This is why I coach youth sports…to keep my team of kids away from guys like this (of which there are too many). I’m reaching the point where that’s not really a good enough reason anymore. I enjoy the coaching aspect and I’m very good at it, but I also enjoy being dad in the stands just as much if not more.
Narcissistic behavior to a T. Parents who view their children’s worth as a direct reflection of their own, rather than understanding that their goal is to provide a strong foundation for their children to achieve their own success. The only time you should ever get onto your child on an athletic field is for behavior that takes place outside of competitive play.
I don't understand this mindset at all. 1) you don't improve by being the best kid out there. 2) at that age where being the biggest kid is the most important advantage, you build bad habits because your size advantage doesn't require good technique. 3) assuming greatness for your child at that age is fucking stupid.
As a MS coach, cannot overemphasize the truth of the bolded. We’ve had at least 4-5 a year that take drastic drops from 7th to 8th grade as the other kids start physically catching up and the formerly overathletic ones who never took technique seriously start getting left in the dust. Affects them all the way up through HS.
Holding your kid back from starting HS a year for sports reasons is pretty common in SFL for football and basketball (I still think this is stupid) but doing it at kindergarten is absolutely insane.
kindergarten is a pretty popular year to hold boys back. Not for sports reasons but for maturity reasons. Also if they’re anywhere near the cutoff, it seems pretty normal
I think a lot of it stems from the Outliers book. Malcom Gladwell (i know) figured out that a surprising number of pro hockey players had a September birthday. Basically surmising that the kids who are the oldest in their class have a huge advantage in youth sports and it snowballs their entire life because they are getting the best coaching and exposure. I wouldn't be surprised if it has been debunked because Malcom Gladwell is full of shit about most things. But I do think that mindset drives a lot of people when they redshirt their kindergartner.
most folks i know that redshirt have kids with late spring/summer birthdays and it's driven by maturity. Still a decent bit of people who are blatantly doing it for sports. Though most of them will never admit it. The kid I mentioned earlier had a January birthday.
That mindset has pretty much completely swapped. The most elite players in hockey are identified and placed in older age groups to face better compitiion. It's not uncommon for the best player on a U16 team to be a tiny 14 year old.
My oldest plays A class travel softball for a national team, and all I can say is it gets worse the higher you go. Parents have trained their kids to step over another kid if that means their kid is getting a better chance.
At Clay, it’s always been our 7th grade RB. Typically the fastest and most developed kid coming out of sixth grade, has a huge year, thinks he’s hot shit and inevitably disappoints his eighth grade year. Basically a curse at this point.
I know that feeling. My son has it and at least 4 (confirmed) and probably a 5th on our basketball team have either ADHD or are on the spectrum which made it interesting trying to do things in practice. Last year my son would get in shoving matches trying to be first in line for everything. This basketball season I just treated him like a captain and had him be the kid demonstrating things or I gave him jobs/responsibility like handling equipment, keeping kids in line, etc. That along with some maturation and OT made things flow much more smoothly.
Baseball practice is by far the hardest for him. Just a lot of standing and waiting and he gets bored. Other sports it's not as noticeable. Hell kids with ADHD probably have an advantage in a sport like soccer.
I gave him the choice to do a one-day per week flag football + 2 of 3 this spring (club soccer, travel basketball, and one of travel baseball in our town or Little League in the neighboring town) and he chose to drop baseball. I think he probably could’ve made AA for travel but I agree with his choice for the reason you mentioned. I played SS and P in HS so I was helping coach it and we tried to do stations to make practices fast paced with lots of reps but it’s frankly pretty damn boring at that age when you get to games and you’re waiting for a good pitch and ball hit in to play.
