Parents and Referees – A Toxic Relationship

With the addition of the Automated Ball-Strike challenge system in baseball, we saw a lot of overturned calls early in the season. While some of the overturned calls are borderline, there have also been some egregious calls rightly overturned. This got me thinking about the often stressful relationship between parents and officials in youth and high school sports.

Most sports fanatics can think back through their youth to bad calls they specifically recall because those calls stick with you. For me, there was the Mike Renfro catch that wasn’t for the Houston Oilers in the 1979 AFC Championship game and the Aundra Franklin fumble recovered by my NY Jets that wasn’t called a fumble in the 1982 AFC Championship game. More recently, we had Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga lose a PERFECT GAME with two outs in the 9^th inning when a runner was called safe at 1B who was clearly out. I am sure there are many others I am missing, but these are the ones that come to mind right now.

For most of history, officiating was based entirely on humans making calls with no assistance from replay. I know that is hard for younger people to fathom, but it is true. Instant replay was not adopted as an officiating tool until 1986 in the NFL. The NFL used it until 1991 and then discontinued it as it took way too much time and failed to get enough calls correct. The NFL reinstated it in 1999, and it has been in use ever since. Baseball has been the sport most hesitant to use replay technology, but it introduced it in 2008 and this season went a step further by using radar technology for its Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) System, which allows teams to challenge a pitch call. Times have definitely changed.

The main character in a baseball saga a few weeks ago was umpire CB Bucknor. He has been the focal point of a lot of frustration because he has had numerous calls overturned. Some of them are really hard to fathom. I do know that officials make mistakes, as it is part of the human condition. In most cases, those mistakes involve razor-thin margins for error and can only be overturned through the use of super slow-motion, high-definition video review. The reality is that the majority of officials are exceptional at their job. The problem is that all it takes is a handful of bad officials to give fans and parents the impression that all officials are terrible, and that is not the case. This impression then carries over to their kids’ sports, and in many cases it gets ugly. Both parents and officials are to blame, but I believe most of this is due to parents not keeping youth sports in perspective.

As I have mentioned in previous articles, parents put too much importance on youth sports, and this causes most of the problems with youth sports officiating. As a high school student, I would umpire youth baseball games where I grew up. I wasn’t perfect, and for the most part the parents were good, and I don’t recall any serious blowups. I certainly made mistakes that coaches would question, but nothing like what we see today. As a parent and coach, I was aware when the high school kids were umpiring and never made an issue of it, but I have seen coaches and parents act ridiculously toward a teenage umpire in a rec baseball game, to the point that the kid’s father would come to the game to observe and make sure no one took advantage of his son. This is unacceptable behavior for coaches and parents with any official, umpire, or referee, let alone a high school kid.

It gets worse in the travel sports arena, as those are certified adult officials. Coaches and parents think they have more leeway to complain or judge the job an official is doing. I have seen a horrendous situation where two coaches almost came to blows over a call in an 8U baseball game. That’s right, 8U baseball. The issue in this case wasn’t the umpire, it was the parents, as it is in most cases.

I am not immune to getting emotionally invested in a game and frustrated by a call. I have been thrown out of a hockey rink, and also had another parent wrongly thrown out, at a 14U game for making a loud complaint over a call. And it was the second comment that did it. I’m not proud of that. That was entirely my fault. It doesn’t matter what the call was. A great piece of advice I received is that when a fan or parent is upset with a call, it is usually the second sentence that gets you thrown out. If you must express your frustration, keep it to the initial frustration sentence. Don’t add on to it.

The worst part of parent reactions to officiating is that all it takes is one parent to be griping about a call and then other parents chime in. On top of that, THEY AREN’T GOING TO CHANGE THE CALL! So, we can gripe all we want, but we aren’t having a positive impact on the officials. If anything, we are just embarrassing ourselves. A few friends who are officials have told me that kids on the ice have commented that they wish their parents would just shut up. Think about that. Your kid is out there working hard and is wishing you would shut up in the stands. We as parents, and coaches, need to be better. We need to keep perspective. We also gain a reputation, which can put a preconceived perspective in an official’s head that doesn’t benefit our kids. Officials are human. How many comments can they hear before it affects them?

Now, here is my one caveat about the outlier officials who give the vast majority of their counterparts a bad name. As a parent and coach, my only ask is that officials treat every game as important, regardless of the level. The kids playing in that game have practiced hard and deserve officials who approach it with the same level of commitment. I have been on the sidelines and in the stands where I have seen someone mailing it in for a paycheck. Or just trying to get the youth football tripleheader over so they can get home. That is not fair to the kids. Football, specifically, is a sport where there is a whole week of practice and preparation for one game. Having an official who isn’t 100% focused on wanting to do a good job for the kids isn’t right. I realize they may have high-level high school games the same weekend and see the youth game as unimportant, but it is important to those kids who worked all week for this game. Note that I didn’t say for the coaches and parents. This is about doing right by the kids.

Correction: I have a second ask. In contact sports, please set a tone early in the game by calling penalties on borderline cheap shots to keep the game from getting out of hand. I am a proponent of contact sports and am not looking to soften the games. I want the borderline dirty hits to be addressed EARLY. I have seen too many football, hockey, and lacrosse games be allowed to become borderline cheap-shot physical, which then spirals as the kids ratchet up the physical play until it gets out of hand.

Then you have parents concerned about their kids getting hurt because the game is out of hand. Referees can control the tone of the game by not allowing it to get out of hand. I have had an official say to me that they don’t set any tone. I have a hard time with that line of thinking. I’m not saying I am right, but I have seen games officiated both ways, and there is no question that a referee who understands the dynamics of teenagers in a contact sport can positively impact a game by calling cheap shots early and sending a clear message about what will be tolerated.

To be clear: the overwhelming majority of the issues come from parents and the ridiculous importance they put on their kids’ sports. The more we can shift the perspective of parents, the better it will be for our kids.