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Out of Control The rising tide of violence and verbal abuse by adults at youth sports events reached its terrible peak this month when one hockey father killed anotherBy William Nack and Lester Munson with additional reporting by George Dohrmann Issue date: July 24, 2000
It all began around midafternoon on July 5, at the Burbank Ice Arena in Reading, Mass., when two men -- Costin, 40, a part-time carpenter and a single father of four young kids, and Junta, 42, a truck driver and married father of two -- got into what appeared to be a minor shoving match. Costin had been on the ice supervising the practice for the boys -- who included his sons Brendan, 12, Michael, 11, and Sean, 10, and Junta's 10-year-old boy, Quinlan -- when the action got a little rough. According to Junta's lawyer, Junta saw his son get checked and struck in the nose by an elbow. Junta complained, urging Costin to control the checking, but the attorney says that Costin skated over to where Junta was sitting and snapped, "That's what hockey is all about!" When Costin came off the ice, Junta strode screaming toward him. The two men wrestled briefly -- the 6'2", 275-pound Junta tore the 5'11", 175-pound Costin's shirt and ripped a gold chain from round his neck, according to Middlesex District prosecutors -- until a rink employee broke up the scuffle and ordered Junta out of the arena. He left. In an era in which kids often behave with greater civility than their parents and in which violence and verbal abuse by adults have become commonplace at children's sporting events, the fight surprised no one in Reading, a town of some 23,000 souls. What happened next, however, shook a talk-show nation already numbed by pointless violence. Costin and his boys were in the locker room, shedding their skates and gear, when young Michael said, "Dad, I'm thirsty." Moments later they were all at the Coke machine next to the rink when Junta returned, according to prosecutors, with "fists clenched." Junta knocked Costin down and pinned him to the floor with a knee on his chest. He then began beating Costin's face with his fists and banging his head on the hard rubber mats that covered the floor. Costin's three boys stood around Junta screaming, "Please stop! Please! He can't see. He can't hear." Junta did not stop, prosecutors say, until a bystander pulled him off. By the time police arrived, Costin lay unconscious, without a pulse, his head in a pool of blood, his face misshapen by the blows. Junta was arrested on a charge of misdemeanor assault, but when Costin was pronounced dead two days later, prosecutors stiffened the charge to manslaughter -- that is, killing Costin without meaning to. Junta has pleaded not guilty. His lawyer claims he struck Costin in self-defense and that he reentered the arena not to finish his fight with Costin but to look for two children he had driven to the rink. Junta is free on $5,000 bail, but he faces a trial after which, if found guilty, he could be sentenced to 20 years in prison. Neither Junta nor Costin was new to the criminal justice system. Costin had been in prison seven times between 1983 and 1995 for crimes that stretched from breaking and entering to assaulting a cop, and Reading police believe he had ties to a gang of Hell's Angels in nearby Lynn, Mass. Junta had been charged with but found not guilty of willful destruction of property, had been sentenced to a year in jail for using a vehicle without the owner's permission and, in 1992, had been arrested for assault and battery. (There was no disposition in that case.) Although the criminal records of the two men distinguish them from many Little League dads, the situation that triggered the violence is all too typical. Junta was regarded as a devoted father. Costin was a recovering alcoholic who had turned his life around after gaining custody of his four kids, and several acquaintances said he was "the consummate single father" who lived for his children. The kids -- the three hockey-playing boys and their nine-year-old sister, Tara -- trailed his casket as it was borne up the aisle of Our Lady of the Assumption Church in Costin's hometown of Lynnfield on July 11. The Reverend John E. Farrell delayed the funeral Mass to give the children time to finish writing letters of farewell to be placed in their father's casket. During the wake the grieving Tara had tried to climb into the coffin with her dad. "Pride and anger can be virtuous and vicious," Farrell told the 200 mourners. "Sports can build up or take away." As terrible and devastating as Costin's death was -- in an ironic twist, Junta attacked Costin after Costin had rebuffed him