Passionate parents can mean trouble for youth sports

The problem with kids who play sports is that they have parents.

And the problem with those parents is that they tend to show up at their kids’ games.

Parents and youth sports games aren’t always a good mix, say coaches, league officials and others in the Wichita area who have spent a lot of time trying to help kids learn about exercise, teamwork and the other positive values that sports can teach.

Ed Scarry, who has been a coach and team director in the Greater Wichita Junior Football League for 27 years, remembers the time a bunch of parents spit on his son’s team and called them names as the team tried to leave a local park after beating their team.

That happened 20 years ago.

“If I could take the parent aspect out of Little League football, everything would run great,” he said.

The role of parents in youth sports came into focus again last week after a GWJFL coach was attacked Monday night by a group of men at a practice at Linwood Park, prompting the brandishing of firearms by the parties involved and the coach’s wife firing a shot into the air. The incident remains under police investigation.

The team’s director has said the incident started when the mother of a former player confronted the coach over her son not being allowed to play in the season opener Sept. 6.

‘Helicopter parents’

The goal of youth participation in sports is to promote lifelong physical activity and healthy competition, officials said, but too often adults approach their kids’ games with their own goals, such as fame, money, Olympic medals and college scholarships.

Scarry said he’s had parents of grade-school kids demand that he let their sons carry the football more often to get a scholarship.

“They think their kid is an All-American. And he’s a fourth-grader,” Scarry said. “I think parents need to lay back a little bit and just let their kids be kids.”

Gregg Heinzmann, director of the Youth Sports Research Council in the Department of Exercise Sciences and Sports Studies at Rutgers University, would agree.

He said some parents who meddle in their kids’ sports games think they’re not being good parents unless they are advocating for their children around the clock. Parents who do that – “helicopter parents,” he calls them – are sending a message to their kids that they aren’t smart enough or capable of making their own decisions, which hurts the children later in life when they have to join the real world.

“The advice we try to give parents is, ‘It’s their life, let them live it. You have to give them the opportunity to fail in order for them to understand what success is,’” Heinzmann said.

Problems in youth sports often arise out of lack of communication between leagues, coaches and parents about rules, expectations and conduct. Those need to be established before competition begins, he said. Parents should know how to communicate grievances with coaches and not let them fester.

And leagues need to have mechanisms in place to hold people accountable for violating their codes of conduct, Heinzmann said.

Codes of conduct

Leagues in the Wichita area tend to have those.

Darrin Regier, president of the Mid-States Junior Football League, which has teams for first- through sixth-graders in 36 area communities, said his group has directors at every game to keep an eye on things, including bad behavior.

“We just don’t tolerate it,” he said.

Information about any incident is included on a weekly newsletter sent to all the directors, Regier said. The measure is a powerful deterrent because “everyone in the league is going to know about it,” he said.

If a coach doesn’t shake hands with the opposing coach after the game, the rest of the league is going to know about it. If parents are bickering in the stands, the league will hear about it.

“We try to be as public as possible to discourage these things,” Regier said. “We’re not bashful about it.”

At the same time, he added, what happened at Linwood Park could happen anywhere.

“You can’t completely stop that behavior,” he said. “A perfect game scenario would be a field with a glass enclosure around it. Parents could yell all they want, but the kids, coaches and refs don’t have to hear it.”

Vic Boydo, president of Sedgwick County Soccer Association, said the organization has policies in place handed down from official sanctioning bodies such as the Kansas State Youth Soccer Association, U.S. Youth Soccer Association, U.S. Soccer Federation and Federation International of Football Association.

The policies send a strong message to everyone participating in the league.

“Any event that takes place at our soccer complex is subject to the rules laid out in both our Operations Manual for coaches, as well as the FIFA Laws of the Game that referees are trained to enforce,” Boydo said in an e-mail to The Eagle.

Coaching certification through Kansas Youth Soccer and the Kansas State Referee Development Program stresses the importance of good behavior on and off the field. All team officials also are subject to a background check.

“Spectators, players, and coaches are expected to respect each other and even bad language, spitting and, of course, physical abuse is subject to disciplinary actions including game suspensions, banning from the league and monetary fines,” Boydo said.

Spectators’ offensive behavior can cause a team to have to forfeit a game or be suspended from the league.

