Know Your Role
Do you know the golden rule of good sportsmanship? It's very simple: Know your role and do not stray from it.
Everyone involved in youth sports has a role to play: players play; coaches coach; officials officiate; and spectators sit in the stands or stand on the sidelines and cheer positively [1].
A Parent's Role
As parents, your only role at a game is to be a positive supporter of your team. A parent is not an assistant coach. A parent is not an evaluator of officials. A parent is not the judge of other parents.
Most parents know that the parent who screams at the official is wrong. They know that yelling at players doesn't help them. What most parents and spectators don't know is that even some very benign acts can cause problems - because players, coaches and officials can't easily tell which parents are ok and which ones are problematic. Here are some examples:
In each case the parent strayed from their role. The first set of parents ceased being positive supporters of their teams and entered the role of officiating supervisor. It didn't matter six times, but it sure mattered the seventh time. The second parent strayed into the coaches' role and interfered with other parents and spectators' ability to watch the game. The scary thing is that these were well intentioned people. It's hard to be a fan. Nobody teaches us how to do it.
Education Is Key
One of the principal roles of administrators of youth sports programs is to be pro-active about sportsmanship and anticipate bad behavior before it occurs. The best way to do that is to actually teach sportsmanship.
To teach the golden rule of good sportsmanship, youth and high school sports program administrators should hold pre-season meetings with parents to:
Teaching help is available
Fortunately, youth and high school sports program administrators do not need to create sportsmanship programs from scratch. Numerous programs exist to help teach sportsmanship. Indeed, as the intensity of youth sports has increased over the past two decades and a winning-at-all-cost attitude has become more and more the norm, a virtual cottage industry has grown up to help administrators, coaches, and parents solve some of the worst problems of the youth and high school sports world. Excellent websites like MomsTeam.com and groups like the Positive Coaching Alliance, Coaching Boys into Men, Character Counts, the American Sports Institute, and the National Alliance for Youth Sports can help everybody from coaches to parents to game administrators make the world of youth sports a better place for everyone.
Even were there no such programs, here are some of the steps I believe youth sports programs can take to improve the level of sportsmanship on their own:
Good People, Bad Acts
Teaching sportsmanship can work wonders in keeping well-intentioned people from engaging in inappropriate conduct on the sports sidelines. Often, parents will act inappropriately without even realizing it.
Training program administrators so they, in turn, can educate parents on the line between acceptable sideline behavior and bad acts will go a long way to improving sportsmanship. It can be particularly effective if parents are reminded of the golden rule of sportsmanship: that it is not their role to evaluate how well the officials did their job, and that if they stray from their role as parents, they are asking for trouble.
Breaking the golden rule can lead to tragedy
A lot of prominent incidents involve golden rule violations. The hockey dad who killed his son's coach in 2002 because he thought the coach wasn't controlling rough play probably wasn't a total lunatic. He was, though, a guy who broke the golden rule - and he was a guy who clearly lacked the normal self-restraint that helps most of us from going too far.
As a parent he clearly tried to substitute his judgment for that of the coach's. It would be interesting to know if he had received sportsmanship education. I rather doubt that he had.
News reports of well-known people abusing officials at youth games are not uncommon. Are they nuts? Probably not! They simply broke the golden rule of sportsmanship when they were placed in a highly charged, emotionally intense environment far different than their normal environment and strayed from their role as parents: to support their child, the team and even the opposing team and players with positive cheers.
Golden rule has limits
Educating parents about the golden rule of sportsmanship can only go so far, however. The golden rule won't stop people who have bad intentions. These people can only be kept in check by a combination of game security and post-game discipline. This is the only way to handle people like the Maryland high school fans who called an opposing player a monkey in December, 2007.
And, even then, there are going to be some people who aren't going to be deterred from engaging in bad acts regardless of the security measures taken or post-incident discipline imposed. At a Yale-Harvard football game a few years ago, a Yale student put cards on each seat in the Harvard rooting sections. At halftime, the announcer had the Harvard rooting section hold up their cards. The cards spelled out, "We suck." The incident is even funnier when you realize that fans holding up cards couldn't actually tell what they were spelling out. Each fan just saw one piece of the larger message. The Harvard fans had no idea why the opposing Yale fans were telling them that they sucked.
Last year a high school student tried a similar stunt. No amount of after-the-fact discipline is likely to deter such a student because he is likely to feel that the sheer joy he got from demonstrating his cleverness outweighs any punishment he might receive for the prank. Indeed, I rather suspect that the people who meted out punishment were suppressing their laughter. I would have punished the prankster, but I, too, would have been amused by his sheer audacity and wit. That wouldn't stop me from issuing a harsh punishment, though. With the exception of the truly bad and the truly precocious, however, following the golden rule should work for most people .
Indeed, I am willing to bet that if you reviewed the incidents that occur over the course of your child's sports season in which parents, coaches, or players misbehaved, you would find that many of them would likely not have happened had everyone followed the golden rule of sportsmanship. Institute the rule, educate parents, coaches and players about and have them follow the rule, and the world of youth sports will be a better place.
Links:
[1] https://mail.momsteam.com/node/455
[2] https://mail.momsteam.com/successful-parenting/game-day/losing-perspective-the-dangers-of-tunnel-vision
[3] https://mail.momsteam.com/successful-parenting/youth-sports-parenting-basics/parents-role/education-and-training-of-parents-co