Trail Life USA Celebrates 10 Years of Picking Up Where BSA Left Offhttps://pjmedia.com/culture/athena-thorne/2023/09/10/trail-life-usa-celebrates-10-years-of-picking-up-where-bsa-left-off-n1725825Ten years ago, as the iconic youth organization Boy Scouts of America (BSA) kicked its self-immolation into high gear, a group of prescient leaders joined together to contemplate forming an alternative program for boys. Or perhaps a better way of phrasing it is that these leaders wanted to preserve what BSA had always been, as the original group abandoned its principles to morph into an alternative organization. At any rate, the result was the creation of Trail Life USA.
In May of 2013, BSA voted to drop its membership restriction against openly gay Scouts. Four months later, in September 2013, the first ever Trail Life USA convention was held in Nashville, Tenn., and the group has enjoyed steady growth ever since.
It looks like those early organizers made the right move: BSA has since completely diverged from its traditionalist roots. Openly gay leaders were okayed in 2015. At the beginning of 2017, the organization opened its tent flaps to “transgender boys.” (On a personal note, that was the point at which I quit any involvement in the organization, even though our local chapter was solid. I have a personal policy against giving time or treasure to woke organizations.) By the fall of the same year, the last great boys-only youth program announced girls would soon be allowed to join. In February 2019, girls were officially admitted, and the name Boy Scouts of America was jettisoned in favor of the more inclusive Scouts BSA.
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“Now, 10 years later, [Trail Life USA] is the largest boy-focused, Christ-centered scouting organization in the country,” announced the organization in a press release on Thursday. “Last May, Trail Life announced it had officially chartered its 1,000th local chapter with more than 50,000 members in all 50 states.”
Back before the lawsuit againt BSA was not yet decided - BSA won, their surrender came later in response to nothing - my son's BSA troop had a "poison-pill" plan in place, to shut down if BSA lost. When BSA surrendered, the troop was among the first in the nation to become a Trail Life troop. In the previous 20 or 25 years, the troop had had quite a few boys earn Eagle rank, and the troop had fairly high standards.
