The “crazy sports parents,” Skye Eddy says, have ruined the experience for everyone.
You know them. They live vicariously through their child. They have unrealistic expectations for him or her as an athlete. Or they are simply so unreasonable that there’s little we can do to help them understand us better.
“As a coach, I’ve had an irrational parent on my team, and it has made my season miserable,” says Eddy, a former USWNT hopeful turned sports parent advocate. “They’ve been taking way too much of my time and energy from the children by asking too many questions. And so as coaches, when we’ve been in those experiences, we say, ‘OK, well, we’re just gonna avoid all parents, because that was a really difficult season.’ ”
Even Eddy, a one-time defensive MVP of the NCAA women’s soccer Final Four for George Mason who later coached on the staff at the University of Richmond, found herself labeled as one of them.
She saw a veil come over the organization’s executive director when she wanted to chat. To him, she was “a crazy parent, complaining about my daughter … I’m like, ‘Oh no, no, no, I’m just here to help,” she says.
Then the door shut. It was the ignition that launched her passion project, soccerparenting.com, which today has about 43,000 members nationwide. It offers advice, training and encouragement for coaches and parents and youth sports leaders with a goal of helping us understand each other a little better.
From Eddy’s experience and research, the vast majority of parents are not “crazy,” but level-headed folks who are just stressed.
“Parenting is stressful these days, like society’s stressful,” says Eddy, 53, a mother of two kids put through the athletic wringer. “You add on a sports experience, and there is a lot.”
Eddy spoke with us about how our soccer parenting, and sports parenting, can improve when we take a more introspective look at ourselves. From the discussion, USA TODAY Sports came with ways we can soothe our stress around our kids’ games and improve the environment in which they are playing.
Your child’s sports journey is unique from your own. Maybe you need to care less about it.
Eddy, a former goalie, reached as high as U.S. women’s soccer player could go in the 1990s, barring making the national team. She played professionally in Italy. She pushes back at the notion that she was living out her own athletic experiences when her daughter, Cali, also became an elite soccer player in high school.
“I loved my athletic career,” Eddy says. “I just didn’t know what to say to her to help her, because our mindsets are so different.
“She was like, ‘I want to play D-I, I want to play D-1,’ and she was getting D-1 interest, but she wasn’t pursuing it. She would not pick up a phone and call the coach. She was struggling with her self-esteem, her confidence around herself as an athlete, and so she really needed coaches calling her. She needed to be built up like that.”
Eddy was seeing things from her own point of view, and what she would have done. In more recent years, she came across a term (“Decoupling”) that would have helped her.
It is associated with a romantic relationship, where two people pull back from their emotional connection but remain friends. It can also apply to teenagers growing into their own identities as athletes.
“It’s sort of like not feeling things so deeply, letting our children dictate the path and us really being OK with it,” she says. “That is the learning, the making the mistakes: Not calling the coach, not eating the right food, or going to the sleepover the night before and playing really badly.
“And I think that because as parents, it’s so easy to feel like the stakes are so high, we try to interject too much.”
But how do we redirect ourselves? The process can start with our actions on the sidelines, and often when our kids are very young.
Your sideline behavior may be relieving your stress but stunting your child’s progress
You may not admit you’re stressed at your kids’ games. But perhaps unintentionally, you are projecting it onto them.
You cheer loudly. You jump up and down on the bleachers. You call to them. You interfere.
“That’s stress,” Eddy says.
Soccer Parenting’s Sideline Project, which helps condition parents on game day, identifies three types of sideline behaviors:
We’re “supportive” when we sit in attentive silence, cheer after positive outcomes for our child and his or her teammates, and perhaps even a good play from the other team.
We’re “hostile” when we yell at referees, yell at our child, or even other players. (Keep reading.)
We may not realize when we’re being “distracting.” This means we’re offering specific instructions to a child. Go to the ball! Get rid of it! Run!
“Distracting behavior serves one primary purpose: To alleviate our stress as parents and coaches,” Eddy says in her Sideline Project online course. “Players should be hearing their teammates and reasonable information from their coach, not their parents.”
In the video, she demonstrates the Stroop Effect, named after an American psychologist who measured selective attention, processing speed and how interference affects performance.
She has an interactive exercise using colors to illustrate how your children feel when they are concentrating in a game and adults interrupt them. I hitched when I did it.
“There’s a lag,” Eddy says. “This moment of interruption. That is how your child feels when they are playing, concentrating on the technical skill and what their decision is going to be, and they hear your voice telling them to shoot or pass.’
Instead, a good youth coach won’t distract, but give a subtle cue – a nod, a whistle, a finger point or a closed fist – to trigger something they worked on in practice.
“Whatever it is that we’re screaming, we’re taking away their learning opportunity,” Eddy says.
‘Do you realize I’m 13?’ If we focus on being less distracting, the truly hostile parents stand out
Cali was a tough defender. So tough, apparently, that she once came home from road club soccer tournament and reported: “Another parent from the other team was sitting on the sideline, flicking me off. She just sat there, giving me the finger, staring right at me.
“I said, ‘You do realize I’m 13 and you’re a grown adult, right?” she told her mom.