The city’s Park and Recreation Department, which sponsors the GWJFL, requires parents to sign a code of conduct. Interim director Marty Miller said he doesn’t know whether those involved in last week’s incident at Linwood Park signed the document.

“What we’re trying to provide is a place for kids to learn about sportsmanship, as well as about sports,” Miller said. “And we would certainly hope their parents would be examples of good sportsmanship.”

‘Here for the kids’

Sometimes sports leagues have to take a hard look at themselves to see whether they’re fostering an environment that encourages emotional eruptions.

Westurban Baseball is one of the city’s oldest sports organizations and currently has about 2,000 players competing 70 to 80 nights each year. Eric Blasdel has been associated with the league for 25 years in some capacity, including as a coach and board president.

When he took over as general manager in 2001, Blasdel said, “We had such a reputation citywide of win-at-all-costs. We’ve tried to develop the mantra that we’re here about the kids, and we’re here to develop kids.

“Coaches are getting a sense of that. Coaches still want to win; that’s why they’re keeping score. But there’s more kids can get out of playing sports than getting a trophy.”

Westurban parents are required to sign a document outlining a code of conduct. Sportsmanship is stressed at preseason meetings with coaches, Blasdel said.

He was well aware of the incident at Linwood Park.

“I have to follow a lot of that real close,” he said. “We try to learn from what everyone else is going through.”

Blasdel estimated that 10 years ago the league saw 35 to 40 coaches ejected from games each year. Now the number is about 10.

“So they seem to be focusing on, ‘Hey, we’re here for the kids,’” he said. “You’re not doing your kids any good to get ejected.”

An ejection draws an automatic one-game suspension for the coach. A parent who is kicked out of the league’s complex is suspended for three games.

“Our biggest problems are always with parents,” Blasdel said. Usually one or two parents draw a suspension each year, he added.

Several league directors are at the complex during games, monitoring behavior.

He sees the coaches and parents just as passionate and says they “have the same capacity to say and do stupid things” as they always have. Coaches have become better at drawing the line, he added.

As for fans, Blasdel said, “People seem to be far more willing to make it a bigger deal than in the past.”

“We’ve never had anyone confront someone with a gun,” he added, “ but it goes from being an argument to a fight. I’ve had a handful of fights over the last 10 to 15 years.”

Most misbehaving parents tone it down after a league official talks to them, he said.

“They don’t realize how idiotic they sound when they’re out there yelling,” Blasdel said. “Sometimes they let their emotions get the best of them.”

Kids are watching

League organizers and coaches said taking preventive measures is the best way to minimize problems. That includes meeting with parents before the start of a season to address everything from playing time to proper conduct at games.

“We always told everybody, if you’re not happy with playing time, wait until Sunday or Monday, send an e-mail, come talk to the coach,” said Jeff Blubaugh, a Wichita City Council member who spent four years coaching a Goddard football team in the Mid-States league. “Don’t ever talk about it right after the game.

“Always try to keep it out of the earshot of the kids. These are adult conversations, and I don’t think they should be happening in front of the kids.”

Blubaugh said he also understood how his conduct on the sidelines could fuel volatile reactions in the stands.

“I never reacted to anything on the sidelines,” he said, “because anything I do is going to be on steroids from the parents.”

The kids are also watching.

“They are very easily influenced,” Blubaugh said. “If a coach is throwing a fit and being violent, you’re just telling the kids, this is how you resolve problems when you’re an adult.”

Travis Lankford, team director of the Raiders’ GWJFL team, coaches one of the teams and has been in the league for 14 years. He agreed that negative attitudes of parents rub off on their children.

“If their parents don’t act right, the kids won’t act right,” he said.

And football, a collision sport in which kids are supposed to hit kids on the playing field, can bring out bad behavior in parents, he said.

“Parents are a whole different world,” Lankford said. “I tell my parents during parent meetings, ‘I’m out here for kids, not for you.’”

A lot of them buy into that, he said. Some don’t.

As director of sports initiatives for the Greater Wichita YMCA, Josh Whitson oversees youth teams in numerous sports that have 20,000 to 25,000 kids participating annually. Whitson said that before every YMCA game, players from both teams gather to recite out loud together a pledge that stresses sportsmanship.

“We say it loud enough so fans can hear,” he added.

