After reading the letter from Emily Taft from Bloomdale in the sports section on Wednesday, I felt
compelled to give the other side of the story.
I happen to be a parent of one of the kids on the Luckey team that I think you may be referring to. After
our games our kids usually do run the bases to celebrate their victory just as many other teams do. I do
not know if any of our kids may have ran through your line of kids as you claim because I wasn’t
watching the kids run the bases at the time. I would agree that it would not have been appropriate to do
that if it did occur but let’s keep things in perspective here. These are kids between 8 to 10 years old
who were simply excited about winning a baseball game. Our team lost our first game and the kids
struggled to come back from that loss to stay in the tournament. They were simply overexcited. I am not
saying that they should not have been corrected on their behavior of breaking your line of kids if it
did occur. These are just young kids who may have made a mistake in doing that.
In response back to your comments that our team showed poor sportsmanship simply because they did not
clap for each of your kids as they got their medals bothered me. None of the teams that beat our kids
stood there and clapped for our kids either when we passed out our awards to each kid and some of our
kids were equally as upset after losing the games. I certainly don’t presume to judge those teams as
having bad sportsmanship. In fact, I want to publicly say that those teams did show good sportsmanship.

After most of the games that we played over a very long weekend of baseball, most teams simply got into
their own huddle surrounded by the parents, family, and friends and then they left regardless of whether
the teams won or lost. There were some days that these teams of young kids played two back-to-back
games. I would guess that a lot of people and the kids too were simply a little tired not to mention the
fact that a team would be waiting in the wings to take over the field that had just been played on.
Our team meant no disrespect to your team. They showed good sportsmanship by going through the line up
and saying good game as all teams do. You even admit that the Luckey team did this in your letter. I
think you owe an apology to the Luckey team for wrongly accusing them of bad sportsmanship.
Lisa Burket
Luckey