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This week's column

Some kids in Raleigh probably are wondering where they went wrong.

They've done their best. They've tried to raise their parents right.

Then, first chance the grown folk get to prove they can control themselves in a public setting and they behave like this:

• Heckling opposing players at a youth football game, telling them they may as well not even try tackling their kids. You stink, they say. You're gonna lose. "And these kids are 8 and 9 years old," Robert L. Gordon, a coach for a Raleigh Little League football team, tells his hometown newspaper, the News & Observer.

• Spiraling so out of control so often that plainclothes police officers have been deployed at games over the past three years to protect officials and, if necessary, escort them to safety following youth football games and soccer matches.

• Forcing one youth football game to be called because parents and other fans spilled onto the field after the last of several players was ejected for unsportsmanlike conduct.

Obnoxious adults have become such a pain in the aspirations of Raleigh youth football players that the city this year has erected 6-foot-tall chain-link fences to keep foul mouths and foul deeds at a safe distance.

"Sometimes people have their own agendas," Shadu Jackson, supervisor of Raleigh's Walnut Creek Softball Complex, said Friday. "Sometimes they're not into the games."

And sometimes they're too into the games.

Lest we get too smug down the road here in Greensboro, we've had our own forgettable moments of Adults Behaving Badly.

Remember the soccer mom who was arrested for assault after she slugged a teenaged official in 1999?

Or similarly scary fan behavior at a pee-wee football game here, where angry fans and players nearly blurred the line between unruliness and violence?

Fortunately, Parks & Recreation Department officials didn't erect any fences. They did try to build a better appreciation for sportsmanship.
In 2001 Greensboro adopted a national program called the Parents' Association for Youth Sports (PAYS for short) and sponsored through a Florida-based nonprofit called the National Alliance for Youth Sports.

The program involved an orientation for parents and their children who participated in youth sports. You paid a $5 registration fee and were required to watch a 19-minute video on sportsmanship.

If you didn't do these things, your child could not participate.
The program immediately stirred opposition, from, of all places, the Greensboro City Council.

Tom Phillips, a former youth soccer referee, called it "a scam" and "a crock" and argued that no videotape was going to reform a delinquent parent. Hooligans were born, not made.

Robbie Perkins, who ran track at Duke, grumbled that the program was too inconvenient and time-consuming.

This, despite rave reviews for the program in other communities.
Phillips and Perkins raised more of a ruckus than you might have expected. It's not as if they were bored or anything. (We were, after all, in the middle of a drought and the city lakes were drying up.)

Discussions, hearings and subcommittees ensued. Prompted by Perkins' and Phillips' complaints, the city conducted a survey.

PAYS received an 80 percent approval rating. Case closed.
The program continues to this day. Thus far, 6,000 parents have completed PAYS orientations.

And wouldn't you know: Parks & Recreation Department just won a national award for its youth sports programs.

Raleigh is not a PAYS chapter, although it does require that parents and their children sign sportsmanship pledges before the season begins.

Obviously, somebody's not keeping his word.

That's not to say that Greensboro has eliminated churlishness at all of its sporting events. Of course not.

For instance, we too, use off-duty police officers as security at youth football games.But city Athletics Director A. Jean Jackson says the atmosphere has improved markedly since PAYS was adopted here four years ago.

"We haven't had major blow-ups at all," she says. "Parents hold each other accountable for their behavior."

To suggest that PAYS alone made the difference would be naive. Greensboro also probably has benefitted from a run of dumb luck.
We'll take it.

And for at least a little while longer, when someone yells "Defense!" at a local youth football game, we won't have to wonder which fence they're referring to.

Posted by Allen Johnson on September 25, 2005 3:34 AM | Permalink

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Thinking Out Loud

Thinking Out Loud

This week's column

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