Helicopter Parenting in the Modern Age: When is the responsibility of the parents to step in, VS pulling back? and other thoughts about being a coach/parent of a child/athlete

Emma started soccer this spring. It is her first time playing soccer, after following Yuna to several seasons of soccer. Emma knows the drill. She has eaten oranges at half time, gets the team popsickles (an all important rite of soccer at this age), and has seen many practices and games. But this is the first year where she is herself playing, with her own cleats, shinguards, and a team shirt. I wasn’t sure how she’d do, as neither she nor Yuna has shown a particular affinity for sports thus far. Emma did far better than I expected. While she was not a star player, she seemed interested, following the action around the field, if not yet “getting in there” to mix it up with the five or six pairs of little four and five year old legs fighting for the ball. Emma is a lover, not a fighter, a very gentle soul.

There is a child on Emma’s team, a boy. From what I understand, he briefly attended Emma’s Montessori school, before there was a “mutual” understanding that it was not a good fit. But he remembers Emma. He is hyper active, rarely listening to the attempts by the coaches to run a drill or teach a group of four year old children about the fundamentals of soccer. He runs around the periphery of the soccer field, kicking the balls of the other children, or occasionally even kicking the children. He continues to mildly harass Emma, in his mind all in just good fun.

I was planning to be a coach for Emma’s team, but a mistake when signing up meant I was relegated to a garden variety parent, with no coach’s team shirt, and no official standing to intervene. I have had raucous and hyper active children before on my teams. After it was clear who they were, I always made a point of keeping a special eye on them, both to make sure they weren’t disruptive to the team, but also because discipline is an important part of team work. But unfortunately, the coaches on Emma’s team were probably fairly new to coaching (this was a pre-K team, after all). They made some mild pleas to this child to pay attention, to stop kicking other children. It was an exercise in futility.

To my dismay, the parents of this child were on the side lines, paying scant attention to their child (and oblivious of my silent pleas to step in and discipline their own child). Maybe they figured that since they have deposited their child at soccer practice, now it is the sole responsibility of the coaches to keep everyone in line. Or maybe they are familiar with his behavior, even accepting of it (boys will be boys), and allow it. The question I have is, isn’t it ultimately the parent’s responsibility to coach their own children, to discipline, to teach, and to otherwise keep in line? Does that fall to the exclusive domain of the coaches/teachers once the child is dropped off or transferred into their care?

I have been coaching Yuna for many seasons now. It is really no additional time commitment, as I am at all of Yuna’s practices and games anyway. I started coaching because the first season Yuna was playing soccer, I was really underwhelmed by her coaches. I thought the coaches were more interested in playing soccer related games rather than actually trying to teach the children how to play soccer and improve at it. They looked to me like they had little to no prior experience with competitive sports. It’s not that one must have had played sports at a high level (Division I? ) as a qualification to coach. I certainly haven’t. I didn’t even make the tennis team at my Division III college. But I have and continue to play sports competitively, where one does novel things like “keep score” and compete. So after Yuna’s first season, I volunteered to coach and have been coaching ever since.

Emma has been really enjoying her soccer practices and games. She is at this point not so interested in physical contact. She is one of the lightest and littlest children on the team, and has no appetite for mixing it up in close quarters with more rambunctious children. She hovers on the periphery, near the action but not really in it. If the ball were to squirt out, she may take a kick at it as it rolls by her, but she certainly is not athletic enough to keep pace with the movement of the ball on the field.

Yuna has really improved as a soccer player. She still has the distinction of never having scored a goal in four plus seasons of playing soccer. But she loves being out there with her team, runs hard and is a great sport. For me, I have no designs on either of my daughters playing soccer at a high level or earning an athletic scholarship to college. But I do want them to play a team sport and learn how to be on a team. I love soccer because it is the ultimate team sport. There is one ball, but all the players move in concert with the movement of the ball, and the team must play as one to be successful. The half time oranges, the post game popsickles, the lining up to shake hands with your opponents following the game, those are all important rituals that I am very glad my children are learning. In today’s society, if you can’t work on a team, you can’t work. The age of the solitary genius is over. There is little patience or place for the anti-social but brilliant artist types. No matter your chosen profession or walk of life, it is essential to learn how to work with a plethora of other people, on a team. And this is the goal with soccer.