the situation and failed to correct it / their kids ability to share, do. The adults that received their money back, understand it. The adults that received a trespass notice, understand it. The adults, who the cops talked to not the kid, understand it. The parents of the superplayers here at being assholes and injecting their kid in a situation they already KNOW will cause problems. All the kids are just being kids and the other parents, as far as I can tell, just want their kid to receive the product they paid for.
Too many people in this thread letting their emotions control their opinion due to a scary headline about a subject they apparently know very little about.
If it was a matter and refunding and asking people to leave why was police involved? I can think of 100 ways to handle this without police starting with giving the other kids another ball.
There has been an update. As far as the reason for the call:
So it sounds like the coach benched the kid at some point, maybe to give the other kids some time to kick the ball, and the parents argued with the coach about it, which led to them being refunded and asked to leave, which they refused to do until after police got there.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/winter-park-police-explain-response-164621178.html
Seems it was a parent that called, not i9 Sports.
Just bench the kid? Has no one here coached baby soccer?
According to the comment above yours (that cites a Yahoo article), they did. That's why the parents were upset and supposedly caused a disturbance.
Source? All the article says is "i9 Sports, which operates youth leagues, camps, and clinics for children ages 3 and up in sports including soccer, has not issued a public statement on the incident. Local police have also not released information confirming details of any call or escort."
What you're describing is not just some more reasonable interpretation of the info in the article. You're describing facts other people have no way of knowing. It's not "letting emotions control their opinion". It's simply having opinion about facts at hand.
The same article, but what I'm having trouble finding is whether they had been banned before this game or as a result of this game.
Exactly, this says they were kicked out, not that they still came back later. Those are two completely different situations.
you know what, I had assumed that naturally the ban had already occurred and that this was not the initial trespass notice that the cops responded to
if they called the cops and issued the trespass at the same time, that's weird. if they issued the trespass and then they refused to leave, well yeah duh call the cops that's what they're for
Can't speak for your jurisdiction, but around here, and most of America I think, if a private business tells you to leave and you don't, that's trespass. In Florida it's trespass if you ignore certain property signage. The police don't "issue" a trespass, it's automatic.
right
so if everybody called the cops at the same time as initially trespassing somebody, that'd be weird. like, you tell them to leave, they don't, then you call the cops
Obviously they did not leave, so asking this is moot to begin with, you know, since they did not leave.
no, we don't know that
the question here is if the cops shows up to issue the trespass, or if it was done prior to the cops showing up
How do cops "issue" trespass? They can't do that, they only enforce it.
you're so stuck on that word, that's the problem here
replace issue with "inform"
So why do you not just watch the video? Not even the patents of this kid, who are extremely stupid, think it happened the way you say. I do not understand what this extreme "reverse benefit of the doubt" is supposed to be. Watch the video, read the article. Anything instead of just making things up because you have some bias you want to validate.
neither the article nor video linked in the article make it clear if they were trespassed before being informed by the cops
Maybe you can stop repeating this now that the PD is contradicting your claims?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/winter-park-police-explain-response-164621178.html
The fact is the police were called and legal action was taken. Now that it has been escalated to involve the power of state force, that invites a challenge to the charge based on equal accommodations laws.
Considering the state of the society is such that John Oliver's most recent LWT segment is about neo-nazi entrenchment in the party in power, we can't look at this incident and not see a racism mattar. We have to consider if the response of the other parents to invoke law enforcement would have occurred if the color of the offending family was a few shades lighter.
It's always good to check; reportedly, the team is already quite diverse, and black parents were among those filing complaints.
The father had been coaching the child who turned out to be quite skilled, and had enrolled him in a very beginner rec league. He got his viral videos out there and started tagging teams and schools. He got the publicity he was looking for, and the facility had him removed and issued a refund because the child's advanced training and subsequent skill level/play were inappropriate for their beginner rec league.
This is not substianted, you can review the videos posted by the father and see the makeup of the team was not primarily white. No other kids were removed from the team.
