There is no instinct more powerful than the urge to protect one’s children. But that impulse increasingly conflicts with the desire to dress them up in helmets and pads and send them crashing into one another. Not many confrontations between parents end up with someone getting killed, luckily. But school and youth-sports officials agree that incidents of sports rage involving players, coaches, officials and parents are rising year by year. “We’re hearing about incidents from our 2,200 chapters constantly,” says Fred Engh, president of the National Alliance for Youth Sports. In response to the growing mayhem, the 19,000-member National Association of Sports Officials recently began offering assault insurance and legal assistance to its members. Recognizing that troubled parents are at the root of the problem, leagues have instituted mandatory adult classes in sportsmanship, set aside “Silent Saturdays” when people in the stands are forbidden to speak–or, in a few places, banned spectators altogether.
Something like that might have prevented the embarrassing episode in Amherst, N.H., a few weeks ago when two soccer parents came to blows after one allegedly slapped the other’s wife. According to one of the men, David Mallard of Cranston, R.I., the incident began when his wife, Sharon, heard another mother urging her son to “push off” the opposing players–an effective way to control the ball if the ref doesn’t notice. (Mallard and the other man, James Palmieri, have both pleaded not guilty to charges of disorderly conduct and simple assault.) But even if there’s no one in the stands, there are coaches. Last fall a soccer referee in Florida was head-butted by the coach of a team of 13-year-olds, suffering a broken nose; the coach was sentenced to seven days in jail. In Alvin, Texas, last month, a coach who was ejected from a game returned in his police sergeant’s uniform, followed the umpire’s car out of the parking lot and wrote him up for a spurious illegal turn. The umpire, protesting, started an investigation that resulted in a demotion for the cop.
No one can say for sure why these incidents are becoming more common. New York sports psychologist Stanley Teitelbaum attributes it to the general decline in civility. “Fan rage, road rage, air rage–it’s all part of the same phenomenon,” he theorizes. Fans can become murderously violent over games played by strangers. How much more so when it’s their own flesh and blood at bat, and nothing less than a lifelong reputation as a winner–or loser–at stake? “When you see your child at the plate with two outs, terrible emotions arise,” says Engh. “Your blood curdles with the fear that your child will be upset or hurt if they don’t succeed.” And it’s not just happiness at stake. Increasingly, parents consider youth sports an entree to the fabulous rewards of a professional sports career, or even the more modest ones of a college scholarship. “Parents act like this is an investment in their kids’ educations,” says Jeff Leslie, president of a Jupiter, Fla., organization that enrolls 6,000 children and teenagers in eight sports, including wrestling and cheerleading.
In response to a growing number of “inappropriate incidents,” Leslie’s organization instituted a mandatory sportsmanship class, based on a program devised by the Parents Association for Youth Sports, of West Palm Beach, Fla. Parents watch a 30-minute video on civility and are required to sign the league’s code of behavior. “It was a little eerie at the first few games,” Leslie says. “Parents were asking us, ‘Can we yell?’ We said, yes, you can yell, but only say nice things to the kids.”
And there are places where you can’t even yell, at least on certain days. One is Anne Arundel County, Md., where referee abuse was threatening the basketball season. “It was hard for us to get officials for our games–even 8- to 10-year-olds’ games –because they were so abused by parents and coaches,” says Georgette Shalhoup, a recreation supervisor. So officials declared a Silent Saturday: a day in which the entire basketball schedule was played in total silence by everyone except players and referees. It hasn’t been repeated, but the mere example of it was sufficient to keep parents in line for the rest of the season, Shalhoup reports. Some of them, she admits, were a little peeved at the exercise, but the absence of bloodshed was worth the price–especially after what happened in a Massachusetts skating rink not long ago.
