They see through you when you cozy up for other reasons, they have your child’s best interest at heart, they despise the travel ball mentality as much as they do helicopter parenting and, believe it or not, are happy to talk to you as long as it doesn’t involve playing time for their children.
And they don't believe children are entitled to anything on the playing field -- they have to earn it.
They are the high school coaches of Alabama and it’s their chance to tell you the problems they have with some parents – just as some parents are quick to turn to a principal or administration when they don’t get the answers they want.
“I think 80 percent of the parents in our district are good, 15 percent have a different perspective and five percent give no support -- and the greatest thing in the world for that player (with no support) is to be in our program,” said Janet Latham, who retired as athletic director for Athens High School and is a former Central Board member for the Alabama High School Athletic Association.
“As AD, I got more complaints about coaches not developing a child for the next level, or making (the player) hate the game. It’s a parent’s job to worry about their child … and the coach and AD’s job to look at the sum of all parts and those two objectives aren’t always in tune. When it all comes to an understanding is when greatness happens.”
In May, AL.com invited roughly 1,300 coaches around the state to participate in a survey on their relationships with parents, players and their own administration. More than 300 responded to our questions and could expand their answers if they chose.
The biggest problems? The sticker shock when AAU/travel ball mentality doesn’t occur in high school; playing time; pushing for the next level; and helicopter parents who want to solve their child’s problem at the expense of another player or the program. And no one is entitled to anything.
“I read an article the other day where an older coach shows up at a baseball convention with home plate as a necklace,” said Mountain Brook boys soccer coach Joe Webb. “And he asks the coaches if they know how wide the plate is for T-Ball. And coach-pitch, and youth ball, and high school and so on. And the answer to all is 17 inches.
“The point he makes is when kids have a hard time getting the ball over the plate, we don’t expand it. Either they figure out how to get the ball over the plate – and coaching plays a large part – or they move on to another position or sport. Everyone wasn’t made to do everything. I was an example. I played football until my sophomore year of high school and switched to soccer because it was better for me.”
PLAYING TIME
Most coaches have a simple solution to deflect conversations about playing time – they won’t talk about it with the parent, but they will with the player.
“We have a parent meeting at the beginning of the season, and we discuss what we will and won't talk about,” said Parker baseball coach Tyrus Moss. “Do not question playing time, coaching ability or the assistant coaches. If you do, you can take your son right then. You run your house, let me run mine.”
Coaches will tell you that a player determines the playing time with their work in practice. Hoover girls basketball coach Krystle Johnson makes it a point to invite parents to practice so they can see what their child is doing – or not.
“Sometimes, that’s an advantage,” said Johnson, who returned to her home school this season after coaching at Huntsville. “If you tell a parent that their daughter doesn’t handle pressure well, they might not see it. But if they come to practice, they might.”
Recently retired Vestavia Hills boys basketball coach George Hatchett likes to tell of the season he coached the son of SEC commissioner Boyd McWhorter.
“I never saw him all season, and he came up to me at the end of the year, introduced himself and said he appreciated the effort,” said Hatchett. “He let you do your job. I mean, no one wants their child mistreated, but if your only complaint is playing time? The player determines that.”
It’s a matter of perspective. A frequent coaching complaint is that many parents want their child and the next best group (size depends on the sport) to play, where a coach has to look at what’s best for all.
“I don’t have a problem discussing playing time, as long we we don’t bring anyone else’s children into the conversation,” said Davidson football coach Fred Riley. “We’re not going to compare children; we’re not going to talk about another child, but what your child has to do to get better.”
And just so you know, it’s not only at the high school level. When Hazel Green girls basketball coach Tim Miller was an assistant women's basketball coach at Alabama, he would see parents of players in different sports go into coaches offices to complain -- and even athletic directors Mal Moore and Bill Battle.
AAU/TRAVEL BALL MENTALITY
It’s the coaches' most common complaint, and much of the reason behind playing time complaints from parents.
There are varying degrees of "travel ball" away from the high school setting, and some private, travel programs have no intention of following that model. Usually, it's led by parents who try to find off-season competition to stay sharp. However, for elite players, or for those who want their kids to become elite, highly competitive travel is often considered a requirement, not an option.
