Have you ever purchased something
and been unhappy or dissatisfied with the product? Your frustration grows until
it becomes anger. You need to lash out at something or somebody. If you are going to be screwed over someone
is going to have to pay. It doesn’t have to be the person or company that you
think screwed you. It could be something or someone totally unrelated to what
got you upset in the first place.
It could’ve even been something small, which
over time continued to grow and fester until it became a big problem to you all
the while staying under the surface of your day to day existence.
No matter what you do you just can’t seem to
catch a break. Things keep piling up and you are continually faced with making
decisions under stress. Most of the time you are not even aware of something
bothering you until someone close to you asks if everything is alright. Your
usual response is; “Everything’s fine.” And I can tell you from experience, after
being married to my wonderful wife for 20 years, when she says “everything’s
fine” the you-know-what is about to hit the fan.
Think how quickly you get upset when
someone cuts you off in traffic, or how a seemingly simple malfunction such as
not being able to find your keys causes you to stress out more so than you
normally would.
You don’t think about it much as events continue to happen
and the stress inside you builds up and finally explodes. After, you wonder how
it happened, or you try to justify what you did.
Last night at a high school sports
event I watched a parent pace the sideline. Even with strict rules in place
about staying on you your own team’s cheering section, this guy went up and
down the sidelines, yelling instructions to his son and harassing the referees.
After the game, as he was leaving, he told one of the other parents that “He
did not know how much more of this he could take.” One of the parents responded
with “I know exactly how you feel.” Really?
During the game, while I was talking
with another person, someone who, like myself did not have a child playing on
either team, one of the players on the field made a very reckless play that
injured both him and his opponent. Now some may say he was being competitive.
No, he was not. It was a cheap play. Here is what is happening. The players on
the field think that there is a chance for them to get an athletic scholarship
so they are bound and determined to get ahead of the next player. Pushed on by
parents and coaches who do not stress the importance of community,
sportsmanship, and humility, they model the very behavior the parents and
coaches are seen doing during a sporting event.
The reaction in the stands was
telling. A couple of parents cheered the play as it almost scored a goal.
Another parent admonished the most vocal parent, and then turned to me and said
“I guess that’s how fights start in the stands.”
The parent who was yelling at the
referees was admonished by the Supervisor at the game. So what was his response
after the supervisor left? He started to cheer exponentially louder for his
son’s team. His daughter who could not have been more than 10 years old put her
hand on his shoulder and asked him to sit down and to calm down.
Parents are paying thousands of
dollars to have their children belong to a particular team or organization in
youth sports. They want to get a return on their investment. The angst meter is
already ramped up by the very fact that their child is playing in the “pay for
play” sports arena. Inherently people want
to belong to something. As the family unit dynamics have changed over the years
people still have the need to belong to a group or organization to help with
their identity. In prison they use solitary confinement as a way to take away
that feeling of belonging. It is one of the most severe punishments.
Youth sports used to be the place where you could put your
everyday worries and troubles behind you and just enjoy watching your children
play and have fun. Sure there was always one whackadoodle in the stands but everyone
avoided him and he was really left out to be by himself. What people don’t
understand is that by watching the person yell and make a fool out of
themselves, and I know the children certainly don’t want their parents behaving
that way, they begin to subconsciously identify with the yelling parent, or by not saying anything
to them, endorse that behavior. Now I am not saying that you should go and
confront that person. You do not want to get in to a fight over a youth sports
game, but what I do want you to be aware of is the effect it has on you and
those around you. Ever been in a room where it starts out with a group of
people talking. Then as time continues, the room grows louder and louder and no
one really seems to notice. They just keep raising their own voice so they can
be heard. Go to a school cafeteria at lunch time and you will see exactly what
I mean.
Now there is a thing called tacit community in which people
will knowingly say or do the wrong thing when influenced by others with status.
My generation called it mob mentality. It also seems that how educated the
person is has no effect on how he or she will react to these situations.
Let us take this classroom study done by
Soloman Asch at Swathmore College and transfer it onto to the youth sport
playing field. Heck, let’s transfer this paradigm to everyday life while we are
at it. People have been sucked in by the belief that college scholarships are
out there and are attainable by following this “pay for play” model. I recently
had a young man tell me about John Wall and how he was discovered at a Reebok
summer camp that cost $1000 to attend.
Two things from that statement. One, do you really think that John Wall
would not have played DI basketball and be in the NBA if he not gone to that
camp? Second, he proves the rule. Thousands of kids have gone to these camps and
what became of them. Kids, coaches, organizations, and parents, use the
exception to try and disprove our paradigm. They say he did it, why not my kid.
Because the facts say the odds are incredibly small that your child will play
in the NBA. 1 out of 100,000 kids between the ages of 19-23 make it to the NBA.
That’s why I
wrote my book, Stop the Tsunami in Youth sports, available soon on my website
in paperback form.
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