How to be a good soccer mom, or dad

Published 11:27 pm Monday, September 10, 2007

EVERETT – If you’ve ever been to a youth sporting event, you’ve probably seen them.

Or heard them.

They are loud and occasionally rude spectators, oftentimes overzealous parents, and they can make games unpleasant for kids, coaches, officials and fellow fans.

At the least, the behavior of these noisy parents can tarnish and even spoil the experience for participants and onlookers alike. At the worst, unruly behavior will sometimes escalate into violence, although incidents of sideline fistfights and the like are fortunately rare.

Still, the issue of parental behavior “is becoming more and more of a concern,” said Mike Margolies, vice-president of development for the Washington State Youth Soccer Association (WSYSA).

“We’re starting to see parent behavior in soccer go directions that we don’t want to see it go. Parents are not only yelling at own children, but they’re starting to yell at other kids and the referees.”

There is, of course, nothing new about fans shouting out their disapproval and disappointment, Margolies said.

“All you have to do is go to a Mariners game and you can listen to people yelling and booing at the players and umpires,” he said. “But now they’re carrying it out with kids who are 5 years old. Or 15 years old.”

To address this problem, the WSYSA and other organizations have begun holding seminars and workshops to teach good parental behavior at youth sporting events. Sometimes mandatory as determined by the leagues, these classes point out the harmful impact of verbally abusive actions, and then give suggestions for improved conduct.

Dr. Frank L. Smoll, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, held a recent session in Everett for a group of soccer moms and dads, on behalf of the WSYSA. During his presentation, Smoll emphasized the danger of “the professionalization of youth sports;” that is, the idea that spectators can carry on at a peewee soccer game just as they would at, say, a Seahawks football game.

Kids, he said, should never take the field with a win-at-all-costs mindset. Instead, the priorities should be on having fun and learning lessons of teamwork, discipline and sportsmanship. Winning, too, should be a goal, he said, but only in harmony with the other objectives.

Likewise, he went on, parents need to embrace that same attitude. In particular, Smoll said, parents should always focus on their child’s effort in a given game over the actual outcome.

In a subsequent interview, Smoll said his classes are “an orientation program to let (parents) know what sports should be about for young people and what (the parents’) role is. What we’re trying to do is make what is usually a very good experience even better by getting parents on board.”

After all, he said, bad parental behavior “can potentially destroy all the positive potential that a program has for the kids.”

Smoll, a onetime baseball and basketball player at Ripon College in Ripon, Wis. (he is in the school’s athletic Hall of Fame), said another goal is to get parents to help police their own.

“It’s important,” he said, “that they see it as part of their role. When parents see (bad behavior) happening, they shouldn’t just be sitting on their hands and looking the other way. It should be a red flag and they should know that this is where they can contribute. Even if they don’t have time to be a coach, part of their role can not only be showing appropriate behavior themselves, but also encouraging it in others as well.”

Margolies, meanwhile, has been around youth soccer as a coach and official for over 35 years. He said he knows of one parent “who believes it’s absolutely his right to yell at whoever he wants, and to yell and scream at the referee. … He’s so loud he’s been semi-ostracized from the team his son plays for. He has to go stand off by himself because nobody wants to be around him.”

There is also a tendency, he said, for bad behavior to compound. It can happen when parents are “standing on the sidelines and learning behavior from somebody who has inappropriate behavior. So somehow we have to stop that cycle, and we have to do it through parent education classes or whatever.

“It only takes one or two parents to get the train moving in the wrong direction,” he said. “So however we go about it, we have to do something to make this work for the kids, for the referees and for the coaches.”