My wife was recruited a few years back to coach a girls, youth softball team (~9-10 years olds, maybe). Of course, being recruited to fill the last coaching spot, the other coaches (one of which was the league organizer) has already selected the players for ALL the teams. Of course, my wife gets the "Bad News Bears"-type team. The leftovers...
The prize after the season was the opportunity to represent the league in a tournament among teams from all over the area. The tournament was to be put on by...the organizer of this league and coach of one of the other teams, the presumed league champs.
Of course, my wife, with all of 1 year experience playing softball, coached her team to the league championship. The tournament was promptly cancelled...
My oldest daughter played softball in an area that switched from slow pitch to fast pitch. Naturally, all of the “competitive” team coaches promptly went out and recruited an experienced fast pitch pitcher or two. My daughter was on the leftover team that had no experienced pitchers. The got creamed almost every game and nobody had any fun or learned anything about the game. Most of the kids weere completely overmatched by the pitchers they played against (some went 0 for the season), but they got up there and tried anyway. My daughter hates fast pitch softball to this day (but enjoys playing slow pitch).
My younger daughter played coach pitch ball against a girl who grew up early - she was twice the size of the other kids on the field and could hit the ball much harder than most. We didn’t take our softball and go home - we pulled everyone back and told the kids to get out of the way if they couldn’t handle a hot one. A couple years later the other kids caught up to her and she was just one of the players.
Something about this article is not quite right. 40 MPH is not overly fast for a 9 year old pitcher - I know I played against kids that could throw that hard at that age, and that was a long time ago. One of them plunked me in the ribs - I survived and got a hit off him the next time up. It sounds to me like a case of the adults acting like children and spoiling the kids’ game. Chances are this kid will regress toward the mean in a year or two and the problem would be solved - but instead they’ve ruined it for everyone.