That musical question is asked by Springfield (Mass.) Republican columnist Bill Wells.

“WHAT a lousy UMPire… WHAT a lousy UMP-ire… WHAT a lousy UMP-ire…” — it’s like a remix  with no music.

You can click through to see what Wells has to say. But because you’re here, I’ll give my answer, which is applicable from high school on down, but especially so for any game involving prepubescent children.

My first rule, to myself and the players I coach, is that the level of officiating can be no better than the level of play. So if you’re expecting NBA-level refs at a fifth-grade basketball game, you’re due to be disappointed.

My second rule, to myself and the players I coach, is that yelling at the official is a waste of time that only takes your focus away from the task at hand. I’ve seen too many players get caught up in what calls are made or not made, and completely take themselves out of the game. I tell them if anybody is going to talk to the official — not yell, but talk — it’s me.

My third rule, to myself, is that only rarely will I talk to the referee during the game, except to call a time out. I have exceptions. One is if I feel like the game is getting dangerously out of control. I have pointed out during basketball games that my players are getting hit with elbows, or I have asked the refs to get control of a kid who might be pushing or undercutting people. (If that happens with my own team, I handle it.) I don’t speak to the refs like they’re idiots. Sometimes they don’t call fouls because at younger ages refs sometimes are instructed to let the kids play.

Yes, I have, on a few occasions, questioned individual calls. But I ask for clarification — why was that a travel instead of a foul? And I try to use that to instruct my team — here is what the refs and calling and why.

The rules are the same when I coach baseball or softball. Except that usually kids throwing elbows aren’t quite such a big issue.

As for parents yelling at referees, in my intro letters to them, I note rules Nos. 1 and 2 in hopes that if they have any inclination to yell at officials. As far as I’m concerned, parents have the least right to yell at officials, and that’s at a standard where no one has the right to yell at them. Parents who yell at officials tend to general pains in the asses to players and coaches, for one thing.

For another, you as a parent are not making your kid any better by sending the signal that any failures are because of a bad call. In fact, you train your kid to be as big of a pain in the ass as you are.

Wired’s Chris Suellentrop is echoing the chorus that attributes the increasingly complex brand of football played at lower levels, and the strategies employed at the highest levels, on a generation’s worth of players growing up with the Madden video game, which premiered in 1989. After all, if pilots get better through flight simulators, and studies show that gamers make better surgeons, then it stands to reason that years of basement video-game playing could translate into real-life football, right?

Cognitive scientists have published a series of studies demonstrating that playing fast-paced action videogames — mostly first-person shooters like Call of Duty and Halo — can alter “some of the fundamental aspects of visual attention,” as a paper published in the July 2009 issue of Neuropsychologia put it. By training on these games, researchers found, nongamers can achieve faster reaction time, improved hand-eye coordination, and greatly increased ability to process multiple stimuli. Studies have demonstrated that military pilots and laparoscopic surgeons can improve their professional skills by playing videogames. It’s not much of a leap to think that athletes could, too.

There are limits to how much virtual training will be able to boost on-field performance, of course. Don’t expect football to follow on the heels of poker, a game in which Internet-trained players have upended the professional cartel. (Chris Moneymaker won’t be quarterbacking the Titans next year.) A better analogy for virtual training could be weight lifting: It’s an activity that won’t turn you into a professional athlete, but if you are one, it will make you better at your sport. And once everyone starts doing it, you’ll need to do it regularly to remain competitive.

Plus, you don’t need to inject steroids into your teammate’s ass to make them a better gamer.

I would say something smart-alecky about Suellentrop’s thesis… except that I agree with it. Suellentrop has plenty of supporters, including pro athletes, in his story. But I’ve seen it work in my own kids.

When my oldest son, now 12, first signed up for baseball, he didn’t know much about the rules of the game — but he learned them quickly, thanks to a preseason of playing Backyard Baseball. He’s not tall enough or strong enough to stand out playing basketball — he didn’t make his seventh-grade team. But I can’t help but think that his strongest suit — quick, thread-the-needle passing — is helped by his years of gaming. If he can figure out how to snake through a zombie-infested subway in Left 4 Dead while also being aware of his teammates’ position, it makes sense that he can make a quick decision with the ball when his teammates are surrounded.

