Very (I umped for 3 years and stopped two games for this reason - and I still remember clearly over two decades later).
The hope was that by making a statement, you could stop future outbursts, and that the coaches and other parents would police themselves. I had kids (as is more than one) who couldn’t hit a t-ball - last thing the kid needs is some alpha male parent deriding him.
It’s an attempt to make the parents realize “my attempts to help my kid are now hurting him, so I’d better stop it.” For those who aren’t totally nuts - and most of them aren’t raging maniacs, they just get wrapped up in the event - I think that’s probably somewhat effective. To the best of my knowledge, no parent ever walked onto the field and sat on the mound after the incident I described.
They’re not calm, but like I say, they’re not lunatics either. I’d bet that most of these problems are caused (and this is part of what makes them so shocking) by otherwise normal people who just lose track of their common sense and decency. There has to be a way to snap them out of it without resorting to extreme measures, and that sounds as good as any I’ve heard. In the particular case of the Little League I’m talking about, there are no crowds of angry parents. In the few cases where somebody gets upset, it’s one parent or one coach. There won’t be a riot.
Former softball and Babe Ruth League ump here.
My softball parents weren’t all that bad. There were a few memorable occasions, but all in all, it was about the girls having fun.
However, the BRL parents were a pack of animals and the players took after the parents. The first year that I started calling in the league was the last bad year, because at the end of the season, the umpire’s association issued a memo to the league that, effective next season, all umpires in the league were being instructed to issue one warning to both teams at the first instance of disorderly conduct from any source, and then to immediately order a forfeit for a subsequent offense.
My second year, the first 12 games of the season were decided by forfeit. After that, we had a fairly quiet season. The league did not renew its contract with us and brought in umpires from a different association for the following season and the zoo returned in force. After that, they came back to us and stayed with us for the remainder of the time that I was calling with that association.
Little League ump (15 years experience) here. This sounds like a poorly run league.
The coaches and umpires are not responsible for policing the behavior in the stands; that’s the responsibility of the League’s board of directors. They should be giving clear guidelines (handouts at the start of the season…posters on the field) as to what behavior is acceptable. Then they should have a BOD member sitting in the stands. If someone gets out of line, BOD member tells them politely that they’ve gone beyond. If that doesn’t work, ask them to leave. If it recurs, ban them from the field for the duration of the season.
It should never get to the point where all the good fans have to suffer for the behavior of the louts.
My husband has been coaching Babe Ruth League for almost 20 years now, and his team drafts players partly on the reports on their parents. They will not take the hottest kid in Calgary, if his parents have a reputation for being difficult. They also ask rowdy parents to leave the ballpark, and apparently banned one parent from the ballpark. He says that silent games are PC bullshit. So, yeah, the parents, the league, the coaches, and the umps all share in getting the message across that aggressoid behaviour is not cool.
But if the game is abandoned, the kids suffer. And they didn’t do anything wrong (and can’t be held responsible for their parent’s actions.)
I didn’t mean there would be a riot. But **one parent ** running on to the field, or striking an umpire messes up the game.
Banning just the parents who are disrupting the game (and setting a dreadful example to the kids) is not an ‘extreme measure’ in my view.
As D_Odds said, it’s an attempt to get the parents to police themselves and say “cut it out” to anyone making a scene.
I’m not opposed to that measure either. But it’s a measure you don’t want to use immediately - as a league, you lose business when you ban parents. Regardless, any intelligent league should try to set up more than one way to reduce these incidents.
With all that said, I have to make an embarrassing correction to my story. Despite what I was told when I asked last night, just before starting this thread, the “silent games” will not be part of the Little League in which my brother plays. Rather, they are from a soccer game that he is refereeing, which he does on some weekends for spare cash. [Why my mother couldn’t have explained this when I asked is beyond me, but oh well.] The issues remain the same, obviously, but I can no longer vouch for what the games are like. He doesn’t know why the league has this rule in place now. I plan to write a column about it next week, since I’m intrigued by the idea. If I’m able to do that, I’ll talk to the league president and with luck I’ll find out why this rule is in place.
[Channeling Carol Kane from Princess Bride]
Liaaaaaaarrrrr !!!
[/Channeling Carol Kane from Princess Bride]
Understandable mistake and your points remain as valid, of course.
I didn’t cite all of those facts to suppor the idea of a bleachers full of adults sitting mutely as their kids played. It’s a continuum. I DO fear the idea that a BOD of an amateur athletic body has to put themselves in harms’ way to go up into the bleachers to chastise a parent. Or, stop them as they try to attack another parent or coach or ref. That BOD member, they’re not the law. They have no legal righs at their disposal to control or limit the behaviors of others. They can try, but I cannot see any BOD member bodily grasping an angry parent and marching them from a venue. Not without it escalating into the Reading, Mass kind of event.
Should parents be able to get a grip, or be simmered down by their fellows around them? Of course. Do parents get really wound up? Yeah, and for sometimes rather unhealthy reasons. I sat as the timekeeper for a lot of my kid’s roller hockey games. That put me square in between both benches, far from any parents’s ears. The things I heard those coaches say to their own sons who were on their teams?
The stuff of nightmares and CPS Abuse calls. Apparently in the world of sports, all bets are off when it comes to verbal abuse. Who was going to step in the way of words between a father and son? What BOD? What timekeeper? Not I, and I’ve always been ashamed that I did not speak up and tell a coach to cut the crap and just coach.
