Life and Sport
"The Parent" is the Bane of a Coach's Existence
Author: Bryan Davies
This story is dedicated to Al, Ron, Harry J., and all of the great coaches that I known.
The Parent
"The next time I recruit a team, I'll do it in an orphanage..." Every youth basketball coach has quietly uttered those words or a similar expression, at least once in their career.
Whenever basketball coaches gather at tournaments, they gossip as ably as any ladies church group, if slightly more profane. Coaches talk with animation about games, past and present, glorious wins and divinely inspired defeats. They speak passionately of referees and their obvious failings, each one more absurd and vision impaired than the last. Coaches speak endlessly and with undisguised affection about their own teams, a sense of wonderment at what players do, on and off the floor, good and bad.
Coaching is an odd calling. We are true volunteers, the lighting rod for 6 months of the year or more for all that affects the young people in their various quests – it costs time and money to lead a team and, if the coach is lucky, the players become part family and part sociological study. Such teams are glorious creations.
If the coach is less fortunate, where the basketball gods are seeking their own amusement, the greatest coaching challenge will not lie with wayward players, an intractable referee, or a brutal opponent – it is the Parent.
The Parent is not the parents. The parents I have known through over 20 years of girls basketball coaching are as genuine as a Salvation Army brass band at Christmas (or any other season). These parents love their children and they are pleased to have their daughter as a part of a supportive athletic environment. They cheer when we win and they agonize over the losses with good humour – "the next game, Coach, we'll get them!" The parents help to make coaching enjoyable – they are a part of the team.
Sometimes these good and deserving people breathe the rarefied air that surrounds a successful team – the healthy, super oxygenated stuff – that tastes all the richer because the next breath, or the next season, is never guaranteed. Any coaching criticisms harbored by these parents are muted because they know that we do our best. They understand that their efforts as parents and mine as a coach cover much the same ground – they know that taking a group of 17 year old girls in the same direction can be like herding cats. A coach's affection for these parents is boundless.
Other parents are ciphers, anonymous in the team structure. They are the dispassionate taxi service and bankers to their children. They never speak; they never impede. A sighting of this species of parent is akin to the spotting of a rare bird, or a nocturnal animal. These are the ghosts that flit into the bleachers in the gym at tip off, dissolving into air as the final horn sounds. As coaches are the past masters of the philosophy "out of sight, out of mind" – we like these parents too.
Most teams have a Parent. Where a team did not possess one at the beginning of a year, a Parent is sometimes a mid season acquisition. If the lunar phases are out of whack, or if the gods are truly angry, the coach might find two or three Parents, lurking on the fringes, ready to assert themselves.
The Parent is the bane of a coach's existence.
The Parent is proof that loud, strident opinions, often bellowed from the bleachers at the most inopportune times, are rarely encumbered by an actual knowledge of the sport. The Parent is a force of nature, as weird and as awful as a waterspout spinning wildly across a northern lake, tearing into the shoreline as it lands.
The Parent never runs to a distinct type, other than being relentlessly right about anything that concerns their daughter and basketball generally. There are Parental sub-species, with some intermingling between the groups. I am certain that the genus parentus basketballus is descended from either the post Ice Age Neanderthals, or the hockey moms.
Most often the Parent has a daughter who is proclaimed as clearly the best player on the team, a circumstance that is all the more remarkable for having escaped the coach's attention. Where two or more Parents press forward, each championing their cause, selecting the best player is quite challenging. These Parents will tie offspring excellence to the one commodity that the coach controls – playing time. It is obvious to the Parent that the best player should play most; as they will tell you, the coach is only putting the team and its success first by playing their daughter the most.
Another Parent type is the expert. This Parent sees the coach and his approaches to the game and his handling of the team as a barrier to his or her daughter's inevitable progression to a successful career and an American university athletic scholarship. This Parent will buttonhole the coach at every opportunity, preaching tactics and team concepts that center on his daughter taking more shots and scoring more points. This Parent will point to books that they have read or clinics that they have attended in the distant past to prove their point. These Parents both pity the coach for knowing so little about the game and privately revile him for not listening very well.
The third species of Parent is the rarest breed. This Parent thinks that all other parents (and Parents) are jerks. They sit alone in the stands, or they stand near an exit door, expressionless as they watch the action unfold. This Parent will never cheer or groan as the games are played, but their body language screams of a primal, low level loathing of their surroundings and all of the people in it.
Change what you can, endure what you must, enjoy what you do, and chart your own course.
A 10 year old will sit quietly as their Parent rants about what is best for the team. By age 17, the player knows that the Parent has become a social and athletic liability. The other players roll their eyes whenever the Parent speaks, which tends to be frequently. The other parents keep their distance. In the delicate framework of a team and its harmony, the Parent becomes a life lesson for the entire group and most profoundly a learning experience for the one person whose interests that the Parent seeks to advance – their daughter.
Dealing with the Parent is one of the many wonderful courses taught in the crucible of competitive sports. The Parent is a study, a precursor to the other archetypes that these young women will meet in the next few years – the Arrogant Professor, the Unreasonable Landlord, the Demanding Customer, or the Tyrannical Boss. The best lesson to be learned from the Parent is one that is entirely unintended by them – change what you can, endure what you must, enjoy what you do, and chart your own course.
I ran into a former Parent not long ago. She had terrorized me in the pursuit of her daughter's career some years ago; this ultimate Parent was now coaching her youngest child's baseball team. She was incredulous at the attitude of two of her Parents, who did not appreciate that she was, after all, a volunteer trying to make the team better. "These Parents were selfish! They were rude! They only cared for their own kids!" As she spoke, I remembered that the most zealous of people were usually the converts to a cause. I suppose that like Saul on the road to Damascus, even a Parent can undergo a conversion.
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Published: April 26, 2006
