Sports seminar reveals problem of ‘ugly parents’

As another year of scholastic sports approaches, there is something that overzealous parents might want to consider as they take their places on the sidelines and in the bleachers to cheer on their children.

Maine’s athletic directors will be watching to make sure these parents don’t act like jerks and disrupt the otherwise enjoyable proceedings. Not only that, the ADs have recently been to summer school to study the worst traits of these problem parents. They wanted to better understand why the adults tend to lose all sense of balance and perspective about what their youngsters really are supposed to be doing out there, which is having fun and learning the value of sportsmanship.

The ADs even learned a new name for those folks who harangue players, coaches, officials and other parents and generally make a nuisance of themselves.

They’re called “the ugly sports parents.”

That’s the term Dr. William Gayton used, at least, when he conducted a seminar at the 4th Annual Athletic Director’s Institute earlier this week at the University of Maine. About two dozen ADs showed up from across the state to discuss the growing problem of parent fans who expect far too much of their young athletes and of the people who run the programs for them.

“Parents are beginning to have an increasingly greater involvement in the outcomes of their children’s games,” said Gayton, who is the director of the Sport Psychology Institute at the University of Southern Maine. “We’re not talking about enthusiastic parents, we’re talking about parents whose self-esteem is almost totally connected to their kids’ performance in sports.”

After nearly 25 years as a sports psychologist, Gayton has devised a model of the ugly sports parent, and it’s not a flattering picture. These are parents, he said, who identify as strongly with their children’s teams as other fans might identify with their favorite professional sports teams. Like the fans of pro teams, these parents tend to bask in the reflected glory of their young athletes when they win. Unlike the fan of pro sports, however, the parent fan cannot simply pull away from a losing team or from the child who does not perform up to his standards.

“To do that, of course, would require that the parents stop going to their kids’ games,” Gayton said. “And while ADs and coaches wouldn’t mind if they didn’t show up, it’s not really an option for a parent.”

Instead, the ugly sports parent attends every game – not to sit back and enjoy the healthy spectacle, but to brood and complain and rail against every perceived injustice. From the sidelines they bellow instructions repeatedly to their children, berate officials for lousy calls, jeer opposing players, angrily criticize coaches after games and sometimes even lobby school boards to get them fired.

“These are people who would never tell a plumber how to plumb or an electrician how to run wire,” Gayton said. “But for some reason they believe they were born with a God-given coaching gene.”

As Gayton deconstructed the ugly sports fan, the ADs nodded in recognition from their seats. They have all met a few of them over the years, whether in their capacities as ADs, coaches, or simply as spectators who have witnessed the extraordinary intensity and pressure that certain parents can bring to something as simple as a kids’ game. One AD and coach told of a parent who insisted on videotaping every moment of his daughter’s soccer games and then reviewing the tapes with her at home, as if it were a professional locker room. One day, the coach noticed that girl was playing uncharacteristically poorly, hardly moving on the field. Later, the father showed up at the coach’s house, armed with statistics, to complain that the other girls were getting more opportunities to handle the ball than his daughter was getting. The angry father then admitted that he had instructed his daughter to not join the action on the field to prove how much the team would suffer without her.

Another AD told how difficult it was to get problem parents to attend preseason meetings, where the rules of fan behavior could be discussed. The ADs talked of parents in their towns who have angrily confronted school coaches after games, and of the good coaches across Maine who have quit rather than take such unfair verbal abuse from know-it-alls like that.

Gerald Durgin, the AD at Gorham High School, said he knows coaches who have received threatening phone calls and letters from high-pressure parents, and one coach who received bomb threats at his home.

Gayton also blamed the winning-is-everything mentality of some coaches – the shrieking, red-faced Bobby Knight types – for elevating the level of tension at school games and bringing out the worst in the ugly sports parents.

“The belief that there is a potential financial payoff to sports is also becoming an issue more and more,” said Gayton, who has been asked by parents if he would work with their teen-agers so they would have a better chance of getting college athletic scholarships.

While he offered no clear solutions to the problem of ugly sports fans, he recommended that the ADs educate overly demanding parents when possible about the harm that their unrealistic attitudes toward sports can cause to youngsters – their own and those who play with them. He urged that schools enforce codes of behavior for fans that, if violated, would bar those unruly parents from future games or even jeopardize their children’s ability to play.

“Maine hasn’t really experienced the types of problems we’ve heard about elsewhere in the country, with parents attacking each other in the stands and that kind of violence,” said Keith Lancaster, director of the Maine Center for Coaching Education, which co-sponsored the conference with the Maine Interscholastic Athletic Administrator’s Association. “But the verbal abuse of coaches is bad enough that we’re having a problem keeping coaches and recruiting new ones. So the key is to keep these issues on the table, and discuss them as we’re doing here, because if we don’t then fan misbehavior is going to get worse.”