for protesting violence in the practice -- it was only the most recent case in what has become an epidemic of verbal harassment and physical violence by parents at youth sports events. Among the most egregious offenses: --Ray Knight, the former Cincinnati Reds third baseman and manager, was charged with simple battery, disorderly conduct and affray (fighting in a public place) after an altercation at a girls' softball game in Albany, Ga., in April 1999. Knight engaged in a heated and profane 15-minute argument with the father of a girl on the team opposing the squad on which Knight's 12-year-old daughter was playing. Knight finally punched the man in the head. --Police had to be called to quell a brawl last October in which at least 50 parents and players went at one another at the end of a football game involving 11- to 13-year-olds in Swiftwater, Pa. --After a hockey game for 11- and 12-year-old boys in Staten Island, N.Y., on Jan. 23, a carpenter named Matteo Picca struck his son's coach, Lou Aiani, in the face with two hockey sticks, according to witnesses, bloodying Aiani's nose. Picca, who was indicted for assault and criminal possession of a weapon and was sued for $4 million by Aiani, had been heard complaining angrily during the game that his son had not improved all season. Picca has pleaded not guilty to the charges and claims that while he did hit Aiani with his fist, he did not swing the sticks at the coach. --Following a Little League game in Sacramento in April 1999, a man who was coaching his son's team beat up the manager of the opposing team. The assailant, who had been ejected by a 16-year-old umpire for verbally disrupting the game, was convicted of felony assault and sentenced to 180 days of work furlough. --A Tamaqua, Pa., policeman was convicted of corruption of a minor and solicitation to commit simple assault for giving $2 to a 10-year-old Little League pitcher to hit a batter with a fastball last August. --A soccer dad in Eastlake, Ohio, pleaded no contest to a charge of assault last September after he punched a 14-year-old boy who had scuffled for the ball with the man's 14-year-old son, leading to both boys' ejections. The punch split the victim's lip. The man was sentenced to 10 days of community service and ordered to undergo counseling. --A former corrections officer was sentenced to 30 days in jail for assaulting a 16-year-old ref in La Vista, Neb., last October at a flag football game for six- and seven-year-old boys. --A youth baseball coach in Hollywood, Fla., was arrested for aggravated battery on July 12, almost a month after he broke an umpire's jaw with a punch during a Police Athletic League game for high school players. The umpire was throwing the coach out of the game when he was struck. The coach plans to plead not guilty. The games kids play are looking more and more like dress rehearsals for the Jerry Springer Show. In fact, the fields and arenas of youth sports in North America have become places where a kind of psychosis has at times prevailed, with parents and coaches screaming and swearing at the kids, the officials or each other, and fights breaking out among adults. According to a survey conducted in the early 1990s by Michigan State University, of the 20 million American kids who participate in organized sports, starting as early as age four, about 14 million will quit before age 13, and they will say they dropped out mostly because adults -- particularly their own parents -- have turned the playing of games into a joyless, negative experience. The vast majority of parents still comport themselves with restraint and civility at games, but it is impossible to ignore or wave away the loud, critical, ill-mannered parent in the stands who believes that his or her child is the next Junior Griffey or Mia Hamm. The obnoxious Little League parent, the meddling soccer mom, the aggressive dad who stalks the sidelines at football games and the poolside deck at swim meets have become a larger presence at youth games in the past five years. Fred Engh, president of the National Alliance for Youth Sports (NAYS), which educates coaches and parents on the needs of young athletes, says that field reports from his organization's 2,200 chapters in the U.S. reveal an alarming trend: In 1995 you could expect 5% of a crowd of parents to get out of line at a youth athletic event -- i.e., to embarrass their children or be abusive toward the kids, officials and coaches. Only five years later, you can expect 15% of the crowd to cross the line. "It borders on insanity," says Engh. "Every year I see more and more ugly things." Jim Thompson, director of the Positive Coaching Alliance at Stanford, says that 10 