For those in the second category, parents spend their money with an expectation of more playing time -- more at-bats, more touches, more kills, more plays -- more exposure. Players get "more": generally due to a reduced roster size, not because of more practice or more emphasis on fundamentals. Travel programs are a business, where wins mean exposure, publicity and more parents paying for their child to get into a successful program. If it means different treatment for better players and their parents or more emphasis on tournaments, so be it.
View on YouTubeWhen the player gets to high school and is fighting for playing time, the parent can't or won't understand how their child can be struggling when they come from an "elite" program, where they had inflated playing time and star status. The return on investment is diminished and they take it out on someone – usually the coach. And when they try coaching from the stands at the high school level, it can confuse the player and create more friction.
“I think the more invested the parent is, the louder they can get,” said Latham. “The ones who are going to complain are the ones who have spent the most money and perceive they aren’t getting a return.”
Another part of the problem is the year-round push in a sport. The three-sport athlete is the exception rather than the rule as parents often push their children to specialize in one sport.
“If you’re pitching 12 months a year, your shoulder is going to wear out,” said retired Bob Jones softball coach Kent Chambers. “You can play other sports to rest the muscles in your arm and such, but you're still in shape. There was a push from college coaches 15 years ago for students to play one sport, but now there’s a push back in the other direction to play more than one because those athletes are well rounded.”
Vigor baseball coach Jason Outlaw, who resigned after this season, likes to say he’s from the “John Smoltz camp,” referring to the former Atlanta Braves pitcher who was an all-state basketball and baseball player at Lansing (Mich.) Waverly -- to the point where he discussed playing both in college with Michigan State.
“Sometimes we forget rest is as important to success as anything,” said Outlaw. “As a parent, you want to raise a well-rounded child. Too much can be too much. If they want to play 200 games a year because they want to, bless them. If they want to do it because you want them to, then it’s a different area.”
But those programs also offer a major upside.
“I think AAU is good for kids, I do,” said Miller. “I can’t take my team somewhere with 400 college coaches there, so it’s good exposure. I have a good relationship and can call up the coach and ask how it’s working out. For exposure, it's great. For development, not so much. There are a few who will develop players, but the majority don't.”
NEXT-LEVEL TROUBLES
Not long ago, players went to summer camps at colleges to show off what they could do. In most sports, that’s not the case any more. Parents and players want to know if they're ranked as a recruit, who is looking at them and what they have to do to be seen -- and they want it now if not sooner.
“As AD, I would get more complaints about not developing their child enough for the next level,” said Latham. “They think that sports is the out to get to college and athletics is the only way they can get in because they can’t make the grades or they don’t have the money. So they put the pressure on the high school coach.”
While driving through Birmingham earlier this summer, Riley was eating at a restaurant and overheard a couple and their sons talking at another table.
“These short, stocky, stumpy sons had just come from Samford’s football camp and they were talking about what camps they were going to next to be seen,” said Riley. “I thought ‘they better learn to video because they aren’t going to get scholarships.’ I felt bad for whoever their high school coach was. Expectations aren’t realistic and it puts pressure on the kid. Then when they don’t make it, it’s ‘not your fault, darling, it’s the coach’s fault. They didn’t promote you enough.’ The message you deliver is it’s someone else’s fault.”
AHSAA Executive Director Steve Savarese likes to remind anyone who will listen that less than five percent of all athletes will receive an athletic scholarship and less than one percent of that group will play professional sports.
The odds aren’t a deterrent for many, not with the soaring cost of higher education. And it's a lot of the drive behind specialization as many parents push for their children to concentrate on one sport for the next level. But for some it’s a challenge to overcome and many do it thanks to society's push to instant gratification. The information highway and social media can help attract players, but it also often inflates the worth.
“Parents are putting more out there with AAU and scouting services where kids want to be ranked,” said Johnson. “There’s so much hype around players. Back then, you had to play to college to show someone what you could do. Now, if there’s one good camp, kids can be ranked before they even get an offer to play in college. People want that quick return, they expect something back quickly.”
And this just in, college coaches pay attention to how the parents act.
