Stop Telling Us What We Want, We Can Speak for Ourselves Part 1

My name is Molly, I am 18 years old, and I am a freshman in college. I recently read an article in Esquire in defense of coaches who yell. It was written by a woman who states that she is a mom, a careful parent, and a feminist. She outlines how she has taken the best care of her kids from conception onward, including enrolling them in a school that, to quote an online dictionary, is based on a system of education through free and guided play. She then spends parts of  the rest of the article arguing in favor of coaches who yell, coaches she calls “old-school style.” She states that it is ok for a coach to yell negative things at her kids and others because they do it for the benefit of the team. They are striving to bring out the very best in every kid so the team can be as great as possible. What a load of crap!

 I do not for one second believe that every “old-school” coach yells for purely extrinsic reasons, especially these days when everyone seems to be a lot more angry than they used to be, for the time, money, and pressure encompassing the world we live in.. They don’t want to be embarrassed in front of others because of a poor score, or because people see their kids as “soft.”

Wow. News flash, a youth sports game has nothing to do with the coach or the parents. Hence the youth part of youth sports. You don’t play in the game, and you do little more than act as a guide and allow your players to create an environment full of positivity. Maybe you teach us a drill or two, but what you really (should) do is teach us how to act as a team.

She often refers to the fact that she suffered the same abuse (which is what it is, because if a parent did that to their own child in public, there is a chance CPS would be called) as a child in sports, and it made her tougher, taught her to “take an unfair ass-kicking and shut up about it.”

She goes on to say that she believes in coaches who don’t care if a child is scared in the deep end or four years old, they will scream regardless. I would argue, first, that this unfair treatment and borderline abuse.

 Second, her coach, and/or maybe her parents, made her an angry human being who feels that, since it happened to her, everyone else should know the pain she suffered. If you let your kids suffer the consequences of your childhood problems, you need to calm down and reevaluate your role as a parent. Third, as a child who played travel soccer for a coach who never yelled, surrounded by parents who yelled nothing but encouragement (if anything at all), I can guarantee that we the players hear NOTHING anyone yells at us from the sidelines.

If you do yell at us, we are smart enough to recognize it as unnecessary, and we tune you out. When you yell things at us that are not true or just plain derogatory, we lose respect for you and we grow to resent you and you lose our trust, the most important part of any relationship between adult and child. Then you wonder why you have trouble disciplining us, why we don’t want to hang around you anymore, and why we strive to be as different from you as possible when we are parents.

You loathe yelling teachers? What is a coach if not a teacher in sports? If someone is in my face, screaming at me to do better, yes I will initially try to do better. But after a while, I will do so poorly so consistently that the coach will have no choice but to bench me. He no longer has a way of criticizing me for my playing if I’m not playing. Didn’t think about that, did you, old-school coach?

I am a former club swimmer, as well as a youth hockey and little league baseball player, and the product of six years of travel soccer. I never played for my high school team, preferring my travel soccer team, and I do not play for my college.