Sunshine Coast Hinterland Times

Sporting clubs have been urged to ban ugly parents and coaches who abuse umpires and referees, even at under-10 games.
The foregoing sentence was the intro to an article in Melbourne’s Herald Sun. But it could equally have been written about the Sunshine Coast Hinterland.
The Herald Sun article reported that a parent who volunteered to referee his son’s under-10 soccer match had to stop the game and ask supporters to tone down the abuse.
I’ve seen that happen in Maleny. One Saturday this winter  I watched as the referee stopped a girls soccer game and refused to continue, because of constant abuse from the sideline. The children watched bemused as the adults carried on like spoilt brats.
This happens week after week at kids sporting fixtures around our region. We like to think we’re a bit special up here in the Hinterland; where we’re into community and don’t have to lock our doors. We’d like to think the “ugly parent” syndrome – where clubs have to enforce a “parents’ code of conduct” – is something that happens in the big cities.
Sadly, it’s alive and not terribly well in the Hinterland. I’m often stunned by parental berhaviour at kids’ sport. If they’re not abusing the referee, they’re haranguing their own kids.
Recently I watched a spectator mother screaming at her child because she was standing in the wrong position. I commented: “Why can’t you just let her run around and have fun?” People thought I was kidding.
I wasn’t joking. Both our girls play soccer every winter weekend. They don’t win very often and their teams don’t score many goals. But they don’t care. They turn up each week and run around with more enthusiasm than skill because they enjoy it. And it doesn’t bother them that they’re out of position sometimes or the referee occasionally makes a poor decision. They just love kicking a ball with their friends.
All too often I observe the kids, out on the field behaving with integrity and spirit, watching with shame while their parents behave badly. It seems adults with boring lives or low levels of lifetime achievement are desperate to achieve success vicariously through their children.
One recent Saturday I saw a Maleny father loudly demanding that his son be ejected from the game by the coach because the boy wasn’t playing well enough to satisfy the father’s lofty standards. Imagine how that kid felt in front of his mates. What kind of parent does that to his son?
This is a national phenomenon. The Australian Sports Commission recognizes the problem of the ugly parent in kids sport. It says children are dropping out of organized sport as an increasingly high rate because they’re ashamed of their parents.
Brisbane media personality and poet Rupert McCall wrote in a newspaper column: “Will you be going out to cheer your DNA this weekend? When those molecular strands of deoxyribonucleic acid are dangerously mixed in the heart and head of a parent whose pride and honour is somehow linked to the point-scoring abilities of their child, sometimes they spontaneously combust.”