How Parents Are Poisoning Youth Sports

The weekend brimmed with promise. A dog dashes in feverish circles in the middle of one soccer pitch. On the next field, parents knock a ball around before the opening whistle of their boys’ match.

The fall sky spreads out wide and blue over the Burbank fields, a glorious setting for Baton Rouge’s largest soccer tournament, United Cup 2006. But by the end of this October weekend, Baton Rouge Soccer Association Director Gary Buete will have witnessed just about the worst run of poor behavior by parents he’s ever seen.

It bordered on “unbearable,” Buete says, right up to the finish, including the Under-15 division championship.

“Parents were screaming at the ref that he ‘f—ing sucked,’” Buete says. “The referee told parents the game would be cancelled unless someone stood up and took the blame. Not until he was kicking out the entire sidelines did a man finally stand.” When this man would not entirely leave the field, a field marshal and tournament director had to escort him off and then return to the game to keep order.

After another match, local parent Brenda Spicer watched another parent trail a referee across an entire field, hurling insults all the way. Two other referees had to run interference. At another, when a teen player working as an assistant ref made an offside call, an adult spectator yelled, “Child, you suck.” The center official had the spectator escorted from the area.

And in yet another incident, parents began derisively calling one youth referee with long hair “Jesus.”

Last year, disgraceful displays by parents of athletes made for shocking CNN video and led to some high-profile arrests from California to Florida.

The ugly reality is Baton Rouge has its own problem with parents capable of vicious verbal attacks and lack of self-control at football stadiums, basketball gyms, swim meets and pretty much anywhere children are competing.

Sore losers

By age 13, a third of all youth athletes quit organized sports because they’re no longer having fun. According to Philadelphia-based sports psychologist Joel Fish, the intensity many parents bring to youth sports is a buzz-kill for kids expected to live up to extreme expectations, or live through parental tirades directed at them, their coaches or officials working the match.

“I’ve spoken to parents across the country, and they all nod when I say we don’t want to push a kid too far. But something happens when we see them get up to hit the ball. It’s emotional,” says Fish, who wrote 101 Ways to Be a Terrific Sports Parent. The vast majority of parents who push kids to the burnout or dropout stage have all the best intentions, he says.

Of course there are those few. Fish estimates 15% to 20% of parents have questionable motives.

One Baton Rouge tennis player experienced it firsthand recently.

In youth tennis, court monitors can’t be on hand for every two-person match, so the competitors themselves make calls on balls that are in or out.

Parents in the stands should know better than to weigh in, but a girl from Arkansas and her courtside mother didn’t hold back at a competitive match in Mobile, Ala.

After uttering a steady stream of complaints about line calls, the opposing mom and daughter both called a 16-year-old Baton Rougean a “bitch” in the presence of her coach. “They were sore losers and felt my daughter cheated them out of the match,” says the mom, who asked not to be identified. “Even though the match score was not even close at 6-2, 6-1.”

The fuel that turns so many parents from spectators to screaming participants is their own desperate desire for their child to succeed.

In his experience as director of the Girls Club volleyball program, Volleyball Baton Rouge, local sports journalist (and 225 contributor) Lee Feinswog has gone so far as to develop several catch phrases to chill over-eager parents. “You’re starting to care too much. Take it down a notch,” is a favorite.

Although quick to defend the majority of his volleyball parents, he concedes he gets his share of headaches. One of the main problems Feinswog sees: “The kids usually are not as good as the parents think they are.”

When the team loses, instead of accepting that their own kid stunk it up, some parents get angry and blame others—the coach, referee, other players, Feinswog says.

They’ll complain about playing time and position for their child, or that the coach chose the wrong players for each position. They’ll gripe, “Why didn’t the setter execute right?” Feinswog’s answer to all of it: “Because they’re kids! And it’s okay for kids to screw up.”

Feinswog says parents of adolescents generally fall into two groups: enablers and blamers.

“They seem to forget the reason they’re successful as adults is because of the failures and obstacles they’ve overcome. Everyone has failed a class, been fired from a job, didn’t make the team, didn’t make the cut. And we’re all better for it. It’s mind-boggling that this lesson is lost on so many parents—that it’s okay for their kids to lose.”

In 24 years as head baseball coach at Parkview Baptist, Coach M.L. Woodruff has seen parents sit behind home plate when their son was pitching, accusing the umpire of being blind on close calls. These same parents are nowhere to be found if another pitcher is on the mound, he notes.

Woodruff has also seen parents—usually the ones who have never played baseball before—yell instructions at their sons even as they’re trying to concentrate on a pitch. “Get your hand higher. Watch the ball.”

“Parents want to protect their kid from failing,” Woodruff says. “They want to control and manipulate what’s going on in the field. It doesn’t make them a bad parent—but in the middle of a game, the kid has a hard time reacting to this.”

When things aren’t going well for a team, you see more of them, he says. “Everyone practices the blame game; it’s never their kid’s fault.”

Parental pressure

For some parents, the high-stakes pressure of their children’s performance causes them to come unglued. It may be the money and time invested in a child’s athletics, or the heavy weight of future dreams.