years ago, when he was giving coaching workshops, soccer parents and coaches (unlike their counterparts in baseball and basketball) had no complaints about parental behavior. But that was before soccer exploded in the U.S. -- before it opened yet another lucrative mine of college scholarships and before the national women's team grew a comet's tail and rose in a spectacular arc to the world championship. Thompson says you should hear the lamentations now. Soccer folks talk about belligerent parents hurling abuse at officials. Indeed, says Thompson, things have become so difficult for youth-league soccer refs that adults are declining assignments, and the sport has had to turn to high schoolers for officiating. "But the kids don't want to do it either, because they don't want abuse from these parents," says Thompson. The most serious problem facing the myriad organized youth sports leagues, however, involves a landmark case in which the Illinois Supreme Court is expected to decide later this year whether children's leagues can be held financially responsible for injuries resulting from adult violence at their games. The case grew out of a grotesque incident 10 years ago in which John Hills, the father-coach of a Little League player in the Chicago suburb of Lemont, complained to umpires that a rival coach, 16-year-old George Loy Jr. of suburban Bridgeview, was loudly making calls before the umpires themselves could make them. By the third inning Loy's father, George Sr., also a Bridgeview coach, was baiting Hills, calling him a "four-eyed mother----er" and promising to "get him after the game." After the sixth inning, as Hills bent over to pick up his scorebook, George Loy Sr. jumped him from behind, punching and kicking him as he drove him to the ground, and then circled the prostrate figure, looking for places to kick him again. George Jr. soon joined his father in pummeling Hills. Finally, George Sr.'s brother, Bridgeview manager Ted Loy, joined in the thuggery, kicking Hills between 10 and 15 times, witnesses said. Lemont's third-base coach, Harry Keeler, interceded and helped Hills to his feet and was hit himself. Then the Loys launched one last attack on Hills. George Sr. stepped in and dropped Hills with a right to the face that broke his nose, while George Jr. smashed Hills's left knee with an aluminum bat. Hills did not wake up until he was in intensive care. Along with the broken nose, he suffered fractured ribs, a bruised kidney, a concussion, a scratched cornea and the injured knee, which still ails him. A plumber by trade, he returned to work only this year. The Loy brothers were arrested, charged with battery and sentenced to supervision and 40 hours of community service. Hills sued all three Loys, the Bridgeview Little League Association and the Justice Willow Springs Little League, which sponsored the tournament and owned the field. After a two-week trial in which 19 witnesses described what had happened, a default judgment was entered against the Loys, who never responded to the service of legal papers. (Nor would they comment for this article.) A Chicago jury awarded Hills and his wife a total of $757,710, finding not only the Loys but also the two Little League associations liable for the damages. The Little League groups, whose insurance would pay their share of the award, appealed, but the three-judge Appellate Court in Chicago upheld the jury's judgment. The outcome of the case created such anxiety at Little League's national headquarters in Williamsport, Pa., that the league hired a law firm to file an amicus curiae brief urging the seven Illinois Supreme Court justices to vacate the judgment. Little League has 2.7 million child-athletes and sponsors 186,000 teams in the U.S., and it sees a far-reaching danger if its local organizations are held accountable for the actions of parents and coaches. In a defense of its position, Little League declared that making its associations responsible for adult violence would put their playing fields in the same legal category as dens of potential mayhem like "taverns, discos and dance clubs." The brief notes that Little League games are alcohol-free events attended by children and their parents, and it asserts, "Little League baseball does not attract the less savory elements of the communities in which it thrives." Remember that this brief grew out of an incident in which two men and a bat-wielding boy beat another man senseless while two teams of Little Leaguers stood and watched. If the Illinois Supreme Court sustains the jury verdict, thereby holding Little League's cleats to the fire, the whole topography of adult violence at children's games will change -- just as