Where I see games translating to real life the most is in my 7-year-old son’s bowling league. First, the whole reason he got interested in bowling is because of Wii Sports. But he, and his teammates, have learned to adjust their starting positions and throws because of Wii bowling. And then it circles back, with my son using real bowling to help position himself on Wii bowling. And then using what he learned from that applied back to Wii bowling.

So if your kids are spending a lot of time playing video games — don’t freak out!

Dave Daubenmire is the most successful high school football coach in America at running his offense out of the wingnut formation.

Since 1999, when he got canned from London (Ohio) High School following a lawsuit over his bringing his extreme religion into the classroom and the locker room, Daubenmire has become a right-wing media star, with multiple appearances in his ever-present cross cap on such standard who-loves-America-the-most shows such as Hannity.

Daubenmire, who as football coach at Fairfield Christian Academy in Lancaster, Ohio, can preach to the converted all he wants without the mean ol’ ACLU getting in the way, wants to fight the evil godless government from within, having filed to run as a Republican for the House of Representatives seat held by Democrat Zack Space, one of Daubenmire’s many mortal enemies.

From the Chillicothe Gazette:

Daubenmire said the time is right for a conservative grass-roots campaign to succeed, especially in a district dominated by Republican presidential candidate John McCain in the 2008 election.

“I could run as an independent, but I don’t want to do that,” Daubenmire said [Jan. 28] on his radio show on WLRY, in Rushville. “I’m convinced whoever wins the Republican primary will be the next elected representative in the 18th District.

“(Space) is not even a Blue Dog. We have the most traitorous Democrat, Zack Space, in that position.”

Daubenmire used his radio show to blast the president and the policies of the Democrat-controlled Congress.

“I don’t think we understand the depth of the evil that is involved in the American government,” Daubenmire said.

“We watch the president of the United States. If he is under demonic control, we watch him on TV and we are hypnotized and drawn to him and how articulate he is. We say he’d never do that or that would never happen. What are the limits of the depths of evil of the evil one? How evil could his minions be?”

The … coach said on the radio show he was still undecided about entering the race, saying he would be assaulted by news media and portrayed as an idiot.

“The question I’m struggling with, I guess, I don’t know, is who better than me to grab the sword of the spirit and go into the devil’s lair and swing that sword,” Daubenmire said.

Here is video of Daubenmire swinging his sword in a sit-in outside Space’s home office in Dover, Ohio. He vowed to sit there until Space had a town hall meeting on health system reform, specifically one involving Daubenmire personally. (Space did have meetings, though none involving the coach.)

If Daubenmire sounds like he’s moved beyond Christianity into delusion, it’s because he has. In his personal bio, Daubenmire notes he started his Pass the Salt ministry after a great victory over the American Civil Liberties Union. It sued the London City Schools on behalf of parents complaining that Daubenmire required players to participate in team prayer, and preached during practice and during class. The case was settled the day before it was supposed to go to court in 1999, and Daubenmire was fired. Here is how Daubenmire recalls the ending:

After a two year battle for his 1st amendment rights and a determination to not back down, the ACLU relented and offered coach an out of court settlement. God honored his stand and the ACLU backed off. Coach’s courageous stand, an inspiration to Americans everywhere, demonstrated that the ACLU can be defeated.

And here is the ACLU’s recollection, in a release whose title begins ACLU Declares Victory:

The settlement, which ACLU attorneys have been quietly negotiating with lawyers for the district and the coaches since early last month, prohibits future acts of religious indoctrination and establishes a system for reporting violations of the agreement to the United States District Court in Columbus [also, for two years any violations had to be reported to the ACLU]. …

[T]he London School Board voted unanimously to accept the terms offered by the ACLU.

Daubenmire also never mentioned that he sued the complaining parents for defamation — and lost.

Of course, Daubenmire has a long history of using the ACLU’s scorn and other people’s disapproval as the fuel for his holy fire, and I don’t mean the one he set when he publicly burned a copy of the Koran. Like his good buddy Alan Keyes, Daubenmire uses his runs for office (he also ran unsucessfully for the Ohio State Board of Education in 2004) to bring more attention to his own activities, and get himself more time on Fox News.