“We’re seeing parents get enraged at any call deemed to be unfair against their team because it could impact a chance to get a high rank to qualify for the big tournaments and compete for that college scholarship,” says Baton Rouge Soccer’s Buete.

The youth sports landscape is nothing like it was in 1976, 1986 or even 1996. Parents have to make different kinds of decisions now, says Fish. Parents fear that if a child doesn’t choose the fast track—specializing in one sport, playing year-round or playing up an age bracket—he will fall behind. This leads them to push their kids too hard.

Parkview’s Woodruff understands what the parents feel—he’s a parent himself, and he’s had to police his own over-coaching tendency with his son, Al. And he knows sometimes, good parents just lose it. A guy may have had a bad day and finally snap at his son’s baseball game. “Pressure reveals who we are,” Woodruff says.

Sometimes the parent feels pressure not related to sports at all, observes Feinswog.

“It’s not coincidental that problems from parents at a youth sporting event come along at the same time that there might be problems at home—turmoil over a parental illness, job loss or job stress, the youngster having trouble at school,” he says.

Everywhere you look

Baton Rouge is not alone, nor does it have a national black eye from recent extreme violent parent behavior, as does California, where a parent attacked an opposing youth football player in September, and Missouri, where a sheriff’s deputy had to use a stun gun on an a St. Louis-area parent resisting arrest at a youth football game in October.

And overzealous sports parents were around way before Nike Shox and even titanium golf clubs.

Russ Carson, LSU assistant professor of sports pedagogy, recalled a dad storming onto the field years ago when he played Little League. But these days, attention lavished on youth sports at times can seem to approach professional-level entertainment. High school state championship games in multiple boys and girls sports are now shown statewide on cable television. Carson would not be surprised to see a high school sports channel pop up in the next five to 10 years.

Whether watching on TV or in the bleachers, parents often forget the athletes are just kids. “A parent might think, ‘Gosh, the whole neighborhood or town is here. I want my kid to look good,’” Carson says. “He may view his kid’s performance as a reflection of him as parent.”

“I do think the importance people place on sports and performance is growing,” says Edward R. Hirt of Indiana’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

“Parents discuss their kids’ performance to others as if it is a direct reflection on them as parents or as people, to the point where the ‘one-upmanship’ gets really tiresome. I’m not sure this is a new phenomenon, but it seems as if people are more obsessed with it these days than ever before—what colleges their kids go to, what travel or all-star teams their kids play on,” Hirt says.

Professional sports aren’t a sterling role model for children and teens, with fights and disputed calls routine in most professional sports. Images on ESPN such as last fall’s football brawl in Miami fuels bad parental behavior, Fish says. “We tend to model what we see on TV.”

Should parents be policed?

Buete says he’s had enough. He is looking into a zero-tolerance policy for Baton Rouge Soccer for poorly behaved parents. Such a measure could include installing roaming monitors at the soccer fields specifically on the lookout for offenders.

In a recent letter to the Louisiana Soccer Association, Soccer Referee Association of Baton Rouge President Hadi Shirazi called for new statewide rules. He wants to require that coaches supply the names of unruly parents; adopt uniform statewide procedures to follow when a person is asked to leave; impose mandatory monitoring on known “problem” teams; and require parents to attend a sportsmanship and rules clinic.

“In the years of my refereeing, parent behavior has gotten worse. In every game, every week, we have incidents with the parents in youth games,” Shirazi says.

Louisiana does have a law concerning attacks on sports officials actively engaged in officiating a school or recreation athletic contest. The penalty is a $500 fine and 48 hours to six months in jail, or five days of community service. Still, too many offenders slip through the cracks, say Shirazi.

Woodruff believes the solution to poor parent conduct lies in education. His “Dugout Club” tries before each season to set expectations for Parkview Baptist parents and athletes. The school has a handbook that spells out expected behaviors, and when anyone, even a parent, digresses, it’s considered a black eye for the school.

Woodruff makes sure to let parents know at the Dugout Club that their $3 game entry gives them the right to see the game, not to harass the officials. “I used to think I only coached kids; the older I get, the more I see I should be coaching the parents.”

Mark Goodner, who for the past 10 years has run Youth Baseball Baton Rouge, believes he has seen enough parental antics to justify his league’s careful selection process. YBBR holds a tournament for younger, non-league teams that Goodner sees both as a goodwill gesture and an opportunity to find those teams that best fit the league’s temperament.

Not long ago, Goodner had to physically restrain several parents who had run onto the field to argue a simple call at second-base during one of these non-league tournament games. “That’s when I called the police. This team just wasn’t used to getting beat,” he says. No one on that team received an invitation to join YBBR.

“We pick the coaches; they pick the teams. I’ve had more problems telling a team they cannot be in the league. It tells me I chose correctly,” Goodner says.

Although the league has a two-strikes-and-you’re-out policy for cussing, he can think of only one instance it had to be enforced. Like Woodruff, he works hard to educate his parents, visiting each team at their opening game and laying down the law. He tells parents, “Pick up your trash; positive cheerlead for your team—do not cheer against the other team; and respect the umpires.”