court action altered the landscape on the issues of handguns and tobacco. Outside the courtroom, as evidence of a national groundswell on the issue, various youth leagues and other groups have been at work to curb violence and encourage mature behavior at games. Over the last year and a half three U.S. government classes at Deer Valley High, outside Phoenix, initiated and nearly pushed through the Arizona legislature a bill called the Youth Sports Official Protection Act, which would stiffen penalties for violence against youth-league officials. The bill passed the state house of representatives 38-18 but was defeated 22-8 in the senate. The class will again lobby to pass the measure in the next school year. Before the widely publicized class on sportsmanship held in February in Jupiter, Fla. -- at which about 2,000 youth-league parents were required to sign a pledge to behave themselves at games -- a soccer league outside Cleveland held a "Silent Sunday" last October in which parents were under league orders not to yell instructions to kids, not to question officials' calls and not even to let out a cheer. Many parents either sucked lollipops or put duct tape over their mouths. West to east, meanwhile, youth-league violence kept police and lawyers working all last year and in the first half of this one. On April 27, 1999, in a slow-pitch softball game for 12-and-under girls in Albany, Ga., Ray Knight was coaching third base for the Magic, the team on which his daughter Erinn played. With the count 3-2 on a Magic batter, the pitcher for the opposing team, the Hot Dice, lofted a ball, and Knight, before the ump could make his call, loudly urged the batter to first: "Get on down there, atta baby!" From behind the third-base dugout, a 47-year-old construction worker named Jimmy C. Smith, the father of a girl on the Hot Dice, yelled to Knight, "Let the umpire call the game!" Knight turned around and said to Smith, "Are you talking to me?" "Yeah, I'm talkin' to you!" Smith said. Knight walked to the fence and said, "You don't tell me what to do!" He accused Smith of trying to embarrass him. "You're doing a good enough job [of] embarrassing yourself," Smith said. "You just shut up!" snapped Knight. "You can't tell me to shut up!" Smith shouted back. "Well, you just meet me here after the game," said Knight. "I'll be here," said Smith. After the game Knight saw Smith waiting off the field and walked over to him. They argued some more, and at one point Smith pushed Knight. Knight lost his temper, and soon both men were nose to nose and screaming obscenities at each other. Just as the shouting ebbed and the fight seemed over, Smith started back toward the field. "You couldn't handle the big boys up there," he told Knight, referring to the major leagues, "so you had to come down here and coach girls' softball." As Smith walked by him Knight threw a punch that landed on Smith's right ear, opening a small cut. Smith dropped to one knee, and Dave Roberts, an assistant coach for the Hot Dice, grabbed Knight and took him to the ground to stop the fight. Knight did not resist. It was all over by the time the cops arrived. The local district attorney, after interviewing witnesses, charged both Knight and Smith with two misdemeanors. Knight was also charged with simple battery for landing that punch. The charges are pending, and more than a year later Knight still regrets his loss of control. "I feel awful about it," he says. "I'll tell you how much it hurt me. My girls didn't play in that league this year. I didn't want any part of it. My remorse is immense." Twelve days before Knight belted Smith, a more violent incident occurred at a Little League game involving seven- and eight-year-old boys and girls in south Sacramento. Lawrence Bahrs, the father and coach of a seven-year-old boy, became so disruptive that the 16-year-old umpire asked him to leave the field. Bahrs, a 40-year-old welder, was calling balls and strikes over the ump's voice. Bahrs says he had gotten angry at the other team's manager, James Solari, then 39, for allegedly instructing the umpire and for using abusive language. After the game, according to Sacramento Deputy District Attorney Scott Triplett, Bahrs lay in wait for Solari. As Solari left the field, Bahrs recalls, he told Solari, "'You might think you're some kind of coach, but you're an a------.' That ticked him off, and he took a swing at me. I deflected it, and he backed away. I walked up to him and I decked him, and I punched him a couple of times and I kneed him in the face." Solari says he suffered a concussion and had the braces on his teeth broken in the attack. Bahrs pleaded no contest to felony assault and served