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parents, kids, and sports
This is a personal message to all parents out their with kids in youth sports.
First of all let me commend you all for attending games driving literally hundreds of miles per week taking them to practice and games and other places to get treats after games and or practices. Let me commend you for paying sometimes hundreds or thousands of dollars to give your children the opportunity to participate in youth sports knowing full well your child may suck at whatever sport he or she is playing. Let me commend you for being supportive of not only your children but others on the team even when things look bleek.
However allow me to condemn you for associating your child participation with the right to give your opinion to the coach on the who what when where and why? of your sports philosophy. As a coach I think I speak for all of us that WE DONT CARE WHAT YOU THINK. Let me condemn you for getting involved in games further than cheering for your children, it is very important that you all know that anything negative you say to the ref's in the game will have a negative impact on the team your child plays for, there is nothing more embarassing, rude, egotistic, and downright stupid than some parent complaining to ref's about calls they can do nothing about. I feel bad for the children who have parents like these tha cant keep their mouths shut at games. Let me condemn the parent that is the rule freak, the fan/coach that is the person who tells their child to do the opposite of what the coach says to the ultimate demise of the coach athlete relationship. The sore loser, the parent who thinks their kid is better than what they are, the parent who thinks everyone else but their kid is worse than they are. The parent who wants to sit on the bench, the parent who is powerful in the business world that thinks that power transfers to sixth grade youth basketball.
My two least favorite types of parents............the A@@hole parent who yells at their kids in the middle of the game like their children have committed serious crimes against humanity and rides the kid all the way out to the car and the ride home about certain moves or how well they didnt play.
and finally the invisible parent the parent who never shows up to games even the close ones for one reason or another who cant plan months in advance to take time off to see their kids play and see the looks on their faces when they do something positive on the court.
I have had every type of these on all of my teams one parent and his daughter thought they didnt need to show up to practice and or our last tournament because a 9 year old thought she wasnt going to learn anything from me(dad's influence right their) and what she missed was the two best games her team had played all season and what they learned this weekend is that it doesnt matter what color the other team is you still have a chance to win if you play hard and have fun.
(i coach a team of suburban girls who were scared to play the city girls and I had to teach them that what made the girls different wasnt their skin color but the fact that they played harder and if they played harder the results would be better and they were we didnt win but we played well) before that game another parent had coached the team againts that city team and the game got out of hand I guess I wasnt their but I think that the parents racist attitude caused the girls to fear these black girls they were playing and cause them to have animosity towards them cause they played harder, so I had to switch there mentality a little, during the game they kept saying that the city team was not playing as well and I kept saying that it wasnt what the city team wasnt doing but that they had stepped their own game up they got better and they were playing harder the city team was doing the same thing but instead of the city team playing down to our level we stepped up to play at the city level and that is what that little girl who's dad had the bad attitude could have learned not only something about B-ball but life. Oh well maybe she will learn that next year.....
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