Bring the kids

Soccer Moms – who’d have ‘em? I would actually. If there’s one thing that makes life impossible for a football coach in today’s under-age leagues, it’s trying to manage, mentor and produce a team to compete week-to-week given the demands on young players’ attention and time.

In my experience, soccer coaches are invariably men, and with some notable exceptions, it is the male parent that takes the initiative when it comes to bringing the young fella to training and driving to matches on the weekend.

The warning signals should be heeded every time a boy is introduced by his friend, with no sign of a parent. The coach is exercised from day one on the unassailable fact that he is not the local babysitting service. In many a coach’s experience, ill-mannered children with parents unknown to him directly impede his ability to produce the best results. And let’s acknowledge that in the vast majority of cases the coach is only involved because he needs a football outlet for his own child.

In too many instances also, the coach is left to work on his own with the team, which if not illegal, is a dangerous practice on the part of any club that allows it, and many do.

I can’t really speak from experience when I say that I believe the dynamic is entirely different when coaching girls, but boys just want to be boys, and when their minds wander and you lose their focus, it’s hard to be the taskmaster drawing them back to the job in hand. This makes for extreme frustration in a coach, and he/she often needs to draw the parents’ attention if their child is becoming distracted or disruptive. If the parents are at such a distance that this cannot be easily achieved, the resulting frustration can cause a less than exemplary response in the coach and a rot in the team’s cohesion. And I know that, based on direct and repeated experience from both the coach’s and the parent’s perspective.

I can’t be sure, but I think it contributes to the inherent respect problem in the game also, particularly towards the office of referee. Maybe that’s a subject for another day.

I feel myself that it’s massively important then, that mums and dads take an active interest in their own child’s participation in their chosen sport. If they’re turning up, helping out with the nets, shop, litter-collection and other important but less glamorous jobs, they are remaining in touch with their child’s enjoyment and progress in what may amount to their first real passion in life. They are also going a long way to ensuring a direct understanding of the workings of the game and the resulting benefit or otherwise to their child.

I have watched some riveting occasions where the focus of a disruptive child’s performance sharpens with Dad watching. I’ve also witnessed numerous times when a patient mother has had to talk down a coach who is actually foaming at the mouth, and I have had to apologise for my own reactions on a number of occasions.  Involvement tends to keep everyone honest in my view, and you have no excuse if your child is coming home complaining about his treatment by a coach you have never met, or seldom meet.

A simple but effective extension of this is going to the big games. The League of Ireland provides numerous easily accessible platforms every week for parents and children to see life in all of its fascination. It’s educating, colourful, earnest, exciting and invigorating, even if you have to endure wind, rain and the less tolerant members of football and society at times.

But most of all if there is a passion there in the young child, he or she sees the progression, the possibilities, the brightness, the positiveness in the future. Friday night football with the lights, the stars, the noise, the green, the goodies and the action, is life itself and those who go are getting it. Those who have not chosen to go yet can get a two-dimensional fraction of the experience on TV, but it’s nowhere near the wonder of the occasion itself the younger viewer will get, and memories are made of such things.

Let’s bring our kids to the football, and bring the football to our kids. Everybody wins.