TheBanyanTree: For the Love of the Game

[Margaret R. Kramer]

There was an article in our newspaper a few weeks ago about youth hockey . .
. “referees rushing off the ice for their safety . . . spectators fighting
in the stands . . . parents berating coaches over playing time . . . kids
skating away from the game because it isn’t fun anymore.”

The article delved into the problems with youth hockey.  Kids being asked to
give up holiday and weekend time to practice.  Families asked to postpone
vacations in order for their children to participate in tournaments.  Kids
being expected to give up participating in other sports because hockey is
now a full year commitment.  Political decisions are made regarding coaches
and teams and players.

What happened to clearing off some snow on the pond, putting a couple of
rocks down for a goal, and slapping an old, beat-up puck around with a few
friends?

Like everything else, the baby boomer generation has taken a simple concept
like kids’ sports and made it into a competitive, winner takes all activity.
The days of going down to the park with a wooden bat, a smelly old glove,
and using rocks for bases are long gone.  Does anyone ever see a ball field
in a park ever being used for fun?  No, if the field is being used, it’s
because there’s some kind of game going on with parents surrounding the
field in lawn chairs and umpires carefully negotiating calling balls and
strikes.

I never participated in sports as a girl, partly because I’m very
uncoordinated and was always the last person picked for any type of team in
grade school, and partly because there weren’t too many opportunities for
girls’ sports.  We had more physical education classes back then than they
do now, so I learned to play soccer, field hockey, basketball, volleyball,
and gymnastics as part of my school curriculum.  But I wasn’t any good in
them, and there weren’t any organized teams between high schools except for
gymnastics.  Just before I graduated from high school, they organized girls’
track teams to compete against each other.

My son was very athletic.  He played baseball, football, basketball, and
participated on the track and field team, and wrestled.  He was coordinated
and the first picked for any team.  Physical education classes were
beginning to be cut from school programs to save money, so physical activity
was moving from the schools’ responsibility to families and sports team
participation.

What happens to the kids who like me and are not very coordinated?  They’re
left out of the system and vegetate in front of TVs and video game screens
and gain weight.

My son flourished in the system and began his sports career playing on a
T-ball team.  All the parents would come to watch their kids play.  All the
parents came to practices.  All the parents were encouraging.

He began to play football in fourth grade and that’s when we started to see
changes.  His team was OK.  The coaches kept things in perspective and from
what I remember were pretty good about rotating kids in during a game.  At
that age, a lot of the positions are determined by weight and not ability.
Basically, it makes the game fair, so you don’t have a heavier kid playing
against a smaller kid and then crushing him.

But there was one coach on a different team who tried to run his little
fourth grade team like a professional operation.  The kids had to march onto
the field.  They had all these weird choreographed warm-up routines.  And
the coach screamed endlessly during the game.  Even if his players were
doing well, he still kept constantly screaming at them.  I guess during one
game, he ended up slapping a kid when the kid made a mistake, and was
removed from coaching.  Duh!

In 1987 the Minnesota Twins won the World Series for the first time.  The
following spring, every kid in town went out for baseball.  I loved going to
kids’ baseball games on a hot summer night.  I can’t think of anything more
delightful to do than watch a game while the sun is setting, drinking a cold
pop, and listening to the ping of the metal bat.

Except for the loud mouthed parents!!!!!  Some parents felt their kids would
be the next reincarnation of Kirby Puckett, so they tried to manage their
kids’ playing times, screamed at the coaches and the umpires, wore out
talented pitching arms, and basically ruined the whole experience for
everyone.

I remember during one game, these parents would stand behind their son while
he was playing third base, and yell at him the whole time.  I can hear it
now, “Micah, do that.  Micah, do this.”  Then when poor Micah was at bat,
they would stand behind the backstop yelling at him, too.  How long do you
think Micah played baseball?

My son quit baseball in sixth grade.  Neither one of us could stand the
parents.

Back to football . . . As the kids got older, less parents came to the
games.  I guess it’s cute and fun when they’re little, but when the
competition gets tougher, it’s easier to stay at home and watch TV than it
is to support your kid playing sports.  But some of the parents who did
come, were way over obsessed with youth football.  They just couldn’t shut
their mouths and let the kids play.  The hassled the coaches, the referees,
the kids, and other parents.

