Enforcing Etiquette on the Sidelines

Fed up with the abusive and occasionally violent behavior on the sidelines of youth sports, athletic officials are clamping down on unruly mothers and fathers with a spate of measures that range from subtle embarrassments to seminars in etiquette.

* Several soccer coaches are dishing out lollipops to rowdy parents, with firm instructions to keep their mouths shut until the candy has dissolved.

* At football games this fall, many public high schools in California will slap yellow cards into the hands of overzealous moms and dads. Distributed through the California Interscholastic Federation, the wording on the cards warns parents that if they don’t quiet down, they will be escorted from the game.

* For the first time, the Los Angeles Unified School District this year is urging coaches to send a letter home with every athlete, detailing parental etiquette at games.

* And in Northern California, the city of Roseville will require parents of children in municipal sports leagues to attend lessons in sportsmanship.

Two years into a statewide effort to improve sportsmanship in high school athletics, the interscholastic federation has concluded that parents need training as badly as the kids do.

Coaches of off-campus youth leagues could have told them that a long time ago. This summer, two American Youth Soccer Organization teams were banned after a parental melee in San Juan Capistrano. In Massachusetts last year, one father killed another after a fight in the stands at a youth hockey game. A Northridge father was sent to jail in January after attacking his son’s Little League coach and threatening to kill him.

“We have had some terrible, hurtful behavior from parents,” said Michael Josephson, president of the Josephson Institute for Ethics, which is backing the yellow-card gimmick as part of its citizenship program for high school athletes. “We will not tolerate this behavior.”

Roger Blake, head of education and training for the interscholastic federation, got the idea of yellow-carding parents when he was athletic director for the Lake Elsinore schools and charged with forcibly escorting obscenity-yelling parents out of games. During one such walk from the field to the parking lot with an angry dad, Blake noticed a referee hand a yellow card to an out-of-line player, a standard practice for soccer players.

Blake figured the embarrassment of getting the cards might work as well on adults as on children. As a result, the Lake Elsinore schools have “carded” parents for the last three years.

“It’s just another tool for schools to use to turn the tide,” Blake said.

Most parents are shocked when they receive the card. Often, just waving the yellow cardboard nearby quiets them, Blake said. He recounts the story of the father of a freshman football player--veins bulging in his neck, arms waving in the air, his voice hoarse from screaming--who saw Blake approaching with the card last year. The man walked over to Blake, his head hung low.

“He said, ‘Roger, am I being that bad? I’m sorry,’ ” Blake said.

This fall, the cards will be recommended to every school in California; principals can decide whether to adopt the practice. Many are expected to, since 40% of schools in the state have adopted the Josephson Institute’s Pursuing Victory with Honor program, designed to promote sportsmanship among players and coaches.

Victory with Honor calls for athletes and coaches to sign contracts promising good citizenship. But while it quickly turned around the behavior of athletes, the project did little for parental misdeeds, Josephson said. While adults have refrained from highly publicized fisticuffs at high school games, the level of invective from the bleachers has definitely risen, coaches say, possibly because of the lure of athletic scholarships to college has raised the ante.

“You have a captive audience with coaches and athletes,” said Barbara Fiege, director of interscholastic athletics for the Los Angeles schools, which participates in the Pursuing Victory with Honor program. “You don’t have that with parents.”

Every athletic director in the district has been told about the yellow cards and can use them if he or she sees fit, Fiege said.

El Toro High School in south Orange County developed a different approach a few years ago after out-of-control screaming from the stands marred a championship basketball game. Now, warnings are broadcast to parents over the loudspeaker before each game.

Coaches and parents at youth games welcome such steps as they watch increasing numbers of grown-ups erupt in toddler-style tantrums.

“It’s awful. It’s terrible. It’s a huge problem,” said Terry Lowe, assistant coach of the Teal Titans, a California Youth Soccer Assn. team in Anaheim Hills.

Her daughter, Nicole Zabielski-Lowe, 13, said some of the worst moments of her young life have been spent running down the soccer field, chased by the shouts of parents on both sides.

“Parents from the other team will yell and say, ‘Good job missing that shot, you’re helping our team,’ ” she said. “Parents act like you’re going to lose a million bucks. They yell at the coach, the whole team, and everyone is upset.”

Across the field at another youth soccer practice, every one of the dozen parents lolling on the grass watching their daughters could recite a litany of embarrassing incidents at athletic events.

There was the dad who punched the coach because his child wasn’t getting enough playing time. There was the gang of parents who reduced a 12-year-old referee to tears with their shouted insults over calls they didn’t like.

This year, their coach, Dave Cochran, seized upon a strategy that’s become popular around California: the lollipop defense.

“We come to soccer games with a big bowl of suckers,” he said. “If there’s a parent who is coaching too much, I hand ‘em a sucker.”

It’s embarrassing to be given candy, said parent Pam Verdonne, who quickly noted that she has not been treated to a sucker. But it works, she said.

In Maryland and other areas across the country, soccer leagues are mandating “Silent Games” in which only players are allowed to speak, and parents aren’t even permitted to cheer when their children make goals.

The head of one youth sports organization said those are child’s-play solutions to a very adult problem.

“That’s like giving a Band-Aid to someone with cancer,” Fred Engh, president and chief executive of the National Alliance for Youth Sports, said of the lollipop maneuver. “The bottom line is we need to change the culture of children’s sports and we can’t do it by slogans and banners.”

Though the vast majority of parents behave properly, Engh said, “There’s this growing number of dysfunctional misfits out to destroy what should be good for children.”

His solution: massive reeducation. His organization is proposing that cities force parents to attend classes on proper coaching and spectator behavior before they allow leagues to use municipal fields for practices and games. In addition, city officials would hold sports teams responsible if parents or coaches don’t behave.

“If a parent finds there is abuse, violence, ugly things that they have seen, now they have someone to contact,” Engh said.

Details of the program, “Raising Community Standards in Youth Sports,” will be sent to every city in the country by Oct. 1, Engh said.

Roseville, in Northern California, already has agreed to mandate that all parents of children in city recreational programs take the classes, said Roni Garrison, the city’s parks and recreation technician. City officials have not yet decided whether they will banish children whose parents don’t show up.

Roseville also is displaying a parent code of ethics on signs around the city and will broadcast television advisories on safe behavior at youth sports events on the city’s local cable channel.

“Unfortunately, we’ve seen an increase in sport rage trickling down to our youth sports,” Garrison said. “We don’t want [violence] to happen here.”

This fall, the AYSO, which long considered its fields bastions of good citizenship amid the more high-pressure antics at Little League and youth hockey games, will roll out a program called “Kids Zone” in which parents sign pledges not to disrupt games.

Kids Zone began last spring in San Diego, after parents there became concerned about rising levels of verbal abuse, said AYSO spokeswoman Lolly Keys. The July brawl in San Juan Capistrano involving more than 30 adults who bit and punched each other sent shudders through the soccer organization and has prompted chapters all over the country to sign up.

“We always thought, ‘This can’t happen in AYSO,’ ” Keys said. “Our members are saying, ‘I don’t want San Juan to happen in my community.’ ”