Eddy estimates that 2% of the youth sports ecosystem, perhaps one parent per team, are these hostile ones. Many of us are merely distracting, a quality we can correct.
Report the abusers and get them thrown out. They are not part of our experience.
I like to sit with the opposing team’s fans when my sons are pitching in their baseball games. While I get a different video angle, I meet new people and feel and hear their emotions. Sometimes I just listen to them. It helps remind me why we are all in this.
‘We care so much about sport because of the connection,’ Eddy says.
We can communicate easier with coaches if both sides respect boundaries
Cali quit soccer for short time when she was eight. She was bored.
Players were standing in lines. They did the same warmup at every practice. They weren’t even given adequate instruction, Eddy thought. It was labeled as an advanced development program.
When she asked other parents what they thought of the environment, they were fine with it.
“It struck me that until parents understand what a good learning environment looks like, to lead to player inspiration and joy and really giving kids a connection to sport, then we’re really going to be missing a big part of the solution when it comes to improving youth sports,” she says.
‘The last thing we want to do is be perceived as one of these irrational parents, so we’re not curious, we don’t ask questions, we don’t listen to our instincts, we don’t follow up when we when we probably should, because we don’t want to be perceived to care too much when there’s a big difference between being irrational and caring.’
When she tried to speak up and was rebuffed, she became a youth coach. And soccerparenting.com was born.
One of its foundational principles is to encourage coach and parent interaction, with clear and appropriate boundaries.
Some suggested parameters a coach can use:
The door is open to chat … When your kid comes home from practice in a bad mood or doesn’t want to go the next day; if he or she is having trouble playing a particular position; if you don’t fully understand the scoring system or rules of the sport.
The door is closed to chat … If you have a complaint about another player that doesn’t involve a safety issue; if you’re wondering why the coach made a tactical decision; if you don’t respect a coach’s time and want to have a long conversation after practice. (You can schedule one instead.)
“We see the correlation between parents having more understanding and the children’s experience getting better, and then therefore clubs and coaches having to get better,’ Eddy says.
Coach Steve: Three steps to dealing with a ‘bad’ coach
Be proactive, and intentional, about the way you handle stress
Even when we feel we have things under control during games, sometimes we don’t. Eddy laughs about once walking across the field with a plan in her head of what she would say to Cali. It didn’t involve the game. Instead, in the heat of the moment, she said: “You really need to work on your left foot.”
‘Where did that come from?’ she says. ‘I had zero intention of saying that. It just poured right out of me.’
When I posed a question on social media about how we can be better soccer parents, Palmer Neill, of Dallas, told me: “Basically, when you feel like doing something at a game or practice other than cheer or clap … just don’t do it. Let the coach be the coach and let the ref, ref. You don’t have (a) role. Life gets a lot easier when you realize this.’
But we can also recognize that sometimes we slip, too, and take precautions. When Neill barks to his 10-year-old son to get onsides, or about an opponent’s hand ball, he sits back in his chair and doesn’t get up. He tries to stay seated during the game.
‘It seems to give me one extra second to think before I sit up (or stand-up) and yell,’ he says.
Our own education and reflection, Eddy says, can relieve stress.
Know the rules (and recent modifications to them). Know your kid’s goals in sports. Be curious, not upset, when other kids have more skills than yours.
Perhaps it’s the Relative Age Effect, where young athletes born earliest among their age grouping are faster and stronger. Or that those kids move better because they play other sports or have more free play outside with friends and have better functional movement skills.
We can put our own sports paths into better context, too.
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Remember they are still kids, even when they’re creeping toward adulthood. There is satisfaction in watching who they are becoming.
What did you do when you were eight? Twelve? Sixteen?
When Eddy thinks about it, she liked to socialize at the local skating rink.
She only trained twice a week with her soccer team. On off days, she rode to a local park and kicked the ball into a piece of plywood against a fence. She would dive at the rebounds.
She used to wonder if Cali, who came back to soccer on her own terms, was getting enough reps on her own.
“What would I have been doing if I was in intense practices for an hour and a half four days a week, plus traveling to a lot in the games?” Eddy says. “Would I still have been doing that? Likely not.”
In today’s world, it feels like kids sports matter a lot more. Maybe they do when we have more opportunities to play in front of college coaches. Maybe they don’t when we play rec soccer, like Eddy’s son, Davis, did, and parents screamed when he missed a shot.
Davis, now a junior in college, had a better experience playing at a small high school.
“Having that outlet for sport was really important to his development, just as a person, and getting some space and, kind of way to blow off some steam as a student,” she says.
Cali decided to work at a sleepaway camp in Maine during the summer before her junior year, a crucial one for college recruiting. She became a Division III All-American and now works for the Columbus Crew.
“I remember thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s so hard for you,’ but not saying that out loud,’ Eddy says. ‘That was a really important capstone to a really important thing in our life. Yet, she really missed a lot of opportunities, and there were consequences of that. We just need to make sure that it’s our child’s voice that we’re hearing.’
We are when we let them lead the way, to choose friends over sports when they wish, and to have those sleepovers. Well, maybe not the sleepovers.
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.