The following appeared in a letter to the editor of the Parkville Daily newspaper. "Throughout the country last year, as more and more children below the age of nine participated in youth-league sports, over 40,000 of these young players suffered injuries

The author in the text above presents some arguments based on stated or implied assumptions in order to justify and support the need of stopping athletic activities in Parkville. However, his conclusion is based on several ambiguous and invalid assumptions.

First of all, the author's statement that young players suffer from injuries is really equivocal, given that we do not know if this number can be considered as a representative result of the total number of players. More specifically, 40,000 injured players is an insignificant number if there are 1 million players in total. Therefore, more details about the total number of players must be given in order to draw a conclusion. Moreover, we do not know the severity of their injuries. For instance, among those 40,000 players almost all of them might have suffered a mild injure that can be ignored. Therefore, unless those players were not harmed this assumption cannot back the author's argument.

Secondly, the author’s implication that the opinion of some players, who were suffering from psychological pressure represent the view of all the players might be mistaken and misleading. To be more precise, we do not know the number of players that were being asked, because those players might hold the same view as only the 2 percent of all the players, while the 98 percent enjoys playing soccer and does not experience any problems. Thus, more details about the interview must be given, in order to consider this assumption as valid.

Finally, expressing the view of some education experts, the author suggests that the time kids spend practicing might supplant other academic activities, thus supporting the need of terminating any athletic competition for kids under nine. However, this assumption is very ambiguous because it implies that there might be a certain amount of children under nine that will choose to use their free time for academic activities, but without providing any concrete evidences, hence weaken his assumption by making it questionable and open to more than one interpretations.. For example, one can claim that those kids will spent their free time staying indoors, thus becoming inactive. Consequently, unless the author provides us with some sort of survey or evidences this assumption cannot be considered as valid.

In conclusion, the need of taking some measures in order to ensure the safety of children that participate in athletic activities is essential. However, the author reaches a conclusion by taking as granted unsupported assumptions. As the assumptions are not buttressed with any evidence, the author’s argument cannot be tenable.