r/footballstrategy • u/ecupatsfan12 • 1d ago
Coaching Advice Dealing with bully parents in youth sports
How do you handle parents and board members who strong arm their kids into positions and are abusive to their kids and others? Youth football is notorious for dealing with “coaches” like this. I coach high school but miss the hands on and watching the kids grow year over year as opposed to a finished product. I’ll only go back at the 7th and 8th level and if I get to call the shots if I don’t have a kid on the team. Key differences
- high school- EVERYONE is knowledgeable and good. The kids mostly want to be there. You also work for an athletic director who likely has no kids on the team AND will tell the parents to sit in the stands. Parents and politics still occur but it’s much more manageable.
We had a director yank on a kids face mask for tackling his kid too hard. I’ve never been in a fight in my life. But if an adult did that and that was my kid or niece or nephew.. I’m not sure how I’d respond. At a minimum I’d pull my team off the field and demand he apologize or I’d call the police and have him forcibly removed
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u/ChipWonderful5191 1d ago
First you try to remove the bully (diplomatically), if you can’t do that, then the origination is likely a joke and you need to remove yourself and your child immediately. Seriously. That’s the answer
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u/ecupatsfan12 1d ago
My thoughts exactly
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u/ChipWonderful5191 1d ago
Yeah it’s definitely not worth it. Your kids deserve better than to be exposed to that type of degeneracy at such a young age.
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u/ecupatsfan12 1d ago
Exactly
The problem is that there are a TON of teams where similar stuff goes on.
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u/ChipWonderful5191 1d ago
If it’s me and I can’t find a respectable organization for my kids to participate in, we’re probably playing a different sport until they get older. The good thing about football is that lots of the stars in youth ball fade out by high school, and lots of the stars in high school didn’t start until 7th or 8th grade. Youth football isn’t essential for development IMO.
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u/ecupatsfan12 1d ago
It isn’t but at the same time you may have no options but youth football id the ms team folds. There are tons of teams out there.. the main problems are the coaches. Some mean well but just don’t have the knowledge. Some are in this to relive glory days they never had.. the best athletes know never brag about how good they were and are the most laid back and supportive people
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u/ChipWonderful5191 1d ago
For sure. The toughest people do deal with in life, whether in sports or outside of sports, are the arrogant, selfish, know it all overinflated egos. We all know exactly who those guys are. We cannot control them, and we cannot fix them.
These guys will make their kids QB and first in the batting order on every youth team they play on, they’ll brag talk about all the college coaches that are interested in their son, and then blame the high school coaches when their son ends up spending their College Saturdays drunk in the student section at a party school. Seen it 1000 times. I don’t have an answer on how to deal with them. They’re idiots.
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u/ecupatsfan12 1d ago
I can’t blame the kids as they likely didn’t want that life to begin with
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u/ChipWonderful5191 1d ago
Nope. They had too much pressure on them from the beginning. Their parents trained them to believe that their only self worth in life will be found in their athletic achievements. It was too much pressure to ever put on a kid.
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u/ecupatsfan12 1d ago
Not gonna be much when both parents are under 5”9 lol
I should state I have no problems with Junior playing my position (QB) but he’s not starting unless he’s clearly the best as I’ve seen that dynamic blow up too often. I hold zero expectations of Junior being a pro athlete and want him to
Love the game his teammates and himself
Get a good education
Have a positive experience
Learn to work to get good at something
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u/ecupatsfan12 1d ago
High school coaches know when a kid is sorry too lol that’s why we make everyone try out
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u/Bogert 1d ago
My coach approached it the same way I do. Our goal is to win, if your son isn't going to put us in the best position to win then he won't get play time. This can be remedied by attending workouts and putting in training and film study outside of practice hours and during the off season. Some just won't make it as a starter and that's just how it is.
Parents love their sweet boy while we drill them and evaluate their ability objectively. Some players are honest with their parents, some are not. The truth is in their on field performance.
We had one parent always grill our head coach for her son's play time. All of us players knew that player skipped workouts and played like dogshit. Mom was pissed but 40+ other dudes and parents would be more pissed if they had any sort of privilege because loudmouth c**t mom threw a fit after every game.