In fact, Daubenmire, as he hinted above, is running as a Republican out of expediency, not out of love for the party. He probably is insulted that the Chillcothe Gazette referred to him as a conservative, given out of his jeremiads: “Let Conservatism Die.”

Meanwhile, the modern “conservative” movement awakened by Barry Goldwater, carried up the mountain by Ronald Reagan, preached over the airwaves by Limbaugh and Hannity [editor's note: great way to guarantee future apperances on their programs], and destroyed by GW Bush and the Republican Party is still being called “conservatism” by those on both the winning and the losing side.

… [C]onservatives went “compassionate” (which really meant compromised) and sold Christianity down the river; Only Christians aren’t smart enough to realize it. They still vote the way “conservatives” Hannity and Limbaugh tell them to, because, after all, they are “conservatives” too. Christianity and conservativism are not the same thing.

… You wouldn’t have to look very far into the “conservative” Republican Party to find the fornicators, covetous, idolators, railers, drunkards, or extortioners. Just look at the guest list at a Republican fundraiser. Those “conservatives” are the one’s [sic] that our Christian leadership are breaking bread with inside the big Republican tent. Is it any wonder they have lost? Has the Republican Party compromised their position to advance the standards of Jesus or has the Christian leadership compromised on the standards of our Savior to advance Republican candidates? … Let conservatism die.

I’m not sure the coach’s offensive activities will get him elected, but they certainly will score points with a certain amount of the electorate — the ones who enjoy watching their politics run out of the wingnut formation.

David Sills says it’s always been his dream to play football at USC, and good for him that new coach Lane Kiffin is fulfilling it by offering him a scholarship. The catch is that Sills can’t use it for another five years, what with him only being in the seventh grade.

I mean, you hear of kids graduating early so they can go to spring practice before their freshmen year, but I’m not sure Sills can finish his high school courses before the end of junior high.

Sills is a 6-foot, 145-pound seventh-grader who is, presumably, talented, and also well-known within the youth sports-industrial complex. Kiffin heard of the Delaware native when he got a tape from Steve Clarkson, a quarterback guru who students have included current USC quarterback Matt Barkley, who started last season as a freshman (slacker). From the Los Angeles Times:

Clarkson said he phoned Kiffin on Thursday to inform him that one of his pupils, Santa Ana Mater Dei quarterback Max Wittek, had received a scholarship offer from Florida.

“While we were talking, I said, ‘I’m going to give you the scoop on a kid,’ ” Clarkson said.

Clarkson told Kiffin that the 6-foot, 145-pound Sills might be better than Clausen or Barkley, who started 12 games for USC in 2009. Then he instructed Kiffin to watch a video of Sills on his website.

“He calls back . . . after going through all the NCAA stuff, and says, ‘I’m prepared to offer this a kid a scholarship right now. Will he commit?’ ” Clarkson said.

I don’t know if this is THE highlight tape Clarkson sent Kiffin, but Clarkson did put together this Sills highlight video.

Ditto.

By the way, this is not the first time Lane Kiffin’s name has been linked to a barely-into-puberty commitment. In his one year at Tennessee, Kiffin offered a scholarship to 13-year-old quarterback/safety Evan Berry, whose father and brother had also played at the school. While he was an assistant at USC, Kiffin made an offer to a then freshman-in-high-school-quarterback — Barkley, who by happenstance will be Kiffin’s starting quarterback now that he’s back at USC.

Current Indianapolis Colts head coach Jim Caldwell, while head coach at Wake Forest, offered a scholarship to quarterback Chris Leak when he was in the eighth grade. And it’s not just football. In 2008, Kentucky’s then-head basketball coach, Billy Gillespie, made waves by offering a full ride to California eighth-grader Michael Avery.

As ridiculous as recruiting pint-sized prospects sounds, I understand how it happens. For the school, it gets an early lock on an elite athlete, well before anyone else even thinks of recruiting him. For the athlete, the offer amounts to a sure thing that, in theory, will keep other coaches at bay and let them develop in less of a recruiting hothouse.

