Coaching Isn’t Kid Stuff Anymore

On a Monday night in early spring, 40 men and women waited patiently at Rockville, Md., City Hall to be fingerprinted. A police officer brought them in, one by one, to a small cement-block room.

The people fingerprinted were there not because they had broken the law. They just wanted to coach kids baseball.

It has come to this in youth sports in the United States. Extraordinary preparations, including a background check with the FBI and local police, are now part of the education of a coach. Why? In extreme cases, because it is a more dangerous world for children. But lesser problems abound, most notably the fact that coaches must deal with misbehaving parents-and must control their own tempers-because sports have become such an overwhelming metaphor for life in our society.

What’s happening in Rockville is not unusual. It is happening in many other communities around the country. And it’s not only fingerprinting; there’s sensitivity training, coaching clinics and training for coaches in many non-athletic activities, including first aid, safety, nutrition and anti-drug programs.

“The time has arrived,” said Fred Engh, president and chief executive officer of the National Youth Sports Coaches Association (NYSCA), which he founded in 1981 in West Palm Beach, Fla., after becoming fed up with the behavior of coaches and parents at youth sports events.

“For 60 years, children have been playing organized sports in this country. People have laughed and scoffed at the idea of certifying coaches for Little League sports. But it has become too important not to.”

This year, Engh said, 100,000 adults will go through the NYSCA program to coach boys and girls in various sports. There are 45 state offices and 1,700 NYSCA chapters in the nation. One of them is in Rockville.

“You don’t watch this program and never scream at a kid again,” Frank Scioli, vice president for rules and instruction of the Rockville Baseball Association, said as he prepared to pop the NYSCA instructional videotape into a VCR at city hall.

“NYSCA is not an inoculation. But I believe we can eliminate 90 percent of the kinds of problems we have in youth sports, and this will help us do that.”

Those problems are, by now, familiar. Every parent who has had a child play an organized sport has a story to tell about an enraged coach yelling at a sobbing player or a coach trying to calm a parent angry about an umpire’s call.

In Rockville, the scenes during an early season evening are encouraging. The coaches are well-behaved, and their job is made easier because the parents are too. When one coach in the pee-wee division (ages 10-11) leaps toward home plate, yelling at his player to go back and touch home because he wasn’t tagged by the catcher, he immediately turns to the stands and says, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Sorry, I need every run I can get.”

Parents are mostly quiet, but this is not a typical evening.

“It’s early in the season,” said Engh. “Things have a way of changing the last few games. Parents often are trying to relive their lives through their kids. While youth sports are designed for children, all too often adults lose perspective and children eventually become emotionally abused by win-at-all-costs parents, whether they are coaching or simply watching from the stands.”

The result, according to NYSCA, is that 70 percent of the 20 million children participating in organized sports in the United States drop out by the time they reach age 13.

“Most said they simply got tired of being yelled at,” Engh said.

Psychologists, national observers and local advocates agree on the problem. It is not the children, whom they say do not particularly care about batting averages, playing time or other statistics parents seem to pay so much attention to. At least, not at the pee-wee level.

“Kids are ultimately fairer than adults,” said Thomas Tutko, a San Jose State psychology professor who appears on the NYSCA videos and is an authority on youth sports.

The problem is the parents, and no matter how much training they get, some will not change.

“Parents are more intense now,” said Bethesda psychologist Mike Stutz, whose sons have played youth sports. “The stresses of society are greater. Society is getting much more competitive; jobs are more competitive and parents seem to have so much fear about their own place in the world, they want to make sure their kids get their fair share. This translates into wanting more playing time for their kids, or wanting their kids to be better than other kids.

“Parents also seem to have more time on their hands. They go to all the games. When I was a kid, there were six to seven parents at one of our games. Now, at my son’s games, I’m really surprised if at least one parent of each kid isn’t there.”

Among other things, more fields are lighted now, so children can play later and more parents can get home from work in time to watch the games.

“These are people who work at the hardware store, who are plumbers, attorneys -- they lose perspective,” Engh said. “But you can’t really blame the coaches if no one really told them what to do.”

So that’s what Engh decided to do. With the help of other parents and coaches, as well as psychologists and professional athletes such as Dave Winfield and Pat McInally, he began NYSCA 10 years ago. Through word of mouth and mailings, his pamphlets, videos and codes of ethics began to tell coaches and parents about the psychology of coaching children, about maximizing athletic performance, about first aid and safety, about how to organize interesting and fun practices.

The video for the initiates opens with the description of the goals of a professional coach: winning games, earning money, providing entertainment. Then, it lists the goals of a youth coach: teaching effectively, caring about the child’s well-being, developing each child, making the experience affirmative and fun. The coaches and psychologists who appear on the tape go on to tell a coach that every child wants to play, that the participation and contribution of a child are more important than winning and losing and that the coach must try to be a positive role model, especially by telling children not to use drugs and alcohol.

Every coach undergoes six hours of training, spread over two nights, as well as a test on coaching technique before he or she is allowed onto the field. There also are both coaches’ and parents’ codes of ethics.

Coaches in the NYSCA certification program are required to sign their code, which includes: “I will place the emotional and physical well-being of my players ahead of any personal desire to win” and “I will lead, by example, in demonstrating fair play and sportsmanship to all my players.”

Coaches are told that they should get parents to sign a code of ethics, which includes: “I will remember that the game is for children and not for adults” and “I will promise to help my child enjoy the youth sports experience within my personal constraints by assisting with coaching, being a respectful fan, providing transportation or whatever I am capable of doing.”

How widespread is this training? It is a must in Rockville and nearly a dozen other communities in the Washington area, and some areas are more serious than others. Engh said the county commission of DeKalb County, Ga., with 47 individual youth sports organizations, will not allow a league to obtain a permit to play unless all of its coaches are certified by NYSCA.

But most communities in the country have not implemented these practices. For every DeKalb County, there is a story like the one Richard Lapchick tells. Lapchick, director of Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society, said that in 1984, when Pop Warner football and Little League baseball leagues around the nation decided to impose a rule that every child must play in every game, 1,800 leagues withdrew from the program.

“I think this program represents a quantum leap,” Lapchick said, “but my understanding of the situation is that it pretty much remains unchecked. The problems have taken so long to be created that it will take a magic wand waved a lot longer than we have time for to come up with the right solution.”