My brother and I used to coach high school softball. I was the JV coach of a highly successful varsity team where the head coach would state, “Winning is important. I’ll need two-to-four of your best players. Run my system and everything should work out fine.”

The head coach and I were pretty good friends, and we would spend hours talking strategy, softball, and sports. I hated the practices, like the athletes I coached, but liked the games. It was competition and I enjoyed it immensely. My brother kept me sane.

I had 23 athletes on the JV team, nine too many. So, when a particular player made several errors costing the team games, and since the mantra was to win, I had to bench some of them. One athlete that made three errors in one game lost the starting position. It was difficult process for everyone and I didn’t relish it in the slightest.

When I grew up, my dad taught us that there will be people who were better, and people who will be worse. The lesson was to keep us humble and to encourage us to do better.

So in the next game, I chose to sit the error-prone player on the bench. During that game, the parent of the athlete poked my brother (who sat at the other end of the bench) through the fence and yelled at him to put her kid back out there. She complained to the school, to my head coach, to my athletic director, but never spoke to me. To their credit, they all said, “Your child is not as good as you think,” but she never relented. It turned into a very trying season.

There are more examples like this one from that season, and because of those negative parents, it’s the primary reason I stopped coaching and I only lasted a year.

Parents can do a great deal of damage to young psyches, building them to be what they are not.

Now, imagine this scenario: Dad plays on a non-contact recreational hockey league and emotions get so heated that he swings a hockey stick, a la Chris Simon at another player. The injured player goes down, has convulsions on the ice, and has a major artery in his neck almost completely blocked; the artery blockage could have caused a stroke.

The response of the stick-swinging dad was only, “I hope he’s OK.“

He is a church going father of two. So, what lesson does that teach, exactly?

The former AHL player that was injured played his last hockey game, not because of his injuries, but because of what happened. There are many more examples of this type of thing happening, the Eric Francis article just caught my eye this morning.

It’s a shame that people forget that in competition, there is one thing that matters most in winning and losing…

It’s just a game.

Original post by PB

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