Should Dad's be allowed to coach their child's team in Representative Basketball?

 

There seems to be an ongoing trend nowadays with junior basketball and I am confused whether this is something good or bad for basketball in the long run.  In the past, a lot of these basketball associations, specially the big ones, try their very best to get a coach that had no relationships with any of the kids in their teams.  I think the purpose of this was that every player was on a level playing field to compete for minutes. Nowadays, more and more associations are allowing parents to coach and I am starting to see that some parent coaches are obviously manoeuvring to give extra time to their offspring when they don't necessarily deserve it. 

Even those in assistant coach positions do this by manipulating the substitution patterns and when the head coach is unavailable and they take over the team for some games.  Of course, if your son or your daughter are top level talent, they seldom will be affected by this.  Those that are of course that are just a little bit better than their kids will be the obvious victims of this type of behaviour.

When parents sign up for representative sports, they are made aware that their kids may not get playing time and I am good with that but as a parent, I also want to see fairness that when a coach's child is not performing well, then they should be benched in favor of those kids that are playing better and hence deserve it more.

I get it that coaches in representative sports don't get any monetary compensation but they volunteered for the job and that job demands them to be fair to the all the kids playing for them.  I do hope that Basketball New South Wales will somehow find a way to regulate this.  I think its inevitable though but they probably need to remind them that this is a practice that they should not do and that they exercise maximum fairness as much as possible.  Fairness meaning that kids who deserve to be in court because they work harder or play better get their fair chance.  There are a few coaches though that maintain this and are even setting the bar higher for their kids but they aren't the majority.  

In one of the trials I attended before, there were 6 coaches evaluating, all of them have kids trialling out.  All of their kids got into representative teams and their friends' kids got in as well and even a couple got in without trialling. The pool of talent at that time was huge and you'd see like more than 10 good kids not get a spot at the end of the trials.  It is sad that those kids got didn't get their chance to get a spot when they rightfully were qualified to do so.  This has to stop else the integrity of this basketball world would be stained but to how to do it is beyond me.

I love the sport of basketball and it pains me to see people corrupt it and ruin it for everyone.

Also, associations should be transparent.  When you hold trials, you should inform everyone that you really are only looking for an approximate number of spots to fill as the other spots are already pre-selected to your returning rep players.  Its very similar to click baiting or false advertising when you sell 100 spots for the trials, for a selection of 30 kids for 3 teams and then 25 of the spots are already pre-selected, meaning that even if these kids perform badly in trials, they are still going to have their spots just because of that they are returning reps and that they have great relations with the associations.