Playing fast and loose with boundary rules is a pretty common tactic in youth and high school sports. The Little League World Series, like nearly all national tournaments in any sport, is set up by geographic areas, with local tournaments feeding into state and regional tournaments, so there has to be some way to split things up geographically to prevent exactly what seems to have happened here - creating a "best of" team that has inherent advantages over other teams that choose to observe the rules.
And according to Mark Mulder, former major league pitcher, the JRW team has been doing this for at least 20-25 years that he knows of:
JRW little league has been cheating and doing things the wrong way since I played them as a kid. Sad that those kids are taught that's ok.
— Mark Mulder (@markmulder20) February 11, 2015 But that didn't stop the bitching and whining about getting caught cheating, by all the usual suspects: a random mom, and Jesse Jackson, and Father Pfleger. The usual racist bullshit from the usual racist suspects is getting so old, and so tiresome, and I refuse to indulge their lowest common denominator idiocy by reprinting any of their blather here (but here is a good summary at Second City Cop: Baseball or DEATH!)
The children players did what they should do - play baseball, mostly, although it strains the imagination to believe that none of the kids knew anything about some of their players being ineligible. Still, they are not at fault, and cannot be, since they are (were) all 12 years old. The adults have to bear all of the blame here, a point made forcefully and convincingly by Laurence Holmes on 670 The Score. He happens to be a black man, who not only grew up in the neighborhood represented by the JRW team - in theory at least - he played for the team as a kid. He has stayed involved, and supports them financially today. So his credibility here is extremely high, unlike some of the clowns pushing each other out of the way, to get in front of the cameras, to show how outraged they are that the powers that be at LLWS had the gall to impose a punishment on a team that broke the rules.
Paying a price for breaking rules. Even for an all-black team. What will they think of next?
The Holmes monologue linked above (it's about 12 minutes long and well worth the time, please give it a listen) gets it exactly right: the adults that broke the rules are the bad guys here. And those adults are despicable because they used these these kids by intentionally breaking rules in order to win, and now instead of accepting blame and showing contrition and accountability for their actions, and turning embarrassment into a teachable moment, and providing actual leadership, they want to blame everybody and everything but themselves.