When you add in the increasing professionalization and early specialization of youth sports, be it in soccer with MLS Next, or shoe company-sponsored club teams in basketball, you have a recipe for parents engaging in behavior that they shouldn’t. The damage can be intense for all involved, for coaches and for players, leading members of both constituencies to leave the game.
However, there are some steps clubs and organizations can take to lower the collective temperature. Having a buffer between coach and parent can help, be it a team administrator or a director of coaching. But Gallimore said she has seen this cut both ways. Given how the coach needs to control the “performance environment,” as she put it, another layer of management can create complications.
“That buffer better be on the same page as you want them to be, or it can have the exact opposite effect,” she said. “I’ve seen it both ways, so it becomes a management issue.”
A steady, proactive flow of communication throughout the season is also vital. It can serve to communicate the club’s overall culture in terms of player development and results, as well as spell out some parameters for how playing time — probably the biggest potential source of conflict between coaches and parents — is to be doled out. It also helps ensure that the first interaction between parents and coach isn’t when something has gone wrong. Yet it’s not as easy as it sounds.
“I think that a lot of clubs operate in fear,” Lemov said. “I don’t think you can be great at what you’re trying to do when your primary goal is to avoid difficult situations when you’re operating out of fear and anxiety.”
Communication can also help set boundaries. Hackworth recalled getting pushback when he told parents they couldn’t set up lawn chairs right next to the field to watch practice but had to watch behind a fence. He insisted, however, that the parents needed to let their kids practice without the kind of immediate parental feedback that could be a distraction. His approach ended up carrying the day.
“In soccer in particular, there’s a pretty small group of people that know a lot about each other, is what I’d say,” Gallimore said. “So it wouldn’t take [more than] one little thing going sideways for something like this to happen, and it’s just a shame, to be honest.”
Hackworth added that how coaches treat their players can go a long way toward mitigating any angst that might arise in the coach/player/parent relationship. There are certainly instances when coaches have to be firm, but kindness counts too.
“If there’s a silver bullet that I could give most coaches at any sport, or any activity, it’s that if you treat your students, your athletes well, if you treat them with respect, if you treat them with empathy and kindness, if you treat them with care, it will alleviate so many of these emotional issues that happen in sports,” he said. “So when things like playing time become an issue, you have a little equity in the bank because you treat them well.
“It sounds easy coming out of my mouth. That sounds like anybody in the world could do it. It’s amazing to me how at every level — professional, college, amateur — that doesn’t happen.”
That goes for parents too. Later, Gallimore forwarded a text from a parent who had just received the league’s newsletter and thanked the league profusely for sending it out.
“[It] made me smile,” she wrote.