six months of work furlough. After his release, Bahrs attended court-ordered anger-management classes. He was also put on five years' probation. "I'm sorry it happened," Bahrs says, "but it's pretty prevalent. You think it's bad at baseball games, you ought to see it at soccer games." Or midget football games. In Swiftwater, Pa., last Oct. 10, right after the Pocono Mountain Cardinals had defeated a team from Allentown's East Side Youth Center 14-7, the two teams of 11- to 13-year-old boys had met to shake hands when some of them began exchanging taunts. One angry lad shoved another, and Allentown's 13-year-old Nicholas Davis got whacked on the head by a helmet. Coaches tried to break it up, but the "footbrawl," as the Pocono Record would call it, ultimately involved 50 to 100 players and parents, most of whom were trying to break up the fight. A few of the parents joined the melee after they charged onto the field to rescue their kids. The police were summoned, but only three people were charged, one adult and two kids. Two people were injured; one, a Cardinals assistant coach, Michael Bartell, suffered a cut above his right eye that required seven stitches. When asked in studies why they play sports, children invariably say they enjoy the fun, they like being with their friends, and they enjoy learning the fundamentals and improving their skills, according to Thomas Tutko, professor emeritus of sports psychology at San Jose State and a member of the NAYS board. "Kids rank winning about seventh or eighth down the list," says Tutko. Unlike pro and college sports, in which winning often translates into money, children's games are supposed to teach skills and values -- such as fair play, working with others and dealing well with adversity -- that kids can draw upon throughout their lives. "The main purpose of youth sports is to emphasize effort, participation and skill development," says Joel Fish, director of the Center for Sports Psychology in Philadelphia. "So we are sending the wrong message when we get too invested in the outcome of a youth game -- who won, who lost, who scored the most. You start to get away from what the mission of it is." For more than 100 years, that mission has gone far beyond sport's chalk boundaries. In the 19th century, most immigrants to the U.S. came from industrializing countries in northern Europe, and they fit well into the newly industrializing America. After 1880, however, most immigrants were coming from small rural communities in southern and eastern Europe, where the agrarian economy did not prepare them for the regimentation of factory life. So across America, in schools, churches and playgrounds, games were organized both to get growing numbers of rowdy children off the streets and to teach the values of industrial production to recently arrived workers and their children. "The organized playground movement and the emergence of organized sports were, in part, tied to the Americanization of workers," says Jay Coakley, a sports sociologist at the University of Colorado. "The playground movement was motivated strongly by the belief that you could use team sports to acculturate immigrants. You made them understand the notions of setting goals, of keeping records -- the things that the assembly-line supervisor kept track of." After World War II, Coakley continues, games became instruments of organizing and controlling children as millions of urban Americans fled deteriorating cities, settled down behind white picket fences and bred like rabbits to produce the Baby Boom, perhaps the greatest population surge of any nation in Western history. "The average parents moved to suburbia to control their environment and to raise the kinds of children they wanted," says Coakley. "This led to the formation of supervised environments for kids." Out of this singular set of circumstances emerged the vast, dust-choked world of youth sports. Armies of kids joined thousands of youth leagues, and their parents came out to watch them play. Indeed, the 1950s ushered in an epochal change in the nature of play in this country. For decades, unwatched and unfettered by adults, children had passed the time playing made-up street and schoolyard games -- from stickball to kick-the-can -- and in playing them had learned how to arbitrate their conflicts and needs, how to compromise, how to build a consensus and make their own rules. Which is to say, how to get along in a democratic society. That era ended with the rise of youth sports organized and controlled by adults, who set up the leagues and the schedules, resolved disputes and made and enforced the rules. Children lost control of their games -- along with all the skills