At your kid's soccer match, everyone has one job - including parents

Back when I coached, I would see my son or his teammates try to wear too many hats while they were on the pitch.  I wanted to come up with a simple, direct way to tell him and his buddies to stop stressing and just focus on their own job.

They would dispute calls or gesture to the referee.  They would tell teammates what they needed to do (usually "you needed to pass it to me") or where they screwed up (particularly destructive to a team when done right after they've let a goal in - most kids know what they did wrong, and if not, the coach can tell them).  With older (say, above U15) players, a team captain might speak with the ref about a call or a carded foul, and a goalkeeper or central defender may be vocal directing teammate movement on the field.  But with younger players, and particularly when done randomly by whatever player feels like opening his mouth, it's a problem.  I needed a Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) slogan so young players focused on their own stuff.

Here is what I came up with.  I told him you can only have one job at a match:  you can be player, you can be coach, or you can be referee.  If you want to play in the game, which is by far the most fun job, then you have to give up trying to be a referee and a coach at the same time.  He didn't like this restriction on his employment options, but knew it made sense - that he had enough to focus on.  In a way, it makes things so much LESS stressful to focus on one job.  Coaching and Refereeing are stressful, kids.  Calls, or non-calls, can be frustrating, so if my son wants to tell me, off the field and after the game, how he thinks a ref missed a call I'll listen.  Sometimes it's a way to discuss certain laws of the game, or just let it out.  But even at the top levels of the sport, you have to move on and you can't do it while leaning on that "bad officials" crutch, as this really well-written blog piece by an Arsenal fan regarding coach Arsene Wenger's obsession with the officiating after a loss to Barcelona.

But I realized that while my (obviously brilliant) "one job at a game" saying helped him, I wasn't following it myself: I sometimes acted like I was player, coach, and referee at the same time, and I wasn't any of those, I was "Dad".  So I had to add a new job to the job jar : "you can have one job at a match:  player, coach, referee, or PARENT."  Hint:  If you are sitting in a folding chair with a coffee and wearing Crocs, talking with a group of adults also with folding chairs and coffees and Crocs, I think your job application for parent was already accepted.

My man, Number 7

It's difficult for parents to do.  Sports are emotional, that's why we love them.  And parenting our kids is emotional too, so the mix of the two can get us pretty fired up.  I guess it's a matter of how frequent and how loud a parent's comments are that determine if it crosses the line.  As kids get older and more skilled, and their coaches are working on certain techniques or tactics that parents don't even know about, it can really confuse a player to have parents shouting instructions during a match from the sideline.  In the end, it's your child and you have to make the call whether you are helping him or distracting him, but shouting instructions (or negative comments) to someone else's kid?  That is out of bounds.  I'm not paying other parents to coach my child during a match, that's what the coaching staff is for!  The worst is hearing a parent of a player on the opposing team call out my son for a foul, or worse, at a recent tournament I guess a Mom was sick of seeing my son slice through their defenders and she actually yelled "trip that number 7"!  I wasn't imagining it because three of us heard it.  Parents, bad idea to shout at someone else's kid, even worse if that kid is on the opposing team.

The other area parents get too involved in is officiating.  You know the saying, "the squeaky wheel gets the grease."  Well, I figured out that the opposite is true when it comes to parents repeatedly shouting at the ref for stuff as MEANINGLESS as which team is awarded a throw-in.  OK, I've seen a loud chorus of parents sway a ref to make a call, but only if you've built some goodwill with the ref.  If a team has parents that from the opening whistle are telling the ref what he or she got wrong, the ref often develops a curious case of sudden deafness syndrome.

Parents have a tough time seeing their kid get fouled or injured.  But soccer is a contact sport, part of the lesson for our kids out there is to learn not to be intimidated and to handle situations for themselves.  Besides, all parents, even me, are too biased to make accurate calls on many fouls.  Soccer referees sometimes know they missed a call, and will try to compensate for it by calling a foul on the player or team later for something that otherwise might have been ignored.  I have been at one or two matches where there truly is a player who is on a headhunting mission, and it is taking place away from the ball so the referee and coach don't see it.  In that case, parents need to make someone aware of it.  But again, it almost always gets handled without your intervention, and just being there often gives our kids the confidence to handle stuff on their own.  And really, that's our goal, isn't it?

One job at a match.  Coach, Player, Parent, Official.  And a parent's job does not include directing or criticizing someone else's kids.  Remember: the player job may be the most fun, but the parent job is easiest, so fellow parents, it's the weekend, let's be lazy.