My son’s team was a champion one year, I believe it was when he was in
seventh grade.  During one of the play-off games, his team was beating the
other team pretty bad.  It was one of those games that aren’t even fun to
watch, because the talent level was so lopsided.  Some of the parents from
our team began taunting the parents from the other team, and a fist fight
broke out.  The kids on the field stopped playing and watched their parents
going at it in the stands.  What a great example for young children.

Then we have basketball . . . that’s where all the money is, right?  Well,
where there’s money, there’s fighting for playing time, for traveling teams,
for tournaments, for coaches, for talent.  Basketball is as bad as hockey.

There was one parent who was on disability, but able-bodied enough to go to
every practice and try to run the team without being the coach.  The kids
finally banded together and got him removed from trying to coach and from
practices.  But in the stands, he would scream at the referees, at kids from
the other team, at the coaches from the other, and on several occasions,
almost started a riot.

One thing about football, I didn’t have to sit with the other parents.  The
stands and the fields were big enough that I could sit apart from the
loudmouths and enjoy the game without listening to the BS.  But with
basketball, especially youth basketball, we were crowded into small gyms and
had to sit close together.  I know my blood pressure soared at times
listening to these people, a lot of them who had never played any kind of
sport, give misguided advice to their children.

There were two acts of violence during my son’s basketball career which
stretched through his senior year of high school.  One was after a game at
the end of Christmas break.  The kids in the stands were restless and my son
’s team beat their team on free throws.  There were no police officers at
the game and usually there always was an officer at all the high school
games.

As my son’s team was boarding the bus to go back to their high school, some
of those restless kids fought their way on the bus and threatened the bus
driver with a glass bottle and basically hijacked the bus.  The suckered
punch my son and then one of my son’s teammates punched them and the chase
was on.  Somehow the bus driver managed to get the kids off the bus and get
the basketball team to their school safely.

But the kids’ friends were following along in a car, so they picked up their
friends, and followed the bus to the school, and waited in the parking lot.
When my son and some kids he was taking home pulled out of the parking lot,
those kids followed him, so he drove like a maniac, and lost them.  He went
a friends’ house and called us, and we got my son and his friends home
safely.

I reported the incident to the police, to the athletic director, to the
principal, to everyone.  The next day the newspaper read, “Basketball player
beaten on bus.”  No one ever asked my son for details, so the story wasn’t
exactly right.  But, you know, when we played another game at that school,
there still wasn’t a police officer there.  Oh, well.

Another act of violence occurred during a tense game, it was JV, so my son
was a sophomore, and our team won the game on a last second shot or else a
free throw.  The game was at my son’s high school.  The other team’s coach
had a fit and started screaming at the referees and wouldn’t shake hands
with our team, although his players did.  The team began to go into the
locker room, and then the coach came out screaming again, and suddenly the
teams were fighting and fans came out of the stands fighting and it was a
riot.  There were police officers there and they got things quieted down
pretty quickly.  I called the athletic director about that coach, but he was
still coaching the next year.  Oh, well.

I could go on and on about organized athletics.  My son was a good player, a
team captain of any team he was on, and never a showboat.  But some parents
have turned athletics into a mess.  There are good people involved in
sports, but sometimes they get swallowed up by the bad ones.  And it’s not
just hockey that these things occur in, it’s all sports.  I think hockey
gets picked on because parents have to fork out so much money for their to
kids to play.

I’ve learned from watching so many games that you can send your kids to
camps, have them practice by the hour, have them play one sport year round,
but if your kid doesn’t have the genetic capability to be a top athlete, it
isn’t going to happen no matter what you do.  You can’t manage genetics.
That’s the bottom line.

Parents need to accept that some kids are average or below average and will
never be a professional athlete or get a scholarship.  Every kid should play
for the love of the game, not because their parents have some misguided
ideas about glory on the athletic field.

Margaret R. Kramer
margaretkramer at comcast.net

http://www.polarispublications.com
Be a star!

http://www.bpwmn.org
Business and Professional Women of Minnesota

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.
--Aristotle