they had learned by playing on their own -- and the games themselves became extensions of the parents' lives, often more important to them than to the kids. So it was that a new species of bird was hatched in the aviary of U.S. sports: Parentis vociferous, the loud, intrusive moms and dads unable to restrain themselves. The species has been sighted everywhere; it's native to all states, and anyone who has been involved in youth sports has a story to tell. Refs and umps are the easiest targets, particularly if they are young. Typical was the experience of Jesse Weber, 19, a sophomore microbiology major at Colorado who umpired Little League for five years in Shaw Heights, outside Denver, and who remembers the stream of catcalls from the stands. "It was ridiculous," Weber says. He remembers having to walk to the fence and tell adults twice as old as he, "You're out of line. Have some respect for the game and the players in it." He remembers parents who called him a "jackass" and followed him to the parking lot, as if to pick a fight. And he remembers the shame the children felt at their parents' behavior. "You could see it in their faces," Weber says. Coaches and parents have been baiting youth-league umps for years. Robert Schwartz, executive director of the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia, was a 16-year-old umpire in a rec league for 10-year-olds when, after a championship game in 1966, he was followed by several parents as he walked, nearly in tears, the 100 yards from the field to the rec hall. "It was like 100 miles," Schwartz says. "They kept yelling, 'You're a piece of s---!' Nothing in my experience had prepared me to be called what I was called by those adults." The umps aren't the only people in authority at youth sports who are upset by abusive parents. Melinda Schmitt was an All-America swimmer who took up coaching after graduating from Miami in 1980. "I loved to coach," she says. "Little kids to seniors." She was leading a team of eight-and-under children when she first saw how panting adults were ruining the experience for the kids, showing up with stopwatches and timing all the swimmers until they had to be barred from the pool deck. At a meet in Pompano Beach, Fla., in 1982, one kid was finishing a 25-meter race when his father, dressed in a shirt and slacks, left the stands and leaped into the waist-deep pool. He started slapping the water right next to the child. "He was screaming in the kid's face, 'You didn't finish hard enough! You let them pass you!'" Schmitt recalls. That incident, more than anything else, drove her out of coaching. "I still think about going back," she says. "But I don't want to deal with the parents. They're trying to live out their fantasies. Some of them think they have the next Mark Spitz." One of the distinguishing marks of obnoxious sports parents, psychologists say, is the inflated hopes they have for their children -- an implacable belief, unsupported by evidence, that their kids are Mozarts in cleats, gifted enough to earn a college scholarship or even be a professional. With all the elite club and travel teams now playing, children's games have grown as deadly serious as intercollegiate sports. Not incidentally, the rise of Parentis vociferous coincided with the transformation of sports into a secular religion -- and the escalating value of college scholarships and pro contracts. "Like pro sports, youth sports at many levels are no longer a game," says Darrell J. Burnett, a clinical child psychologist in Laguna Niguel, Calif., who specializes in youth sports. "It is big business. The statistical chances of a kid getting a college scholarship are very small, but parents have unreasonable expectations. When their kid makes an error at shortstop, instead of saying, O.K., he made a mistake, he'll learn from it, they think, Oh, my god! What if a scout is in the stands watching?" Now Armageddon can be found in tee-ball games for five-year-olds, and battles have been joined in events as trivial as flag-football games for six- and seven-year-old boys in which no official score is kept. Last Oct. 23, in La Vista, Neb., a 38-year-old machinist and former corrections officer, Roenee Ware, was caught on videotape verbally abusing and then assaulting the 16-year-old referee, Mike Tangeman, at halftime of a game. Flag football is a weighty business in Nebraska. Ware's team of tykes, the La Vista Tornadoes, had three coaches -- Ware was the offensive coordinator -- and the Tornadoes were "running the option," says Tangeman. When the game got rough and elbows started to fly, the ref began calling penalties. At halftime, Ware went onto the field and yelled at him for his calls. The