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Published: March 10, 2008
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EmailBack about a decade ago, when all the political wonks were talking about soccer moms and their voting power, I saw my destiny: Mini van, two kids, lots of sports, not enough time. What I didn’t see was me biting my tongue.
I should have. I grew up living across the street from my community’s Little League field. My parents sponsored a softball team. I begged my way onto the Mighty Mites team when I was six, after I missed the sign ups. I later played on my parents’ softball team, which lost every game and I, too scared to really try, was a big part of those losses. I listened to my mom vent after a family friend pulled my brother from batting lineup when it was crunch time in his baseball game. She had a right to be mad: Unlike me, he was good. But she didn’t say anything to the family friend or anyone else beside me. I still think about that day – and I wonder if she does, too. What you see at sports competitions stays with you, especially when your loved ones are involved, but what exactly you’ll remember depends on who you are and how you view life.
Cindy from Great Bridge knows that sometimes normal people go berserk. She has three daughters, all teens, who play softball, volleyball and field hockey. Practices are daily for some sports, three times weekly for others, and the girls also go for extra instruction at a sports training facility. If her husband weren’t retired and in charge of much of the sports transportation, Cindy wonders if she might go crazy herself trying to drive the kids back and forth and keep their schedules straight. To simplify things a little, she insists that her twin daughters play the same sport so there’s not yet another place to drive to every weekday and weekend.So she knows help is necessary in “sports” families – and so is a willingness to shop for the right league for your child. Her choice: City recreation leagues, where competition seems less intense. “It’s more tame,” she says of the level of play. Although, the parents seem worse. “Everyone thinks their kids are the best,” Cindy continues. “You know, they question why their child isn’t playing or why the coach did this or that. The parents are way too involved.”
And Cindy isn’t pointing the finger only at other parents. “I question decisions, too. I try to start off by saying ‘the coach must have a reason,’ but what he’s doing doesn’t make sense,” she says. She thinks this might be so involved mentally because she used to be a cheerleader and not a competitor like her daughters.“I’m pretty sure I push a little harder because I wish I had played,” she confesses. Wanting your children to do well, whether or not you did so when you were young, is a common emotion for parents. I watched my daughter play soccer a few years ago, and she wasn’t that into it. She did what she had to and listened to the coach, but I didn’t see much enthusiasm on the field or the sidelines. Very, very much like me and softball. I decided to say nothing and let her decide what was important to her and where she should give her effort. She had an OK time, won most of the games and loved the big trophy she (and all the league’s players!) got at the end of the season. The smile I saw when she received the trophy was probably the biggest one she shared during the season.My friend Tina, who plays on a softball team herself for the social aspect and also likes the way her kids have made friends through sports, does not approve of every sport giving every child a trophy at the end of the season. “The philosophy that everyone is a winner – there are no losers -- is creating a generation of complacent kids who are not working hard enough to really win,” she says. “In real life, it’s not that way. You will win or lose. You’ll get the job or you won’t; you’ll pass or fail. They need to be taught there are winners and losers and the harder you work, the more you can impact your success. We’re now so worried about a child feeling disappointed. It’s part of life, a normal emotion.” Many parents do want their children to learn something as well as have fun. My friends Diane and Mary echoed Cindy’s feelings about searching for an appropriate league where growth and enjoyment are possible. “We purposely looked for a baseball league that has a good balance between fun and learning the fundamentals,” Diane told me,” “without being overly competitive or demanding on the kids.” Mary had a great experience with AYSO soccer but not nearly as nice with another league in another sport so she decided to stay away in the future. I heard many comments like that while researching this story. My friend Deb told me about a sports team that would never play her son. She might have understood if the other players had been far superior but that wasn’t the case: The team lost every single game. Adding to her frustration was the fact that the games started at 7:30 p.m. – and her son wouldn’t get home until 9:30 on school nights. Tina told me about a coach in coach-pitch baseball, which really shouldn’t be all that serious, screaming at kids and getting in the referee’s and other coaches’ faces.
“It was on the other team, so I watched and was thinking ‘get a life,” she says. “Had it been my son, or my team, there would have been no words that would have escaped me. I probably would have been thrown off the field.”Cindy recalls one softball coach screaming at a player during a SCRIMMAGE game.
“It was something about her not seeing his signal to bunt,” Cindy says. “I think he kept yelling ‘I told you to BUNT, BUNT, BUNT.’ The coach’s wife was screaming at him to stop screaming and my daughter told me she was so confused. The coach happened to be next to her because he was on the third base line and she was playing the field. She started thinking she had done something wrong. She told me she was about to walk off the field herself because she was so scared.”
What made the situation even more odd is that the man is usually so normal and so nice. “We still talk about how weird that was,” Mary says. Who knows what was going on with that coach on that particular day. Being a coach or a team mom gives you a different perspective on the workings of local sports and just what it takes to keep a league running successfully, the parents happy and the young athletes playing. It’s not an easy job.Kimberly from Virginia Beach is my very energetic friend with an equally energetic husband who serves as a team coach and a league board member. She jokes that she’s a baseball/basketball widow from February until October every year.
“As a coach’s wife, I don’t believe that the parents have any idea of the amount of time and effort that the coaches and board members give to the leagues,” she says. One thing that she sees adding to problems and “attitudes” with parents is fundraising. “They feel like they’re being asked for money every time they turn around,” she says. Her league did what my son’s did this year – and I’m so thankful for it (yes, I guess I’m one of those parents with an attitude about those #@!%*%$ fundraisers!): They upped their registration fees and eliminated the fundraisers. I paid about what I pay for monthly drum lesson but that’s not so bad for 12 weeks of baseball. “We hope this adds to a good vibe and a more enjoyable season for everyone involved,” Kimberly told me. She and her husband have been fortunate to experience mostly good vibes in the past, though:“One of the best experiences we have had was when a mom came up to my husband at the end of the season and thanked him for the respect he gives to each of the kids and said how her son had left the season loving the sport and with a lot of confidence in himself (something he did not have at the start),” Kimberly shared. “She knew her son was not the best on the field – but my husband as his coach made every kid feel like he was the best player on his team. Steve was truly touched and said that if that was that child’s experience, then he had done his job right.”
And thankfully, there are other coaches -- and sidelined parents -- out there who are willing to help the kids. One of Kimberly’s best and worst moments watching sports came when her son was playing in a baseball tournament. Playing third base, he took a hard line drive to his head and went down immediately. “They wouldn’t let me near him because it was so bad,” she says. “All present that day agree that it was one of the worst hits they had ever seen. We were very lucky that we had two surgeons on our team to help. We rushed him to the emergency room and it all turned out OK.”Diane fondly remembers the coach who took a personal interest in one player’s family. He saw that the player’s brother looked to be the right age for the baseball league but wasn’t playing. When he learned that the boy was visually impaired and couldn’t play, he decided to make him bat boy, complete with his own uniform. The child was thankful and thrilled.
Another coach responded positively when Diane’s son was up to bat at the young age of 4. He struck out and someone in the stands said “let him run anyway.” Young Ryan ran all the bases and the crowd all cheered him on. “The look on his face was like he had hit a home run,” Diane remembers many years later. Magical moments like that happen – sometimes with a lot of luck. Mary said her son’s most thrilling play to date probably happened by accident. He was standing at the pitcher’s mound during T-ball, when the kids don’t actually pitch but pretend to so that they can understand how the game works. After “pitching,” her son stood there and a line-drive ball smacked into his glove. “I don’t think he or the players knew it happened,” Mary says, “but the crowd was cheering and best of all, his grandfather was there to see it.”
