Why do they yell at refs and even worse the other team? Most of the time these are children playing. I have my own thoughts on this. First let me tell you about coaching my son’s third grade basketball team. There was a draft. However, the best two players’ dad’s coached together so they had their sons on the team. There were rules for playing the players so it would be even, coaches found loopholes. There was a rule that you couldn’t keep score, they did anyway. Why? Because they actually cared who won or lost a third-grade basketball game. This blows my mind. Most of the parents who coached and almost certainly all the parents in the stands never played. They never were taught teamwork. They never stepped on a field in a tournament, a championship, they never had the opportunity themselves to succeed or fail and so their son or daughter is doing it for them. In third grade. I never once allowed the score to be kept. If a player committed a foul, we told them what they did wrong and gave them the ball back, because it’s about learning. “So do we count that basket?” I asked the other coaches, it’s absolutely ludicrous to care about the score in a third-grade game! But they don’t know, they don’t know that the kids will have more fun without their interference. That the players who are competitive will always be competitive and some may continue playing but for so many at that young age it’s an after-school activity for fun. And that is all it should be. The parents get in the way of living vicariously through a third graders sport. It is appalling and unfortunately, I don’t believe they understand the harm they are doing.
They make their children feel inadequate because they aren’t good enough, or because the team loses. Or worse they over inflate their ego because they are good and the team wins. The largest trophy I’ve ever seen was for little league baseball. LITTLE LEAGUE. And the parents let their son bring it into school never thinking how unsporting that was because they don’t know. They don’t know about sportsmanship, winning gracefully, because they didn’t play, and they didn’t learn it themselves.
I coached so many sports and stood on the sidelines as my kids played in high school, where I believe it should be competitive. However, it is a sport, it is not life or death. I was fortunate to play in college (3 sports) and to go to a national tournament. It was very, very important to me but what was more important was the lessons that my coach taught me. Life lessons that shaped me into the adult I became. Lessons that helped me get my first job, have a career, and later to hold tournaments. Lessons about teamwork, leadership, respect for authority, dedication, commitment, goal orientation, time management, and how to win and lose gracefully. They are lessons that shape who you are and at the end of the day that is what sports is about. They are a metaphor for life and they can instill confidence and self worth. But those lessons must be taught.
And the parents on the sidelines yelling at 8-year-old were never taught them. They never had the opportunity to learn what I was fortunate enough to learn. Playing in a national tournament was so very important to me but I would never injure another player, cheat, or be disrespectful win or lose. You have standards that you hold and it doesn’t matter if you lose because that will always happen. It will happen on a court or a field and it will happen in life and it doesn’t matter what happens to you it’s what you do when it happens.
These lessons can begin to be taught to 8-year-old (or younger) and they are what matters not the game. Third grade basketball is a blast, they double dribble, they walk, they are learning. Every year I coached I sent an email to the parents. It went something like this: My first priority is to keep your children safe, second is to make sure they have fun, I will try to teach them some basic skills and I will try to teach the game to some degree. I will make sure everyone is treated the same and everyone respects one another, and I will try to teach some life lessons if possible. Never did I mention winning, it just isn’t important at that level.
My greatest moment coaching, in my opinion, was the same third grade team. One of the boys came off the court crying. His teammates were yelling at him and saying not nice things. I called a time out and explained that was unacceptable. You all are teammates and teammates support one another. We never say anything bad about a teammate. In fact, we never say anything bad about anyone on the court. Never anything bad about the other team, but most certainly never to a teammate. And the next practice we went over that in much greater detail. Most of those boys didn’t play in middle school, none of them played in high school. But if they took just that one lesson away from playing rec basketball I am satisfied.