PARENT TRAP : To Coaches’ Dismay,the Biased Inputof Mothers and Fathers Impacts the Fortunes : of High School Teams

They cheer wildly and offer nothing but praise and encouragement. They send chills of pride and happiness through their children and they support the coach in anything he or she does. And when the game is over, they hug and kiss and spread a blanket of joy over all they come in contact with.

But they also rant and rave and bellow obscenities. They loudly proclaim their belief that maybe someone dropped the coach onto his head from a rooftop during his childhood and that now, because of that, the coach occupies the same slot on the biological chart as a garden slug.

They are the parents of young athletes.

“Ninety-five percent of the parents are very good and very supportive of their children and the program,” said Bill Redell, football coach at Crespi High. “But the other 5% can cause absolute misery. The bad ones, those 5%, can destroy you and your program. Those 5% are my biggest problem in coaching, above all other problems. These people can hurt you.”

They can hurt a program by speaking of the coach in such negative terms that they eventually convince their child that the coach ranks somewhere between Charles Manson and Attila the Hun on the social scale and that the team and the athletic program would be better off if they were run by crazed monkeys. And there’s a special place for a team full of players who think their coach is an absolute jerk. It’s called last place.

“Parents can tear down in a short period of time what it took a coach a long time to build,” Redell said. “When kids hear real negative stuff about the coach and the program from their parents, they believe them. They listen to their parents.”

Redell and other coaches insist, however, that while the ranting, bug-eyed parents are the ones who can make their hair stand on end, the vast majority of the parents are, well, normal. And that it is that overwhelming majority who make the long hours and low pay of high school coaching worthwhile.

Pat Johnson’s son, Brett, plays football for Crespi. He is not a starter, yet his father is pointed out by Redell as one of the good parents, the kind that Redell would like to clone and fill the stands with.

“I coached Pop Warner football for 20 years, and I coached Brett,” said Johnson, holder of a black belt in karate and the technical adviser for the “Karate Kid” movies. “But I stay in the background and just provide moral support for Brett and the team. Sometimes I find myself wanting to stand and yell and scream, and I have to fight to keep that in. But I go to Brett’s practices and to the games and I just sit and watch. I am there just to show my son that I support him and that I am there for him. Everything he does matters to me, and I always want to make sure he knows that.”

Not all parents have Johnson’s attitude, however.

“The kids get embarrassed and actually ashamed of their parents,” said Steve Landress, the football coach at Cleveland High. “On the level of varsity football, these aren’t kids, they are young men. And yet when their parents behave poorly at games, they get so humiliated and upset. It really rocks them.”

The criticism comes in many forms. A common type is the back-stabber, the parent who tells the coach how much he likes him and then tells everyone else that a public execution of the coach would be too nice.

“One guy would talk to me like he was my best friend,” Taft basketball Coach Jim Woodard said, “but when he was behind my back at a game, he’d rip me apart. I never heard it, but the other parents would always tell me what he was saying up there, blasting me, telling everyone what a jerk I was. Then he’d come to me during the week and tell me what a great job I was doing with the team. I’d just smile at him. That guy was hurting me and my team real bad.”

A less common but more menacing problem for a coach comes in the form of a large parent with bad plans for a coach’s face. It doesn’t happen often, but coaches seldom forget it.

Landress recalled such an incident at Cleveland a decade ago, when he was an assistant under Coach Frank Carito.

“We had a father come out of the stands during a game and challenge Frank to a fistfight,” Landress said. “Frank was about 5-6 and this guy must have been 6-5. The guy had his fists up, ready to pound on Frank because his kid wasn’t playing enough. We got him away but then he followed Frank into the locker room after the game. We had to pull him out of there.”

The most common problem for a coach comes from a parent, usually the father, bellowing words from the stands that would embarrass a coal miner. Women, children and especially the coach be damned. Redell, who has been around football his entire life, including a stint as a professional player in the Canadian Football League, is still shocked by some of the streams of obscenities directed at him during games.

“I’ve heard people say things you wouldn’t believe,” he said.

Such criticism can take a player, or a whole team, out of a game faster than a knee injury.