PARENTS BEING PARENTS
One coach has had a brick thrown at them and an assistant, and had to have a restraining order put on the same parent when he threatened to shoot them over his child’s playing time – then went out to the car to get a gun. Another had a parent volunteer to help and had to dismiss the volunteer when they played favorites – a move that saw the player blossom after the stress was removed.
“Parents always want to communicate with coaches and coaches never want to,” said Outlaw. “From a coach’s perspective, some feel that when they open up that line of communication, it almost gives a parent a green light to offer suggestions or to put pressure on other things. Any time a parent comes to a coach, it’s almost always with a negative and we get bombarded with negativity a lot.”
And the coaches have a point. They are professionals, hired by schools to teach a sport, and they do it for little money – for example, the supplement for a head football coach with 15 years of experience at Jefferson County schools in suburban Birmingham maxes out right around $7,800; a volleyball coach with the same experience is $4,000. Not long ago, the same district paid its coaches an extra $1,500 per year for athletic director duties.
Head football coaches in Mobile County Public Schools earned $7,345 in 2015-16; football assistants and varsity head coaches in other sports earn $3,491 with all coaches earning between $100-200 per playoff round.
“We know your concern is your child, our concern is the whole program – including your child,” said Latham. “The bottom line is that if the parent feels like their kid is being treated fairly, they usually aren’t going to complain.”
Parents want to know why their child isn't playing, and often the child doesn't want to tell them they aren't meeting the coach's defined expectations with effort or talent, are only playing because the parent wants them to, or even that the child is happy just being part of the program.
"The kids get it, sometimes the parents don't understand," said Moss. "They don't like freshmen playing over seniors and such. I'm going to play the best athlete."
View on YouTubeWebb tells of an instance where he wanted a goalkeeper to do things a certain way, and when he didn’t Webb pulled him from the game. A few minutes later, they were joking on the sideline and after the game, the keeper helped Webb carry equipment. But that wasn’t what the parent saw.
“Mom came to school the next day and chewed me out,” said Webb. “After she went on, I asked if she talked to her son. It sounded like a record skipped and scratched; she immediately stopped what she was saying. I went on to say the player and I had no problems. We were laughing and things are fine.
“She said ‘Well, it embarrassed me,’ and I said ‘I don’t coach you.’ So she went, pulled him out of class, asked him if things were OK, then came down the hall and said she was sorry. It was already handled by the time she got to me, but she didn’t ask the player first. Conflict resolution is a lost art. We laugh about it now, but at the time it was a big deal."
Often, players would like more playing time, but they also prefer to be part of the program and know their role in it matters to the overall success.
“Do players get treated differently at practice? Yeah, but it depends on what their roles are,” said Miller. “That’s all part of getting the player to buy into the program. The kid might tell the parent 'this is my role'; the player might buy in, the parent might never buy in.”
It’s not just playing time; strategy (which often comes back to playing time) plays just as much of a role.
“In football, everyone is convinced they know it because of the saturation of the game,” said Riley. “They watch ESPN and Gameday, so if (Kirk Herbstreit) said it, they know it. I had one mother tell me she was a cheerleader in high school so she knows football. My father once told me that I could take care of this if we would just run the plays that worked.”
But every once in a while, a parent and player finally get the message. It might not be right away, but the eventual reward is worth it.
Riley tells the story of a mother and son who came to see him five years after the student graduated. Riley didn’t remember the player at the time, but remembered the incident.
“‘Five years ago, you booted me from the team because I didn’t apply myself and put forth the effort. And because of that, I graduated from high school, joined the military and now I’m doing (whatever) and it goes back to that day,” recalled Riley, who once benched his own child. “Lessons you tried to teach me they taught me in the military. You’re the only person who had the courage to tell me fair wasn’t good and good isn’t great.’
“This stuff that’s been taught in the last generation – if you tell someone they’re good enough, they’ll become it – is hogwash. Self-esteem doesn’t come from playing sports, that’s accomplishment. We’ve raised a generation of kids who have no idea what excellence is. Excellence comes from failing. You’ve got to fail and bump and bruise and scrape. Life’s not a participation trophy. Too many people get told fair is good, good is great, and great is excellent. And it isn’t.”
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