No Child Is a Winner in the Game of Blame

I can’t think of anything better than youth sports--spirited competition among children sharpening their skills, strengthening their bodies and confidence, and working as a team toward a common goal. Yet there exists an age-old problem that threatens to ruin it: poor sportsmanship.

Two issues are particularly glaring. The first is what the head baseball coach at Louisiana State University, Skip Bertman, calls TOB--transfer of blame. It’s simply people pointing their fingers--coaches blaming players, players blaming umpires, parents blaming coaches, etc.

It’s not accepted at LSU baseball, and I have never accepted it in 18 years of coaching youth baseball. In the 1,000 games I have coached at various levels of competition, not once have I blamed an umpire for a loss. Indeed, many factors influence the outcome of a game, and most come from the players and coaches.

I’ll never forget watching an all-star game for 15-year-olds in which a team from Yucaipa had beaten a team from Orange County. After the game, a parent photographed the umpires so he could show his son “why they lost the game.” Classic TOB, and the wrong message for a parent to send his son.

Coaches blaming players or parents blaming coaches also is common in youth sports. You can walk around an athletic facility on any spring weekend and hear, “Jimmy dropped the ball, so we lost.” With gentler handling, such embarrassing moments can have a positive result. Here’s what I mean:

A player in our Little League 10 years ago was in center field in a crucial game between two teams vying for a chance to go to the Little League World Series. Late in the game, with his team leading by one run, he dropped an easy fly ball that would have been the final out. Two runs scored. He was devastated, and within the team there started to be a TOB toward him. But then it was pointed out to all the players that many opportunities were missed earlier in the game and that, if not for the player who had committed the error, the team would have never even reached that decisive game.

The result was that the player went on to an outstanding high school career and earned a scholarship to a major college.

More recently, a freshman at our high school was trying to win a place on the varsity team. He was playing against our archrival in a preseason game and dropped a pop-up late in the game that allowed the winning run to score. You can imagine how he felt.

Coaches and several senior players offered encouragement, and I read him a proverb by Mark Twain: “The ability to forget is most often more important than the ability to remember.” The comments by his coaches and players must have helped, because not only did he earn a place on the team, he was recently named player of the week.

There is one area of TOB that I do accept: coaches blaming themselves. As adults we must take more responsibility, even when a player makes a mistake.

If I give a player a steal sign and he’s thrown out, I tell him it was my fault. You can’t believe how much pressure a coach takes off players by taking responsibility for their actions.

Another way coaches can avoid poor sportsmanship is to emphasize team play by treating all the players the same and encouraging them. All the players are important, not just the best ones.

For several seasons after drafting Michael Jordan, the Chicago Bulls were unable to win the National Basketball Assn. championship. It wasn’t until all the ingredients for success, down to the smallest detail, came together that Jordan’s team won a championship.

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A second area of poor sportsmanship is overbearing parents, which harks back to TOB.

Coaches will argue a call with an umpire, parents will hear it and transfer their anger to the umpires and players.

Then there is the parent who constantly yells at a son or daughter for what the youngster is doing wrong. At this point, after play has begun, I tell the player to see the ball and hit the ball, nothing else. We work the problems out in practice.

I liken a baseball game to a play, and practices to a series of rehearsals. If you don’t know your lines by game time, it doesn’t do any good for someone from the audience to yell them out.

If we can stop the finger-pointing and get the parents to be a good audience and not disrupt the game, maybe in this setting called the athletic playing field we can set an example for society.

Ed Kitchen coached children 6 to 18 during 18 years in the Thousand Oaks Little League. His teams won World Series championships in 1994 and 1998 and a national championship in 1996. He is an assistant baseball coach at Thousand Oaks High School.