Youth Athletics Crack Down on Wild Parents

Fed up with 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 on etiquette.

Some soccer coaches are dishing out lollipops to overbearing parents on the sidelines, 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 start slapping yellow cards into the hands of overzealous moms and dads. Distributed by the California Interscholastic Federation, the cards warn 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, Roseville will require parents of children in city sports leagues to attend lessons in sportsmanship.

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

Coaches of off-campus youth leagues could have told them that a long time ago. Just this summer, two American Youth Soccer Organization teams were banned after a melee involving parents at a match in San Juan Capistrano. In Massachusetts last year, one father killed another in a fight after 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 of Ethics in Marina del Rey, 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 CIF, got the idea of yellow-carding parents when he was athletic director for Lake Elsinore schools. One of his duties was escorting obscenity-yelling parents away from games. While walking one angry father to the parking lot, Blake noticed a referee showing a yellow card to an out-of-line player, a standard practice in soccer matches.

Blake figured the embarrassment of getting yellow-carded might work as well on adults. As a result, Lake Elsinore schools have been carding disruptive 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 a yellow card. Often, just waving the yellow cardboard nearby quiets them, Blake said. He recalls the father of a freshman football player--veins bulging from his neck, arms waving in the air, his voice hoarse from screaming--who saw Blake approaching with a yellow 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 yellow cards will be recommended to every school in California, with each principal having the option to adopt them or not. Many are expected to because 40% of schools in the state already have adopted the Josephson Institute’s Pursuing Victory With Honor program, designed to promote sportsmanship among players and coaches.

Pursuing Victory With Honor calls for athletes and coaches to sign contracts promising good citizenship. While it quickly turned around the behavior of athletes, the program did little about parental misdeeds, Josephson said. The level of invective from the bleachers at high school sporting events has definitely risen, coaches say, possibly because the lure of athletic scholarships to colleges has raised the ante.

“You have a captive audience with coaches and athletes,” said Barbara Fiege, director of interscholastic athletics for Los Angeles Unified, 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 they see fit, she said.

El Toro High School in Lake Forest developed a different approach after alleged violence, cussing and taunting by fans of its girls’ basketball team marred its participation in a tournament in Santa Barbara in 1998. Now, warnings are broadcast to parents over the loudspeaker before each game.

Coaches and even 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 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 recall 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, Dave Cochran, who coaches the daughters of those parents, seized upon a strategy that has 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 them a sucker.”

It’s embarrassing to be given candy, said parent Pam Verdonne, who quickly added 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.

But the head of one youth sports organization said those are childlike solutions to an adult problem.

Handing out lollipops is “like giving a Band-Aid to someone with cancer,” said Fred Engh, president and chief executive of the National Alliance for Youth Sports in West Palm Beach, Fla. “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 re-education. 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.

But already, Roseville has agreed to require all parents of children in city recreation programs to take the classes, said Roni Garrison, the city’s parks and recreation technician. City officials have not yet decided whether to bar children whose parents don’t show up.

Roseville also has put a parent code of ethics on signs around town and will broadcast advisories on safe behavior at youth sports events on the city’s cable TV channel.

“Unfortunately, we’ve seen an increase in sports 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 compared with Little League and youth hockey games, will roll out a program called Kids Zone, in which parents pledge not to disrupt games.

Kids Zone began last spring in San Diego, after parents there became concerned about rising levels of mean-spirited 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 across 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.’ ”