tape shows Ware, 6'3" and 250 pounds, jabbing his finger in Tangeman's chest as the little boys, including Ware's son, gathered behind him. At one point, after a shoving match, the 5'9", 160-pound ref slapped Ware's finger away. Ware then punched him in the face. Ware was arrested on a charge of third-degree assault and convicted at trial. He was contrite at his April 14 sentencing -- "I should have walked away," he said -- but Sarpy County Judge Todd Hutton gave him 30 days in jail and fined him $585. Among the central questions raised by such a litany of incidents, says Jim Thompson of the Positive Coaching Alliance, is this: "Why do parents and coaches in youth sports act in a way they would never act in other places?" "Everything starts at the pro level and funnels down to the college and the youth sports level," says Leonard Zaichkowsky, head of the sports psychology program at Boston University. "At Fenway Park, people with multicolored hair strip off their shirts to show tattoos and body paint, and a certain kind of clientele prides itself on drinking and using foul language." What makes a youth-league event even more emotionally charged is that parents are watching their own children play, their own DNA body paint and tattoos, and everyone knows that blood is thicker and more volatile than beer. "Something deep down inside happens in moms and dads when they see their kid up there with the bases loaded," says Joel Fish. "These are well-intentioned parents. We know the people booing the loudest are pretty straitlaced in their everyday lives. I can't tell you how many times I've heard a parent say: 'Did I really yell at the 16-year-old umpire? Did I really yell at my kid?'" Last Sept. 25, at a high school soccer game in Eastlake, Ohio, George Telidis, a 40-year-old Greek immigrant and former scholarship soccer player at Cleveland State, went racing onto the field after, he says, he saw his 14-year-old son, Alex, go down twice while fighting for the ball with a 14-year-old Bosnian immigrant, Davor Jozic. Alex has braces, and Telidis says he saw his son's mouth bleeding. "You kind of lose it when you see your own son's blood," Telidis says. He belted Jozic in the mouth, splitting the boy's lip. (A teacher of Jozic's says both boys had been red-carded for the incident and were walking off the field when Telidis struck.) Telidis was arrested for assault, to which he pleaded no contest, and was sentenced to 10 days of community service. He seems chagrined now. "I would not hit him if I could do it over," Telidis says. "I would control myself more. I did what I did to defend my son." The whole parenting experience is emotionally loaded, says child sports psychology consultant Alan Goldberg, and in sports it often stirs feelings that have been buried for years. "All the old garbage comes to the surface," Goldberg says. "If you were frustrated as an athlete, if you were never picked to play on a team or didn't go anywhere as an athlete, all that stuff gets tapped into." Frank Smoll, a sports psychologist at Washington who specializes in youths in sports, speaks of a "reverse dependency trap" between young athletes and their parents. Normally, Smoll says, youngsters depend upon their parents for feelings of self-worth and self-esteem. The trap is set when the parent overidentifies with the child. "So it's not just Johnny or Mary out there," Smoll says. "The parents are playing the game out there, maybe trying to live out a past glory or attain some athletic excellence they were denied or incapable of attaining." Over one 12-year period, Burnett says, he worked with as many as 1,000 troubled youths in Southern California. "Runaways, drug users, suicidal kids," Burnett says. "Ninety-eight percent of these kids had dropped out of youth sports. I asked them why. Kid after kid gave the same two reasons: negative coaches and negative parents." Burnett and other psychologists recall the common plea of children to their parents: "Please don't yell on the sideline. It's distracting. And it's so embarrassing." In Goldberg's archive of horrors, the piece de resistance is the memory of an irate mother at poolside during a swim meet, slapping her nine-year-old daughter across the face in front of everyone and screaming, "Don't you ever do that to me again!" The girl had shown up late for her heat and been disqualified. "Know why she missed the race?" Goldberg says. "Her mother never asked. She missed her race because two heats earlier her best friend had had a lousy swim and was devastated and sobbing in the locker room. This girl had been in there comforting her." Issue date: July 24, 2000
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