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Thursday, July 10, 2014

ABUSIVE SPORTS PARENTS: The Unforeseen Fall-Out from Fans Screaming at Young Refs


Sports Officials will have to "Go Galt" before anything changes for the better. Given the reports cited below, that appears to be happening at some level both here in the U.S. and Canada.

With all the focus that schools and organizations put on sportsmanship (everybody has a Code of Conduct) do you ever wonder why these incidents keep happening with increasing severity than ever before?

I don't.

The bad actors, whether they be players, their parents or coaches are coddled throughout the system because they WIN. And nobody directly and effectively confronts their behavior. They just pass them on. PERIOD. END OF STORY.

The leagues and school administrators have a direct relationship with each other and their interest is in minimizing complaints and "noise" about issues like this in order to keep the line moving, the show must go on and the fees keep flowing in. 

So we have a "Silence of the Lambs" culture hidden and embedded within the system. The economic incentive / disincentive prevents the enforcement mechanism -- which has to come from the umpires in conjunction with administrators -- from working properly. Leagues don't ever want to admit / confront a problem openly and directly when it develops in their front yard.

The officials, who are supposed to be on the front lines of enforcement are sabotaged at every turn if they even attempt to touch these "radioactive materials" (the bad actors) with threats of "You'll never work here again" from schools and leagues. "You need to have a thicker skin. I'm getting complaints about you" from administrators and assignors because they have an economic incentive in minimizing complaints and coddling their clients to keep their fees flowing.  "The show must go on". We'll just send another umpire who will tolerate / ignore the behavior and the vicious cycle continues on overdrive.

All those fancy "Sport a Good Attitude" signs and glossy "Code of Conduct" missives, that everyone reads and signs at the beginning of the year before the game start and then forgets about throughout the year as games are played and behavior worsens, are MEANINGLESS if the miscreants know that the "Powers that Be" will not enforce them in any meaningful way.

So wonder no more boys and girls. There is a reason why EVERYBODY is on board in saying this kind of stuff can't continue and yet IT DOES. The people who should be shutting it down are handcuffed, shackled and silenced by the people that hire them because if they can hire them, they can fire them.

So the good umpires "Go Galt" and leave and the natural selection process continues. The sportsmanship environment continues to get ever more polluted and everyone says "Why is this happening?" 

Well, wonder no more.

Recently, we've had reports of sports officials suffering serious bodily harm and death as a result of working games for some of these social deviants:

 Charges elevated to second-degree murder in fatal Livonia assault of soccer referee

How many of those is enough or too much, I wonder? As we've witnessed with the Bryan Stow verdict, maybe lawsuits are the only answer.  It seems to be the only thing that gets the Powers that Be's attention.

 Until the "Powers that Be" get serious and put more actions behind their words, the environment will not improve. PERIOD. END OF STORY. 

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ABUSIVE SPORTS PARENTS: The Unforeseen Fall-Out fr...
      HOW ADULTS' ABUSE OF REFEREES ENDANGERS PLAYER SAFETY by Doug Abrams On June 10, the Bakersfield Californian reported that all Kern County...
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This column concerns another, especially harmful result that can escape the untrained eye when veteran referees prematurely hang up their whistles. Particularly in contact and collision sports, the shortage of experienced officials can increase the risk of injury to players, including ones who play clean and follow the rules of the game.
 Compromising Safety
"To be effective for promoting safety," says a recent medical study, a sport's rules "must be enforced rigorously and consistently by referees and leagues." Parents and coaches assume important enforcement roles, but referees are the primary enforcers once the game starts. The American Academy of Pediatrics reports consensus among sports medicine professionals that "[o]fficials controlling the physicality of thegame . . . can . . . play significant roles in reducing contact injuries."
Particularly in contact or collision sports, this essential control suffers when so many veteran referees are driven to quit each year. Many replacement refs are simply not yet ready for the responsibilities cast on them. But for the premature departures of so many veterans, many of the replacements would not yet be on the field.
Before parents and coaches criticize less experienced officials for not controlling high school and youth league games, the adults need to consider whether their over-the-top misbehavior helped create the very situation that draws their criticism. All too often, parents and coaches get the quality of officiating that they deserve. All too often, their children are the losers.
 [Sources: Jeff Evans, Kern County Association Faces Referee Shortage, Bakersfield Californian, June 10, 2014; Charles H. Tator et al., Spinal Injuries in Canadian Ice Hockey: An Update to 2005, 19 Clin. J. Sport Med. 451 (2009); Chris G. Kouteres & Andrew J.M. Gregory, Injuries in Youth Soccer, 125 Pediatrics 410 (Feb. 2010)]



