I am sure you have heard as many little league horror stories as I have, but in case you need a reminder, here are a couple:
Watch this video of a High School football coach going crazy.
Here’s another where the writer of the blog suggests that parents need to check their weapons when they get to the game.
And closer to home.
Last weekend, at a high school wrestling tournament, I went to the training table to get ice for an aching shoulder of one of my athletes. I noticed a young man from another school nursing the worst black eye that I have ever seen. It was swollen shut, both upper and lower eyelids, and would remain a tremendous bruise for several weeks. The danger of course is that the eye socket was damaged. Had he been one of my athletes, I would have called his parents and suggested that the eye be checked before competing again. Also, he might consider wearing a face mask to protect the eye from further contact during competition.
Later in the day, I noticed him again and he was warming up for his next match.
“I thought you were done,” I said.
“My coach is making me wrestle,” was his reply.
The next day I heard the rest of the story. It seems that the coach went beyond making the boy wrestle to berating him and questioning his pride and manhood if he did not step out and compete in spite of the injury.
This attitude is very old school, stupid, and dangerous. It reflects a “win at all costs” mentality that is mean spirited and evil when the health of a young person is at stake.
When the young wrestler got home that night, his mother was livid. She immediately took him to the hospital where tests showed the eye to be bruised only. No structural damage.
She then called the coach to inform him that her son was no longer on this team. She would not allow her son to be in the presence of a coach who considered tournament points more important that personal safety. She was also furious that no phone call was made to alert her to the injury. The coach defended his position by saying, “it was just a black eye.”
While I admit the above examples are extreme, they still represent a fundamental need for a new way to approach coaching today’s young athlete.
I believe that there are two kinds of coaches; ones who don’t have a clue and ones who don’t want to get one. The latter is the dangerous one. The former acceptable if he or she has enough humility to realize what they do not know and accept reasonable solutions.
More importantly, and this speaks directly to the reason for writing “Coaching Young Couch Potatoes,” is that the youth sports experience which has the potential to build children, also has the power to damage them. With millions of children playing, and hundreds of thousands of adults coaching, I suggest that we take steps to make the little league experience a partnership between parent, child, coach and sport. It is time to imbue youth sports with a pointed capacity to raise healthy and responsible people. During little league there is plenty of time for fun, much opportunity to learn valuable lessons and a better alternative for its participants than sloth or indolence.