What the children's league is for

In Al Khobar, a basketball league for children plays its games in the evenings. The coach of one team has a clear method. The tallest five play almost the whole match. The rest sit on the bench in clean kit, and some of them go a month without touching the ball in a real game.

His team wins most weeks. The parents of the starters are pleased. The parents of the others are quietly looking at swimming lessons.

It is worth asking what a league like this exists to do. Ask the parents and almost none of them will say trophies. They will talk about a child learning to lose without sulking, or the quiet one discovering she is good at something nobody grades, or a habit that might still have them running about at forty.

None of that happens on a bench. The coach's way of keeping score, with wins, a polished cabinet and a few children shouted at for their mistakes, is borrowed from the professional game on television, where winning really is the point because people pay to watch it.

A children's league does not have that excuse. It could mix the squads until the games are close. It could let every child play. It could count the boy who finally sinks a free throw he has missed all season as a result worth celebrating. It could judge the coach on whether the children want to come back.

Each of those choices is easy once the purpose is clear, and impossible to argue for while it is not.

So the question comes first. Is the point to give the parents in the stands something to cheer, or to give the children on the court something to keep?