Parents and Coaches,
Now that the season is over, as all of you and your kids prepare to lace up the soccer cleats, get into your baseball gear or look forward to the CNR Spring Basketball league, I’d like to bring up an issue I think is only getting worse and worse in youth sports. Maybe you will agree or disagree with my view I’m about to give, but hopefully you will take it into consideration and self analyze yourself and your team on this.
I believe the conduct and respect towards referees is at an all-time low in youth sports. This includes players, coaches, and parents. I’m not just referring to basketball, but referring to all sports. I think there are a few reasons why we have gotten to this point.
“I’m not a Role Model” – I think back to the famous Charles Barkley commercial during his playing days where he talked about how he wasn’t a role model. If you watch any professional sport, it has become the norm for players and coaches to question and argue every call. Our kids see this, and they mimic it on the basketball court or various sport venue they play on. How many times have you seen it, a referee calls a foul and the player turns around with hands raised with an exasperated look on his face? How do we solve this problem? Coaches and parents need to tell their kids to stop reacting to calls.
Like Adult, like child – Here’s a self analyzation moment for you. Whether you are the coach of the team, or the parent in the stands, if a call happens that you don’t agree with are you that person who is yelling at the referees questioning the call? If you so, then it’s likely that your kid will, or eventually do the same thing in games as well.
With our CNR Basketball league, if you have an issue with the officiating, we have a process in handling that. We have people who handle referee complaints and code of conduct issues. Send us an email, give us the information we need and we will look into the situation. That’s how you should handle it. However, during the game, if you decide to verbally berate the referee, which then leads to your parents following suite, which will obviously lead to your players losing their composure, there’s nothing I can do for you.
I think the best thing about sports is that it provides us life lessons in a protected environment. One of the biggest life lessons is dealing with adversity. All of us deal with adversity to various degrees in our everyday life. So in sports, if a basketball team is losing a game and feels like none of the calls are going their way, what is the appropriate way to respond? Do we yell at the referees? If you don’t get that promotion at work, do you yell at your boss?
I like to think I’m a person who can see both sides of a story. I’m a pretty reasonable person. However, I struggle to follow the rationale some people have towards referees. the reality is that we have a serious supply and demand issue. It has gotten so bad that this past week, there were high school basketball games cancelled because of a lack of referees. Think about that, it wasn’t cancelled because of bad weather or because a team didn’t have enough players. The game was cancelled because there wasn’t enough referees to officiate.
We had roughly 3,300 kids get to play basketball this weekend. Imagine if your high school kid had prepared all week for a basketball game only for it to be cancelled. The reason I bring this up is that the CNR Basketball league is a starting ground for many future high school officials. When these referees come to games, they don’t know who is playing. They could care less who wins the game. They do it for mainly three reasons. #1 – to make money to provide for their family. #2 – they love basketball and want to remain around the game. #3 – to stay in shape. If these referees get verbally berated in our league, they simply quit and find another way to provide financially for their family.
What give us the right as adults to feel like we can verbally disrespect someone else over a judgment call we made? If you go to Outback and feel your steak was over-cooked, are you going back into the kitchen to berate the chef? If you feel the person and the grocery store didn’t do a good job bagging the groceries and put the bread on the bottom of the bag with a jar of pickles on top, are you going to yell at them?
Folks, I’m no one important. I”m just a life-long educator, coach and parent who is trying to teach my kids right and wrong. I have this small platform with CNR Basketball where I have something in common with everyone in the league. We all either have kids playing youth sports or we are coaching it. I can’t control what happens on the soccer fields or the baseball diamonds across the area. The only thing I can control are the expectations we set in CNR Basketball as far as behavior and conduct is concerned with our players, coaches, parents and officials.
So when you step out onto the baseball diamond or soccer field this April, when you see that bang-bang call at second base or that goal you thought should have been disallowed because of offsides, before you begin to express your displeasure with the officials, just ask yourself one question, “Is it worth it?”