Daily Excerpt: Soccer Is Fun without Parents (Jonas) - The Ego Parent
Excerpt from Soccer Is Fun without Parents (Jonas):
THE EGO PARENT
The ego parent is sometimes hard to spot at first. One key is that they are often seen with large insulated mugs of coffee that have some ridiculous inscription, like: “It is a great day for soccer.” They also have bumper stickers about soccer on their cars, so you know they are involved with the “beautiful game.” They will constantly bring up the premiership without really knowing what league it is or who plays in it, but they love saying the word premiership. The Brits put the emphasis on the first syllable of Premier, and Americans on the second. You know them within minutes of the conversation because their son or daughter, Sam or Julie, are the absolute best player on the team. There is no “we” in the Ego Parent.
In youth soccer there is a national ranking system where clubs, teams, and players get ranked. Too many parents take these rankings seriously, and the president of FC told a story that he had a parent from out of state call him because his family was possibly moving to Milwaukee. Ultimately, the family did not move because the father said that the FC U-12 girls’ team wasn’t ranked high enough in the country. The family currently lived in a city where the daughter’s team was ranked really high, and therefore their club was a lot better. The father decided he couldn’t be moving his daughter to play for an inferior team. Truth is stranger than fiction.
Don’t for a minute think that fathers are the only parents with high egos. Jeff is a 20-year veteran referee who presented a player a Yellow Card for unsportsmanlike conduct. [Technically the term is unsporting behavior, not unsportsmanlike conduct.] The player was obviously removed from the game. However, just before Jeff was ready to restart play, the player’s mother stepped on the field and started shouting at Jeff for giving her kid a card and at the coach for taking him out of the game. [The irony here is that with a yellow card the player must be removed from the game. This is the rule.] After several minutes of her rampage, the mother had to be escorted to the parking lot by the game manager. I am sure that she was later nominated for Mother of the Year for this display.
There is a rule of proportions in youth soccer. The better the youth player, the bigger of a jerk the parent is.
One team in Oregon tried to solve the problem of parents yelling by having shirts made for the coaches that read: “They play. I coach. You cheer.”
One of the calmer soccer parents I have encounter related this story, which he believed explained soccer parents. (I am just repeating the story, not agreeing with the content.) Back in the Neanderthal times, the women worked by cooking the meals, bearing children, and building a cave/home that would help everyone survive. The men were the hunters and gatherers, going out in the woods. Soccer may not be that different. Soccer moms typically serve as team manager, handling all the paperwork, snack schedules, end of season parties, team communications, and more. They not only bear the children, but they also then drive them in a minivan that serves as the cave/home. The men gather intel on the opposing team players, and they hunt to coach and referee. If either of the two get out of line or create danger for the family, they pounce with every ounce of energy and soccer insult they can muster. At the end of the day, in either world, it is survival of the fittest. That especially rings true in select soccer.
Claudio Reyna, the Former U.S. Men's National Team World Cup Captain is credited with saying:
For
some reason, adults - some who can't even kick a ball - think it's perfectly
okay to scream at children while they're playing soccer. How normal would it
seem if a mother gave a six-year-old some crayons and a coloring book and
started screaming? “Use the red crayon! Stay in the lines! Don't use yellow!"
You think that child would develop a passion for drawing? Most important,
parents must realize that playing sports is a way for children to express
themselves (Reyna,
2008).
There is a great Family Circus cartoon that depicts this thought. Billy is talking to Jimmy as they watch a professional soccer match. Billy says, “The reason they can play that good is because their parents aren’t yelling at them from the sidelines.” It is funny because it is true.
It is one thing to constantly yell at a youth soccer match, but negative behavior is raised to a whole new level when you yell profanities at a youth soccer ref, and you have definitely crossed a number of lines when you get kicked out of the soccer club and threatened with trespassing if you attend any more youth soccer matches. Thus, was the fate of Tinamarie Mahlum. The Thunder Mountain Soccer Association’s board met to discuss this soccer mom and “held to verify continued complaints, slander, profanity, etc., against the League and board members.” As a result, the league removed the entire family from any “membership activities of any kind with the Thunder Mountain Soccer Association.” The director of the soccer league said that she was trying to act on behalf of children. “If,” she said, “you could take the parents out of sports sometimes...” My point exactly! The child must have been thrilled with having to go to school the next day to face his friends after his mom’s actions (Harmon, 2008).
Servant Leadership: Healing
“Learning to heal is a powerful force for transformation and integration. One of the great strengths of Servant Leadership is the potential for healing one’s self and others. In, The Servant as Leader, Greenleaf writes, ― There is something subtle communicated to those being served and led if, implicit in the compact between the servant-leader and led is the understanding that the search for wholeness is something that they have” (Spears, 1995).
Too many parents can’t let go
of the past, are worried about the future for their young soccer player, and
certainly do not spend enough time in the present. They fear that a wrong call
by the ref or move by the coach will forever hinder their child’s soccer
experience. More parents need to practice mindfulness. Mindfulness is the psychological process of
bringing one's attention to experiences occurring in the present moment without
judgement. It is being present to watch a soccer match, not think about the
past or future, and calmly acknowledge and quietly accept one's
feelings, thoughts, and sensations. The key here is “quietly.” Research
indicates that individuals spend 95% of their time worrying, or thinking, about
the past or future and not enough time living in the present. Mindfulness also
teaches us that all actions and thoughts are connected. When one parent yells,
it is directly connected to the thoughts and actions of others. People need to live in Oneness. John Lennon
simplified Oneness as, “I am he, as you are he, as you are me, and we are all
together.”
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KOPS-FETHERLING LEGACY AWARD
IN THE CATEGORY OF LEADERSHIP
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