Amateur hockey referee Scott Miskiewicz says he considered giving up officiating after he was sucker-punched by a player during a game last March.
“An incident like that, you kind of wonder is it worth the $35 you get for that game?" said the 18-year-old Manitoban, recalling the attack.
But while Miskiewicz continues to officiate, some amateur referees are fed up with the abuse heaped on them during games. While most of the abuse is verbal, it can turn physical, and deadly, as it did this week when a referee of an adult-league soccer match in Detroit died after he was punched in the head by a player upset that he was going to be ejected from the game.
The frequency with which these attacks are occurring and whether it’s increasing is difficult to say. Miskiewicz insisted that his incident was an anomaly, and that while he is mostly a target of benign verbal attacks, the physical attack was a first. 
In an email to Miskiewicz to offer him support after the assault, NHL official Vaughan Rody lamented that when it comes to referees, "We lose 10,000 great young men and woman a year due to abuse."
Bruce Tennant, who has been refereeing amateur hockey in Toronto for 40 years, said he was once cross-checked in the side of the head by a player after he threw him out of a game.
Tennant said he "could count on two hands the number of times I've been abused," but a lot of the senior referees are quitting because of the abuse they have received.
A couple of years ago, in response to what seemed to be a slew of reports of officials getting attacked after games in parking lots, Sports Officials Canada began tracking complaints. The organization, which represents sports officials across the country, is set to launch an abuse database.
“I think so many people have buried their head in the sand about this,” said Denise Pittuck, executive director of the organization. “They consider it part of the game, and they don’t think it’s affecting recruitment. Certainly now the sports are realizing recruitment is down, retention is down.”
Barry Mano, the president and founder of the U.S. National Association of Sports Officials, told The Associated Press that his group spends 20 per cent of its time on assault and liability-related issues, up from around three per cent 20 years ago. 
Meanwhile, in Saskatchewan, the Saskatoon Referees Association said the number of referees dropped in 2013 because of fans and coaches abusing young officials. 
Two years ago, a report published in the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine — titled Violence in Canadian Amateur Hockey: The Experience of Referees in Ontario — found that more than 90 per cent of the 632 referees who responded to their survey said they were recipients of aggression and anger. Around 46 per cent said that referees are threatened by physical violence.
The study, co-authored by Toronto neurosurgeon Dr. Charles Tator along with Dr. Alun Ackery and Dr. Carolyn Snider, found that some referees reported they had been punched, spit on and had garbage thrown on them (with nine per cent saying police had to get involved.) Specific examples of abuse included a parent breaking a referee's finger, a referee grabbed by the throat by a player, sexual and homophobic comments to a female referee and a fan threatening to "carve out a linesman's eye."
But Peter Woods, executive director of Hockey Manitoba, said that the media attention given to some of the abusive incidents may give the impression that it’s a worse problem than it is or has ever been. Woods said the number of complaints, ranging from threatening an official to actual physical contact, has remained stable throughout the years.
He said there are probably 10 to 15 incidents a year, with 60 to 70 per cent of those involving a threat to an official and maybe a couple where there's physical contact.
“One is probably too many, but it’s not at a catastrophic level that is unmanageable or that is negatively impacting our sport," he said.
Although she doesn't have hard data, Pittuck said the number of abusive incidents appears to be on the rise, and that there seem to be more physical attacks against referees and more attacks from spectators.
"There's always verbal abuse. It should never be part of the game," she said. "Officials shouldn’t have to accept that. But a lot people think that 'Hey, there’s  an official, I can yell at them, I can do whatever I want.' It’s that mentality that we’re trying to break."
Pittuck said that according to their research, younger officials are more willing to report abuse than older officials, who have developed an attitude that it's part of the game. She said abuse also seems to be more prevalent in team sports. 
Officials are also subject to cyberbullying, where those upset with a referee's officiating are putting their names and faces up on Facebook.
Tennant blamed some of the referees for the abuse, saying a lot of what officials get they bring onthemselves.
"They put the striped jersey on and they think it's instant respect. You sort of have to earn that respect," he said.
"It's almost like they expect the abuse, so they don't even put an effort in, because they know they're going to get abused anyway."


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