Yes. As more details of the incident became known to me, my position has evolved. It appears the police were called regarding the behavior of the father, and the response by the police was temperate.
I love you for this comment. ❤️ The mark of a sage.
"Because police and a black person were involved, we can't NOT assume it's racism"
Riiiiiiiight. The fact that this bat shit insane comment is upvoted is an indictment on Lemmy
I did add context that one of the primary political parties — the one in power, in fact — is openly white supremacist and xenophobic. Hate crimes surged in 2016 by 68% and haven't dropped since. Literal lynchings in the US have become conspicuously more frequent.
Even before Trump, police and the justice system have been demonstrably dangerous to black Americans.
So, yes?
Maybe if we wanted to take interracial tolerance in the US for granted, we shouldn't have voted a white supremacist into office, which Americans did twice, specifically for his racist and white supremacist views. Maybe the response to Brianna Taylor and Heorge Floyd should have followed through on police reform.
I'm not claiming racism doesn't exist, or doesn't exist in America, or that the police force isn't often racist (intentionally or otherwise).
My claim is after looking into all the details of the situation, it's the unfortunate reality that the kid WAS literally just too good. It's funny to say but it's the actual fact. He was too good, and didn't belong. On top of that the parents were being problematic which is the real reason the cops were called. If the parents just chilled and acted like reasonable adults then nothing would have happened.
A blanket perspective of "A bad thing happened to a non-white person, therefor, the bad thing happened because they are non-white" is barley better than the full throated maga racists and it infantilizes and removes autonomy of non-white people. Sometimes the reality is that non-white people DO deserve the cops called on them. It's not the case that the police involvement is ALWAYS racist.
They called the police in a situation where the need for police is implausible. There were parents there, yes? I assume they were sober. Why didn't they manage the situation as might mature adults?
No, they escalated to state intervention, and that means question of equal accommodations can be raised, if the state has laws mandating them.
But it also raises the question of racism, especially if that was the only black family in the group.
Racism doesn't merely exist in the US, it's the dominant culture right now. So yes, it's entirely appropriate to expect it and catalog when it happens.
Uriel's view has changed, this rebuttal i provided is no longer necessary
Not a great concept, but pretty easy to scope out, not like we don't have video evidence that it wasn't a black kid on a white team.
Just go to a park...
Yeah but when they get there, there isn't a marked soccer field with 2 goals and 15 other kids all wearing matching uniforms.
You're paying for the orchestration and scheduling of the games
Not fucking $600 I'm not. That's a car payment. My friends and I were always able to make do with sticks or fence posts or whatever and organize games. That was before we even had cell phones. You don't even need organized teams and uniforms for a bunch of little children to just fuck around.
Sports league dues for kids get really expensive. My grandson is in the local basketball league and the annual fee is over $1000, and then we're charged $30 to attend the games.
The first year, there was a call to all relatives to pitch in if they could. I don't know since how they've been affording it.
TMI, Maybe
I'm also now out of contact with Master D, since his grandma and I divorced in 2024. It was a bit of a drive to the games, and travel and cost has made it prohibitive.Well it sure isn’t $600 a month lol. It’s $600 once and covers like 4 months of playing.
$150 a month is still insane for a 4 year old to play soccer.
Ok I’ll admit I just rolled with what you said on the price, but turns out that was just an exaggeration.
I just looked it up and soccer is $157 and covers 6 weeks. So about $26 a week that covers the organization, setting up practice, the games, the refs, etc.
That’s pretty cheap.
Yeah I was responding to someone else who gave that price. $26 is much more reasonable.
Kids are expensive...
Metal gymnastics are strong with this one
to be fair to people, the headline is just lying to us about why the police were called
I think it's reasonable to expect headlines to be correct, and that the blame lays almost solely on the publisher who is stating incorrect information
I understand where you are coming from, but I don't think that is a reasonable assumption in 2026.
I don't think it's been a reasonable assumption for a long time lol