Wichita officer tries to coach coaches on dealing with belligerent parents at youth games

Quincy Best coaches eighth-grade boys on a team called the Cowboys in the Greater Wichita Junior Football League.

He’s now reached the point where he fears for people’s safety at games, he said.

Where a gunshot can get fired at games.

Where a coach like him got beat up after a practice at Linwood Park in south Wichita.

Nobody involved in running things is doing enough, he said. Tempers flare; supercompetitive parents demand that their children play more. The league lets some people get away with too much, he said.

Best listened politely on Wednesday as Wichita Police Officer Larry Carlson led a talk in the City Council chambers involving 100 people, many of them coaches from the junior league.

On Sept. 8, a group of people beat up the coach of a fourth-grade team because the mother of a former player thought he had prevented her son from playing in the season opener for another team.

The coach’s wife pulled a gun and fired a warning shot to scare off attackers.

Carlson thought he’d seen a lot, he said, as a police officer and as a 39-year-old youth league coach of one rank or another since age 15. He’d seen parents yell profanity at games, loud enough for the kids to hear. Parents at some games have run onto fields.

On Wednesday, he coached the coaches about heading off confrontations.

“Start today – have that meeting, decide now that this is where this problem stops,” Carlson said. “To me, this is no different than speeding on Kellogg. … Speeding on Kellogg goes on constantly until all of a sudden, officers set up speed traps and write 5,000 tickets in a month. After that, the speed limit is 60, but everybody’s driving 55.”

Tell parents during preseason practices that disruptive parents will be held accountable, kicked out of games, suspended for games or seasons or banned from the league if they act out, Carlson said.

Always be respectful. “Keep your ego out of it. Always understand that the league wouldn’t even exist without the parents,” Carlson said.

“Call the police” if that doesn’t curb confrontations, he said.

The coaches listened. But some said those precautions are not enough.

Best, an assistant coach, stood up and said he didn’t feel safe at the games, that the league wasn’t doing enough.

“My thing is, they kind of said it isn’t really the parents’ fault,” Best said after the meeting. “But why hasn’t something been done with the parent who started this (the confrontation on Sept. 8)? Those people wouldn’t have done what they did if the parent hadn’t said something.”

He likes coaching football, he said, but the league has become so competitive. Many parents in it seem to think their children will someday play in the National Football League, he said.

Other coaches said during the meeting that they didn’t think Wichita police have responded fast enough when called in the past.

Carlson tried to help. He pointed out that league directors were sitting in the audience. He displayed his own cellphone number and an e-mail he can access on his phone, all on a video screen in the room.

To the coach who questioned police response times, he cracked a joke, which most people chuckled at: He said the police department is actively recruiting new officers, and anyone is welcome to apply.

Best said the strange thing about all this is that the children involved, the first- through eighth-grade players, almost never have any problems with each other, whether they win or lose, whether a player plays a lot or plays only a little.

“Stuff like this, it’s never the kids,” Best said. “It’s always the parents.”

This story was originally published September 24, 2014 at 8:30 PM with the headline "Wichita officer tries to coach coaches on dealing with belligerent parents at youth games."