Shaun Pugh & the PIS thread closed below

As a long time  member of this community, I have to somewhat agree.

Although this place really should not be about complaining and whining, but about learning, I tend to think that many just beginning this journey are very naive, this a perfect example of the bad and ugly of the business of baseball.

FWIW, I want to add that this has nothing to do with coaches not renewing scholarships, or over recruiting.  This was a crime that was committed and we should be able to discuss this to help protect parents who take their hard earned money and get scammed, not to mention PIS who seems to be a stand up guy with no intent to hurt anyone.

JMO

As a relative newcomer who learned a lot from people on this site, I tend to agree too.   This is about as clear a case of an operator people should be alerted to avoid as I can imagine.

Maybe it needs to get posted as an example of what can happen - maybe with a title that would allow later folks to locate through a generic search.  Maybe something like "Managing Team Money - Beware of Scams".  Hopefully this guy won't get away with it somewhere else but I have to believe that it happens every year - maybe not to this extent but maybe more along the lines of "shaving" some funds off the top.  Always good to see a budget going in along with a recap after the fact - a mid-season report is also a nice touch.

I thought CD's decision to close but not delete was a reasonable approach.

We don't want this site to become a clearinghouse of grievances against travel programs because in >90% of the cases we would be unable to evaluate the claims. 

Because Rich's claim was backed up by the link to news coverage it had an extra measure of credibility, which is why I suppose CD let it stay up.  

However, that extra measure of credibility also made his post unnecessary.  This guy's reputation is already forever trashed. As he gets ground up and spit out by the justice system, Google will report more and more adverse information on him--enough to scare away even the most starry-eyed baseball dad. So Rich's post was basically a late hit after the whistle--I personally did not see the point.

Even so, the point raised by Redbird and others about the role of this site in educating newcomers is also valid.  We don't want to shy away from the issue of consumer fraud, but we can't become the BBB, and we sure don't want the unvalidated ratings problems of Yelp.

I would be  comfortable with having one or more threads that gave case studies of the kinds of scams baseball parents should be alert for--without naming names and getting us into the messy business of dealing with people demanding retractions or rebuttals.

Maybe a new category of post is in order.  

Buyer Beware.  Known Scams.

that sort of thing. 

Wouldn't want to open it up to mere speculation that could make the owners of this board liable for possible defamation charges.  But things that people come across that are clearly establish, written up in the newspaper, or settle in court and not just complaints on the basis of non-public and unverifiable information, would be worth alerting the members of this community to, IMHO.

Google only keeps things relevant at the top of their searches.  I know of 2 instances where googling the specific name and offense (which occurred 4 years ago) produced zero  results even though every local major news outlet reported on it.  Certainly, we do not want to get into airing out travel ball grievances but I would think that we would want a Buyer Beware, especially since it happened to one of our sponsors.

Shaun Pugh means nothing to 99.999 percent of our members.  

We are not contending the underlying grievance of the original post.  What we don't want is for these types of threads to find a home here on the hsbbweb.  There are other types of venues (I forgot to mention small claims court in my previous post) open to dealing with the Shaun Pugh's of the world.  Use them and not the hsbbweb.  This thread is closed.