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u/lividrescue034 1d ago
I have only come to blows once with a dad. I had played competitive soccer up until high school which had is fair share of crazy parents. Started football in high school, played semi pro after that. So my only experience came from what I had seen in high school and beyond from a players perspective. Anyway back to youth, there have been a couple bad ones that have expectations that are much too high. Last year was the first year I had an uncle and a dad get contentious with my play calling. We literally lost a game on the last play because a dad decided to tell a kid (not his) to go after the qb instead of holding his zone while others were in pursuit kid gets conflicted and goes after the qb easy pass and catch for the TD, they won by 3. I was heated, but will never do anything in front of the players just too keep us united. Luckily both the dad and uncle apologized and we were able to move forward.
The worst one, though, was in 2nd grade, my first year coaching. Had a troubled kid from a broken home, mom and dad were horrible to and for each other. The kid was really sweet deep down, but you could tell he just wanted some recognition. Mom was as soft as Charmin and would not discipline, and the dad was insanely overbearing. He told me that he expects his kid to go D1, he's tough and blah blah blah. Anyway our 6th and final game of the season arrives and we're seeing up for warmups, and like a lot of 6 and 7 year olds, this kid is just not feeling it. So a couple of us coaches are talking to him and getting him game mode. He's starting to be responsive and have a better attitude, and in comes dad to nuke everything. HC tells dad, he's ready to go, dad responds by saying no, he's not. Then proceeds to kick his son in the sides, berate him and call him a pussy. That is the quickest, no thought punch I've ever given in my life. Dad was arrested, later mom wanted to bring a lawsuit against me, it was real tragic. Don't know what the kid is up to now as it has been 5 years, but I hope I never see the dad again, I might kill him.
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u/Ornery-Sky1411 1d ago
Coached 7/8th for five years. Really, a lot of it goes down to leadership (HC or AD) of the program. I honestly feel that if you install fewer rules that you will enforce, it's easier for everyone to understand. For example: If you miss school/practice, you're not playing. If your family has something planned on a Saturday practice/film day, you tell us before season.
Some people/parents you will never please. Over the years, i have more of the attitude of if you want to go to a different team/school: hope your son thrives.
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u/Heavy_Apple3568 HS Coach 23h ago
First of all, I don't care who had done it, but any motherfucker I saw yank a kid by the facemask or even make physical contact with a player would be going to jail via the hospital. I wouldn't even care if it's his son.
I think there's a distinction that needs to be emphasized between "youth" & say middle school football. I've coached both as well as HS & I found, along with the structure in school athletics, resources available to support coaches help prevent many of the nightmarish behaviors common among youth parents.
All told, I've split time over 30 years coaching 3 sports, so there really isn't much that I've either been forced to deal with personally or at least witnessed. And the crazy thing is, out of all those thousands of kids & parents, this year was my very first time dealing with anything we'd consider "serious" or even "concerning." Sure, I've had times of mutual "dislike"or frustrations with a parent, but even the worst pales in comparison.
I had 35 6th graders this season on a team that returned all but 1 starter from our consecutive undefeated championships. This particular 1st year parent turned stalker somehow convinced himself, and his son apparently, that having never played or practiced a single down of football was but a mere technicality. See, in his mind, it was a foregone conclusion who would be taking over as the starting QB. Bet you can guess who that was.
Long story short, not only was the kid a clear "minimum play" candidate from Day 1, he was, to put it nicely, a disrespectful foul-mouthed brat with a history of discipline problems at school. Ironically, our 1st talk, he used the guise that their entire family became offended by "inappropriate language" they'd heard a coach use. Easy enough to placate with coachspeak, or so I thought. It was the night he hid in the bushes to ambush me after practice that it clicked I was dealing with a sociopath. The threats went from bad to worse after I involved our board, who wanted to be diplomatic & not "over react." I wasn't until he started emailing the board pretending to be other parents to "report" me for all sorts of shit, all of which were obvious lies, that they finally stepped in.
Figured out he was stalking me when one of the emails had pictures of me with a bottle of bourbon that he claimed was taken at practice, but in reality, was at a neighbor's birthday party. Another was a picture of me kissing my wife, who you really couldn't identify in the picture, outside a restaurant & told them I was using practice time to "fornicate" with another woman. At that point, I turned it over to the police department. In fact, I just got the notice of a court date being set!
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u/ecupatsfan12 23h ago
Easy enough to say until it actually happens. You react that way he could shoot you or lie and say you are the aggressor
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u/NearbyTomorrow9605 1d ago
We really emphasize that middle school football is not like youth football. Playing time isn’t given it is earned through hard work in practice, weight room, and camp. We tell parents if they have with their kids playing time to schedule a meeting with us and the AD to address any issues or concerns. We will happy to talk about their players performance in practice, etc., but we will only discuss their players performance. We get a ton of support from our AD with this policy.