Question #150:
Dear Dan and Jay: We play for a AAA Bantam travel team and regret allowing his "coach" to influence our son. Aside from the coach's favoritism to play his talented players the most, and his nephew who is a house player taking others’ ice time, my son (not in the top six players) is now being harassed by players on the team - we suspect they're following the coach's precedent of disrespecting him.
There have been disturbing incidents, including verbal abuse, exclusion, and cruel impractical jokes, which have been brought to the GM's attention and dealt with a "boys will be boys" attitude for fear his son will be black-balled as well. Would you quit this team so late in the season on principle (and not having much fun riding the bench or in the locker room) or stick it out? Frustrated Father
Dan Replies:
Dear F.F.: February seems to be the time of the year for this question and my father tells me we've received over twenty Emails expressing variations on the same concern. The simple answer would be - by all means don’t play for this coach again – even though next year your player might gain favorite status and be one of the players who plays two thirds of the game. That solves your problem but not the problem for one third of the kids who will play for this coach in succeeding years.
A more pro-active approach would be to work to have the coaching philosophy typified by this coach banned from your association. Toward that end, there is beginning to be ever more ammunition to aid you in that goal: the five year results of Fair Play in Nova Scotia, the Peterborough Pete Squirt AAA team coached by Steve Larmer and Greg Millen, our IT PAYS program, the statistic that 80% of the kids quit the sport by age 13 (among the reasons are that they were treated unfairly), etc. That would make a positive impact on all the players iy your assn - at least the bottom one third.
It has been said that experience is a hard teacher because she give the test first and then the lesson. The lesson here is that tryouts are not to see if your player is skilled enough to play for this or that coach, it’s to see if this coach is good enough to entrust your player. And good is used here meaning the opposite of words like ill-advised, inappropriate, self-serving, self-aggrandizing, egotistical, and even evil. And while the "player tryout” happens once for the whole season, the coach’s tryout happens every practice, every game. Just like a coach wouldn’t think twice about cutting a player who is not skilled enough, a parent shouldn’t think twice about cutting a coach who isn’t good enough.
If you knew about this coach’s philosophy but thought your son was skilled enough to be one of the favored players and now are upset that the coach didn’t see it your way, shame on you. If you didn’t know about this coach’s philosophy, also shame on you for entrusting your player to a coach without checking out his background and philosophy. And further shame on you for waiting this long to take action. We guess that you wouldn’t have stood by for this long while your player’s school teacher allowed him to participate in only one third of the instruction or allow the other students to disrespect him and for our money, hockey is well below education on the list of activities which we think are important opportunities for our children.
The lesson here is to understand what tryouts are. Not many parents understand them; not many coaches do either. Garry Galley (1147 games in the NHL) pulled his kids from a team with a coach like the one you describe. I wouldn’t let my son play for this coach; my father wouldn’t have let me play for him either.
There are only three reasons to have your child play youth sports: to have fun, to develop his athleticism, and to learn positive life lessons. We think this program provides none of these three and we’d be out of there.