While that helps set the tone, coaches also are asked to hold parent meetings to talk about what is expected at games. That has helped, Whitson said.

But it’s also about having staff trained at games to “look, listen and feel” for potential problems.

“It’s being on the front half and not the back half,” Whitson said. “If you have parents that are really vocal, hopefully it’s, ‘That’s a great job, Johnny.’ But if it’s not, there’s probably an issue.

“It’s much about trying to do what you can to stop it ahead of time because people get carried away in a game. If you just let a game go, it’s going to carry the emotions with it.”

Once a problem is spotted, a staff member tries to address it with the fan or coach. If that doesn’t work, the person is booted from the premises.

Whitson estimated that the Y has had to talk to a coach or fan about their behavior only once or twice a year for each sport.

Matt Flaming, executive director of Mid-America Youth Basketball, which holds tournaments in the Midwest that draw 30,000 to 40,000 youths, plus thousands more parents, said the games have experienced parents yelling, and maybe a few confrontations that fall short of fighting, but nothing worse. MAYB provides plenty of supervision at games to diffuse situations before they escalate, he said.

Those supervisors haven’t been formally trained to do that. But in light of the Linwood Park incident, the league may provide instruction on what to watch for, Flaming said.

League 42 is a baseball organization that was formed last year to give inner-city kids a chance to play the sport. But that initiative has meant more than teaching youths how to hit, field and throw.

Parents also are instructed that the league is about sportsmanship, fair play and participation, said Bob Lutz, a sports columnist at The Eagle who also is the league’s founder and board chairman.

“Our parents are aware of how much we stress sportsmanship,” he said. “We talk to them about it. We’re front and center about it.”

League volunteers also are at every game. If a parent does get too rowdy, he said, “We talk to them, we try to calm them down. We try not to be heavy-handed about it.

“We try to develop relationships with parents so they’re on the same page and understand what this league is about. It’s important to communicate that on a consistent basis.”

Problems increasing?

Lankford, the Raiders team director, said he thinks parental attitudes have gone downhill. He hears more comments from parents toward kids, coaches and officials at football games now than he used to.

They complain about playing time, coaching techniques and bad calls by officials, he said. He’s seen fights between parents and coaches throughout the league, and heard of a large scuffle involving parents of kids who were on the same team after a game a few years ago.

Scarry, assistant director of the Gators, said he and other coaches in the organization patrol the sidelines of their teams’ games to watch out for problem parents in the stands and cool them off before matters get out of hand. Trouble most often comes from parents who don’t attend practices regularly and are surprised and angry on Saturday when their kid isn’t playing, he said.

As the father of two daughters active in sports, Mike Anderson has seen his share of parents become outraged at games. His oldest daughter, now a freshman at Bishop Carroll High School, is on an elite-level softball team that plays weekend tournaments.

“You see the occasional over-the-top parents – I don’t know if they’re trying to live vicariously through their kids – who are way out of order,” he said.

But he doesn’t see the problem as any worse today than it was when his daughter started playing T-ball.

“You always see parents who are out of line,” Anderson said.

Whitson, of the YMCA, said the level of improper behavior at games is “no different than it was 20 years ago. It’s just getting more publicity.”

Ray Staats, who, along with his brother, Tom, spent decades coaching and serving as leaders of Biddy basketball, said publicity has helped the situation. He saw behavior improving before he stepped down from the program in 2008.

“Probably the Internet and mass media on a national scale are responsible for making it a better situation,” he said. “Things that would have been dealt with on a local level and forgotten about in the past are now subject to national scrutiny.”

While some league organizers may cringe at what they consider to be negative publicity, Staats said, “Things like that need to be brought to light so there can be discussions. It makes people more aware of their own actions.”

Playing time is frequently a source for conflict between parents and coaches. Most leagues have specific rules requiring each child see a certain amount of playing time.

But Staats said he always reminded parents that children’s physical abilities blossom at a different pace.

“Some kids develop sooner,” he said. “If you’re a lucky parent, your child will develop later and pass up ones who develop sooner.

“You have to be patient and wait until those things come to fruition. But in any event, conduct yourself in a professional manner.”

This story was originally published September 13, 2014 at 6:21 PM with the headline "Passionate parents can mean trouble for youth sports."