“Sometimes we all hear the real bad stuff from the stands,” said Brett Johnson, the Crespi player. “We usually try to ignore it because we know how much it hurts the team’s morale. We’re trying our best, and you hear someone’s father screaming out really nasty things about coach or about some of us or about the whole school, and it really gets to you.”

Still, coaches find a way to laugh at the ugliness.

“One time a group of parents behind our bench is screaming, ‘Get rid of the coach, get rid of the coach, “ Woodard said. “I turn around and my wife is in the middle of them and she’s screaming along with them. She doesn’t want me to coach.”

While a parent’s displeasure can surface in several forms, the source of the displeasure is nearly always the same: their child is not playing enough.

“I’ve had three sons play football for me, and I understand the situation,” Redell said. “One of my own sons didn’t get into a game for three weeks in a row. It made me feel lousy and it also made my wife feel lousy. She didn’t yell at me from the stands during the game, though. She waited until I got home.”

Many of the problem parents have trouble judging their child’s talent objectively .

“The hardest part for a parent is to . . . see their son playing football and grasp the reality of how good he is,” Landress said. “We all think our sons are Rolls-Royces. But the reality of it is, some of our sons are Chevys, and it’s tough for parents to admit that to themselves.”

Redell agrees. “The problem is parents with unrealistic attitudes about their son’s ability,” he said. “I’m the one who has to tell them, either in words or by not getting the kid onto the football field very often, that their son is just not as good as the other kids here, that their son is not up to par with some of the others. And it’s a tough thing to hear.

“But I also try very hard to tell them this: I have never coached a bad kid at Crespi. Never. I’ve had lots of kids who couldn’t play football, but I’ve never had a bad kid. But that isn’t enough for some parents.”

Landress, however, has as many tales of happiness as woe. Many of his players come from the inner city, transferred from South-Central Los Angeles to Reseda as part of the desegregation program.

“The parents of a lot of our players don’t get to see their sons play football,” Landress said. “But then we go to Banning, like we did last year, and now the kids are back in their old neighborhoods and their parents can make it to the game. And I see kids just come alive.

“Some of the kids might lay down a little quicker when no one is really there to watch them. But the humiliation of losing in front of your mother or father, or the great joy in playing well in front of them, is unbelievable. They will fight to the death. I saw a tremendous pride in our young men that day.

“And after the game the parents are on the field hugging their kids and picking them up and swinging them around and kids are crying and parents are crying. That was a great, great night. Having mom and dad there to see you do well and having them hug you and hugging them back, well, words can’t describe it. I have some pretty tough young men on my team. Kids from tough places. But after the game they kind of melted.”

And for most parents, the ones Redell calls the good ones, having a son score the winning touchdown isn’t a requirement for a hug. Johnson, whose son practices hard but seldom plays in games, said there’s something more important.

“It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t play,” Johnson said, “as long as he’s happy and he’s having a positive experience. As long as Brett is seeing the importance of sportsmanship and fair play, then I couldn’t be happier for him.”

And Brett Johnson knows that his father is always there to watch and to support. And not to bellow.

“He’s always been there. Always,” he said. “Having him there is so good. He gives me such a boost. All the guys on the team know if their fathers are there or not. Some of them hate to admit it, like it’s not cool to be looking around for your father, but they all know and they all care. We’re all trying to do well and impress them and make them proud.”

Some don’t get that chance. Sean Burwell of Cleveland High doesn’t have to check the stands before a football game. Terry Burwell drowned in 1982 when he dived from a fishing boat to save his young son--Sean--who had fallen overboard.

“During games, I try not to think about dad. I just try to think about winning,” he said. “After the game, though, I think about it. When I get home after a game, that’s when it hits me the hardest. My mind wanders to that day, the day it happened, and I really wish he was here to see me play. But he’s not.”

Sean’s mother, Sharon, has learned a lot about football since her husband’s death. She has tried valiantly to fill the void. But football has long been a game of fathers and their sons.

“I know Sean misses him all the time,” she said, “but I really see it before and after football games. They always went to games together and came home together. I know Sean misses him so much then. Terry should be there with him. But he’s not, and that hurts Sean more than he can tell you.”