Of course, nothing ever really goes as planned. Leak decommitted from Wake Forest after his older brother, recruited in a naked attempt to get Leak himself, transferred. (Leak ended up at Florida.) When Gillespie was fired after the 2008-09 season, Avery decommitted, enrolled in a private high school in Florida, joined an AAU team in Indiana, and put himself back on the open market. (No word yet on whether Berry changed his mind after Kiffin left Tennessee for USC.)

There’s always the risk, too, that the athlete doesn’t develop as expected, or gets hurt. Leak was a star at Florida, but he topped out at six feet — not an elite size for a quarterback. Sills’ highlight tape looks great, but until a letter of intent is offered and signed, Kiffin can pull his offer at any time if Sills doesn’t grow much more, or breaks his arm, or develops a drug habit, or whatever peril can happen in the next five years.

But these early, early commitment go a long way toward explaining why you can find lists of the best fourth-grade basketball players in the nation. For competitive reasons, coaches are compelled to scout, and project, younger and younger players.

By the way, the NCAA followed Avery’s early commitment by, in early 2009, declaring seventh- and eighth-graders male basketball players “prospective athletes,” meaning schools could not recruit them. There is no indication yet that the same clamps will be put on football coaches.

In advance of Feb. 3’s National Signing Day, college football’s orgasm to the child porn that is the recruiting watch, the Houston Chronicle’s Jenny Dial asked a question. Just what are your kid’s chances of getting a scholarship, anyway?

If you didn’t read her story (or see it on Youth Sports Parents — hat tip your way), then in the afterglow of signing day, with the sweet throb of the fax machine still faintly pulsating, you’ll get an instant cold shower from her answer: almost nil.

You would think it’s generally understood that the odds are long. But Dial’s excellent piece makes you wonder if, as a means of future earnings potential, parents should buy lottery tickets instead of paying big bucks for travel teams and private lessons. The chance of success is about the same, and so is the usual justification — you can’t win if you don’t play.

How do we know the odds are so long? Dial took numbers from the National Federation of State High School Associations on school sports participation, then took numbers from the NCAA on the number of scholarships awarded to Division I athletes, and did the math. The numbers might not be 100 percent accurate: they don’t count kids who play at elite club levels only (increasingly common), and they don’t count kids who might have gotten scholarships to NCAA Division II or NAIA institutions. But those figures would probably not move the needle much one way or the other.

So, without further adieu, the percentage of high school athletes in the class of 2008 (the latest figures available) who got Division I athletic scholarships nationwide, in alphabetical order by sport:

Baseball: 0.6

Boys basketball: 0.7

Girls basketball: 0.9

Boys cross country/track and field: 0.5

Girls cross country/track and field: 0.9

Football: 1.4

Boys golf: 0.6

Girls golf: 1.6

Boys soccer: 0.4

Girls soccer: 1

Softball: 0.7

Boys swimming and diving: 0.8

Girls swimming and diving: 1.2

Boys tennis: 0.6

Girls tennis: 1.1

Volleyball: 0.8

Boys wrestling: 0.3

Man, I think you get better odds from the lottery ticket.

Your odds are 1 in 300 for this lottery.

Dial also talked to parents to see what they spent on sports. Golf parents spent the most: about $11,000 per year. A lot of sports fell in the $2,000-$5,000 range. Football parents spent the least, about $300 a year for offseason expenses. Football is relatively cheap because, unlike every other high school sport, you’re also not duty-bound to join a travel or elite team in addition to your school team in order to get college recruiters’ attention. However, you can rack up expenses paying for all-star camps and Nike-sponsored combines that require you to jet around nationwide to get the attention of your top football schools.

And for what? Not only are the chances of a scholarship tiny, but Dial’s survey included partial scholarships. Every athlete is not getting a four-year free ride. In most sports (mainly, outside of football and basketball), just about everyone is getting only half, or one-quarter, or less covered in tuition expenses — if they’re getting a scholarship at all to play.

This is not to say that you should immediately dump your kid’s golf clubs in the nearest water hazard. If you and your child love the youth sports lifestyle, and you’ve got the money to spend, then have fun. But if you’ve got a hard-on for a college scholarship, chances are that on National Signing Day, you’re going to be limp with disappointment.