Unfortunately, this is a phrase we hear all too often these days.  It happens when another parent flies off the handle because their child didn’t get enough minutes in their pee wee basketball game or innings their little league baseball game.  Sports have become a huge part of our lives.  Not only did we love them as kids, but we have tried to make sure that our children love them too.  The problem is that you can’t force kids to love anything.  They like what they like and if you don’t force it down their throats, hopefully sports will be one of those things.

Think back to when you were a kid.  Did your parents force you to play sports or yell at the umpire when you struck out on a called third strike?  Probably not.  In fact, if you were from my generation, you played sports because you loved playing sports, not because your parents wanted you to.  If anything all I did was add about a dozen more carpools to my mom’s schedule each week.  The last think on her mind when I played sports was yelling at the umpire, she was too busy trying to schedule the next carpool shift.   Anyway, when we were kids it didn’t matter what you were doing, but if it involved a ball and a stick of some kind you could play for hours.  Now we didn’t have video games back then (actually we had pong, but you could only watch a dot bounce between paddles for so long) so that is probably why we played outside so much, but it was definitely different.

Fast forward back to today…parents want so much to have their kids experience what they did as children.  Mix that with dreams of college scholarships and million dollar professional contracts and you got crazy parents yelling at umpires, other parents, coaches and sometimes even kids.  Just this past weekend in Maui (yes, it even happens in paradise) a father cold–cocked a coach after a girls’ basketball game in which his daughter didn’t get a lot of court time.  The man received 5 days in jail for the incident and got to familiarize himself with the bail bond process.  Check out the original story below…and remember, kids love things that are fun, the fastest way to turn you kid off to the sport you love is to be “that” guy in the crowd.

Original Story:  Man gets five days in jail for punching basketball coach