And think of it this way…after attending one of these “silent games”, how many parents are going to say to themselves: gee, that was fun…let’s do it again.
If you ban the out-of-control parent, you lose one player next season (possibly). If you start having silent games, you lose a dozen families next season.
Oh, see now I understand completely. Soccer parents can be the worst kind of animals. I have never been so uncomfortable as when we were playing the final game of a U9 tournament last season. It came this close (||) to being a parent riot right there on the field. Luckily, the tournament officials were able to restore order, but I sure knew who I was going to deck first if it came to blows. On our team, it’s not so much the parents, it’s the older brothers. Having grown up in the league, they take particular delight in harassing the refs right up to the edge.
Bring an air horn. Wait until a tense moment, then let ‘er rip and watch the popcorn fly. Sure, you’ll get kicked out of the game, but the looks on peoples’ faces as they wet their pants will be well worth it.
I really don’t understand the difference in enforcement of a "no being a jerK’ rule at a normal baseball game and a “no clapping” rule at a silent baseball game.
If some unruly partent starts cheering at a silent baseball game, what happens? Is he ejected from the park, banned from attendence, or forces his team to forfeit? How is that any different from the enforcement that might be taken against a jerk at a regular cheering game?
Personally, I think that if parents get out of line and start being verbally abusive to players or start threatening referees, the cops should be called and the parent should be arrested for disorderly behavior. Forget this “escorted from the park” stuff, let’s see how parents like being intimidated by Curly and Big Joe in the lockup for a few hours in the way that the jerkhole parents seek to harass little kids and volunteer umpires and referees.
Time to tiddly-wink for a moment. My kids weren’t huge into team sports, but they both played roller hockey, and daughter did soccer for two years.
What was the upside to parental vocal input? When you got two teams where the parents really GOT IT. Where both coaches GOT IT- especially with roller hockey, where the physical proximity of teams/coaches on the bench tends to be closer than in soccer or football or baseball. They GOT that it was about the kids, about hard good fair play and being supportive of good efforts.
As awful as a very raging parent was to have to bear witness to, it was always equally heartwarming to see Coach A call out, " Great shot !! " to Coach B’s player as he/she scored. And since being Goalie is rough on kids, when they’re having a good OR bad day, both teams parents and coaches frequently were very encouraging to both goalies.
Many were the games where there were nothing but positive remarks called back and forth. For a kid playing in front of peers and the parents of peers, to have a kid’s parent on the OTHER team call out to him or her, " Nice try- great shot !" is something they will remember.
Not always a negative thing, to have some vocal supporters. The problem is ( tiddly wink back time ), there’s no way in hell to differentiate between a great group of parents and coaches, and an atrocious few. Until it’s way too late.
My daughter’s soccer team (8-10 yr olds) has a policy where the kids themselves can call for a silent quarter, half or game. This has only been done once last season because quite a few of the parents (moms mostly; myself included) were “coaching” the kids on the field and they were getting confused.
We were properly shamed. 
We were all really caught up in the game and trying to encourage them. Nothing negative being said to any child or any other parent, but with most of the parents shouting at once it was too much.
It was tough not to say “good try” after she didn’t prevent a goal, or “woohoo” when she did.
My 11 year old son is something of a bowling phenom. He has loved to bowl since he was old enough to push a ball down the lane. He is in a league, and a retired pro has been coaching him.
A recent state championship tournament had a rule that parents/friends/coaches were not allowed to say anything that might be construed as coaching. My son’s coach worked out some basic hand signals that he would use. A parent complained, and there was an investigation. hehehe. All over some $5.00 trophies.
My son was exonerated, BTW.
I think playing like that, having a crowd silently watching, would creep me out.
I feel the league should have, for lack of a better term, bouncers, for the stands. It shouldn’t be up the coach or umpire, however, this will run the cost up.
I heard this has something to do with boisterous parents. Don’t remember where I heard that, though…
I’ve reffed really-little-kids soccer (one game) and been a linesman in high school volleyball (most of a season; representing my school but calling fair/foul, so to speak–conflict of interest, anyone?) and I never had trouble with parents, but I’ve heard all the horror stories. I probably didn’t have parent trouble because of the ages involved; the soccer players were too young for parents to get really uppity, and the volleyball players were old enough that most of their parents didn’t come and if they did they would sit quietly. I followed a friend’s under-17 soccer team in high school, too, and the parents were all pretty respectful–on our team, anyway; we had some asshats on other teams, but our girls were mature (and talented) enough to brush it off.
We did have one scare on that volleyball team, when we had a game in what we’ll call a less priveleged part of town. We had to have school administrators double as bodyguards for the (female) players and get out of the place as quickly as possible; a group of Bloods were making some seriously creepy comments about what they wanted to do with our players.
My brother’s high school lacrosse league aparently had some problems with unruly parents a few years back. One of the solutions was to start calling penalties if behavior on the sidelines gets out of hand. My brother’s team lost a game this year because of a technical called on a parent. I wasn’t there so I don’t know exactly what his offense was. I attended a later game and saw parents “shushing” another parent who was putting too much coaching in with his cheering.
It’s interesting to see how different sports handle this problem. All my umpire training has told me that our authority stops at the fence; we run the game, and somebody else runs the stands. Of course there’s no equivalent in baseball of the soccer “penalty”, so this might have something to do with it. All we can do as umpires, if we feel the game is getting out of control, is to pull the players into the dugouts and stop the game until somebody deals with it.