Last night was the playoffs/championship for my son's flag football league. We got there about an hour before his game and the area his team was hanging out/practicing in happened to be right next to the field that the 5th/6th grade boys playoff game was happening. I have never seen a worst behaving group of adults at a youth sporting event in my life. It was really just one of the teams, but their coach was taunting the other teams parents and loudly trash talking the other team, and then the parents were also joining in the trash talk. One mom even tried to get the face of another parent after her kid's team scored while recording on her cell phone like she was MTG trying to troll a gun violence victim. Just trash people.
There's always at least one team in those youth baseball leagues where the kids will say stuff when someone is hitting or pitching for the other team that I'm shocked the coach doesn't make them stop. I would personally go to my son and tell him to stop if nothing else. Like these are kids and some of them I've seen take failure pretty hard. They don't need the other team taunting them. It's a very black pilling experience
Agreed. Anytime my son does anything remotely unsporting, he hears about it from me. The thing he does the most that drives me crazy is wagging his finger at kids like he's Dikembe Motumbo anytime he makes a save in soccer or a kid he's covering in football doesn't catch the ball. I call him on it every time, but then other parents on our team praise him for it
Love coaching a shitty disrespectful kid and meeting their parents and it all makes sense immediately.
Speaking of shitty parents… Our baseball league is pretty small, about 60 kids per year, so it’s usually 6 teams. There are 5-6 star players and each team gets one to be fair. This is the first year of kid pitch so the star players are even more important for equal competition. The parents of our star player just pulled him out of the league to play full time travel ball. This happened earlier this week, a month into the season, and days before our first game. (They asked the league for their money back too.) Parents can do whatever they want, it’s their kids. But fucking over your little community that has sort of helped you out along the way is savage. I let the dad know and he didn’t care. Gonna be a rough season, boys.
They always stack the teams where I live. My son didn't want to play baseball this year because he got tired of losing which makes me sad. They say the the teams are picked fairly but they very much aren't. Then those teams run it up on you. There doesn't seem to be as much of that in soccer.
That sucks. We've been unhappy with various leagues/teams in the past, but we always finish the season. Like now, we're not totally thrilled with the experience of my son's first season of competitive soccer. Mainly because we feel like we were sold snake oil from the owner in terms of how great their developmental system is. But we're still finishing the season before moving on to Futsal.
That stinks. We had a kid quit before the season so we are 1 less player than every other team. Then we have two brothers whose parents are very unreliable. Either late or no shows. So we can’t have any kids get sick or we might have to forfeit some games.
There was a certain age where you couldn’t press at all. I think it was 10 or 11. You had to play man so trying to press and find your man led to too many stoppages. People who confuse ages needing to learn the basics to competitive sports are the biggest problem in all sports.
I may have told this story earlier in this thread, but my buddy umped either a high travel ball or middle school (can’t remember). Either way they were up 20-0 and his buddy’s daughter came up. Count goes to 3-0 and he calls a strike on a terrible pitch. The dad laughed then looked at his wife who wasn’t laughing or smiling at all. Later that night we’re having dinner and the team comes in and the wife and daughter start absolutely berating my buddy about the called strike. She walked on the next pitch but there’s a woman and a 12 year old girl screaming at a man at a restaurant over a pitch. I told myself that was the end of umpiring for me.
My son is in 2nd grade and is in a coach pitch league in our town. This is his second year. last year he got picked up by what was like half of a travel ball team who was playing in the league. All the travel ball kids got their infield positions and he was stuck in the outfield. No one ever changed positions. I don’t have anything against the outfield and I think my son would be a good outfielder, but he’s too energetic and loves baseball too much to be shoved in a corner where he only saw 3-5 balls all season. He was legit dying of boredom out there. You could hear him yelling how bored he was every game. I felt terrible for him because he’s not a kid that’s out there because his parents want him to be, he genuinely loves to play and practice but the games were toughhhhhh. He’s not the best out there but he’s probably a notch above average in the field and a good hitter. the travel ball kids decided not to play in the league and another team picked him up this year. New coach is awesome. Really structured and cycles the kids through all the positions. Hoping this season is better than the last.
