LA Observed: Kids who won't play on Sabbath lose

Kids who won't play on Sabbath lose

Kevin Roderick • Bio • Email

You probably don't know that there is a big Little League championship tournament underway in San Bernardino, with a team of Northridge 11- and 12-year-olds involved. One contender has a bit of a disadvantage. The mostly Mormon boys from Santa Clara, Utah don't play games on Sunday. When Little League officials refused requests made weeks ago to reschedule their Sunday game, the boys voted to take the first forfeit loss in the history of the tournament.

"This is consistent with what Little League always does,'' Western Regional director Jim Gerstenslager said. "The problem with (accommodating Utah) is that it opens up a can of worms, where maybe you have a team with Seventh-Day Adventists and they can't play on Saturday or another religion can't play some other day. We have to draw the line somewhere.''
Utah manager Kyle Frei is disappointed in the ruling. He thinks Little League could have been more flexible.

Frei said when the West Region schedule came out July 15, he called Western Regional headquarters and asked them to re- schedule Utah's game with Nevada for a day other than Sunday.

"We hit a brick wall,'' Frei said. "We had our league president and district administrator call and nothing worked. We made about six calls.''

Utah's kids then lost 14-1 to Hawaii in their first game yesterday. The Northridgers play Arizona tonight. More at SoCal Sports Observed.

12:31 PM Tuesday, August 8 2006 • Link
More by tag: All | Los Angeles | Sports
Email or share:

8:33 PM Fri | Eli Broad offers $30 million to save MOCA

4:10 PM Fri | Villaraigosa wants 'emergency' cuts

3:57 PM Fri | Crest Theatre put up for sale

3:38 PM Fri | Reading 'The Maltese Falcon'

12:58 PM Fri | NYT's White House team

Go to LA Observed

Two words: Retail liquidators

4:49 PM Fri | Forget plastics, the real action these days is arranging going-out-of-business sales.

Rags to riches to rags

4:10 PM Fri | Louis Verdad was one of L.A.'s hottest designers, but he had little idea of how to run a business.

Go to LA BIZ

Going through 'The Changes'

TJ Sullivan | Without referencing its recent layoff, the Ventura County Star's editor says the suburban LA paper is now "more streamlined and, in many ways, much more efficient."

Lost thunder: BLM preparing to execute 30,000 wild horses

Deanne Stillman | We stripped the Indians of their ponies, and now we're doing it to ourselves.

LA's fire-orange sun

TJ Sullivan | When the sun looks like that, there's a big fire somewhere regardless of whether we see or smell smoke.

Contributors • RSS feed

Innovation chief Abrams not too impressed with Times

Lee Abrams, Tribune Company's chief innovation officer, doesn’t seem too impressed with the Los Angeles Times. That’s the feeling I got when he appeared at the Los Angeles Press Club.

Aural history

Seven or fifteen minutes from now I can definitively say I didn't hear the sound of sirens.

Kelp

Making our bed, lying in it.

Week eight: the ugly, the bad and the good

A rough week in runland.