A few ways our LL has helped tamp down the asshole coach. My son’s LL baseball has minimum play rules that prevent players from not getting reps at infield positions every game for AAA and under. Using a blue flame pitching machine for first 3 innings of AA(6-9 year olds) has been great too. My oldest son was the last season of AA that was all kid pitch. Every inning took an hour from all the walks. A couple seasons ago they dropped all manager challenge’s except pulled foot and dropped ball at every level. This change alone has helped us keep umps. There were umps quitting mid season and refusing to return the following season. This season we have 40-50 kids that are umping. Had less than 20 kid umps before the rule change.
My older one played two kid pitch games yesterday back-to-back. He played up at 10U and then his normal 9U game. These were the first games of the season so we expected it to be ugly. 3 hours and 45 minutes of baseball 7 1/3 total innings
Were the coaches calling pitches? Nothing made me angrier than a 9u coach calling pitches. Tell him to throw strikes motherfucker. He ain’t Greg Maddux.
God, no. These kids can barely hit the side of a barn. We have a few assholes, but at least they are efficient assholes.
We only play 6 innings with a 2hr max before starting a new inning. Never played a 4th inning in that regular season. We were joking before playoffs that a game could hit 4-5 hours since playoffs were 6 innings regardless of time.
Watched an 8th grade basketball coach throw an extremely dramatic 5 minute temper tantrum over a parent yelling “box out” too early for his liking on a free throw attempt by team, his kid. Guy went and got one of the gym supervisors to intervene, that’s when the ref tossed him. The coach took his son with him when he had to leave the premises lol
We once made a coach absolutely lose his shot and get thrown out of a city middle school holiday tournament for telling him there’s no such call as over the back. That isn’t the penalty. We did that all tue time and it never failed. It’s called displacement and he was so mad when he found out he was ejected for the whole tourney. Sometimes it’s the little things.
it gets me hot reliving it. it really sucked watching kids on other teams rotate every inning. Don’t get me started on travel ball coach pitch teams.
Our team last year (6U) quit rotating after spring break. My poor kid was relegated to the outfield full time. Of course that only made his development worse. This year the coach is committed to alternating all season. It helps that his kid isn’t that good and it would be ridiculous if he played him at shortstop the whole game.
Truthfully, at 6U the most put outs are from 1st base fielding it cleanly, P to 1st or probably 3B fielding it cleanly and forcing out a runner at 3rd or 2B/SS at 2nd.
We don’t start travel until 3rd grade (2nd graders can try out for 3rd grade travel) but I would handle it that way for travel too.
LL rules allow a manager to challenge just about any call but balls and strikes. Most games are streamed on Twitch. Being UIC I’ve gotten videos, pictures and slowed down videos with narratives of LL rule. Not one of the parents who felt the need to send me their “proof” has accepted my invitation to umpire. Never had a heckling parent volunteer to ump when asked either.
That seems ridiculous to me at that age. Obviously competitive people care about winning but the focus should be development over outcome and challenging plays is not in that spirit. Umps/Refs are going to make bad calls. Developmentally, I thinks it’s better to teach kids the perseverance to overcome the negative emotions associated with what they view as a bad call. It’s some of the same skills adults need to overcome a co-worker getting a promotion they thought they deserved. You can’t just argue and appeal everything. I was an ump and ref when I was growing up. I know I made bad calls, some I can still replay in my head. It’s a learning opportunity for everyone.
The perseverance part is exactly what they should all be learning, I see so many kids that get put in the outfield, and the stigma amongst parents is the bad kids play in the outfield, instead of teaching everybody has a role, or work harder and go compete for the position you want. I see a lot of kids complaining about where they bat in the lineup, but my kid knows that we are going to bat the 9 hole, just like we would do the 4, if you don’t like the 9 hole go show them you don’t belong there.
Managers aren’t asking for video review during our games. All my correspondence from parents and coaches is after the game. Sometimes a week or two later.