Youth baseball parents put on notice

Hey, a college education here these days is worth only a student load debt and five years of living with your parents until a) you can find a job or b) should you find one, payback your student loans.

 

One fundamental principle parents and coaches forget (and then pass along to the kids), jeez, you expect perfection from the umpires, yet fail to recognize that YOU'VE never been perfect. Erroneous calls are simply part of human nature.

Now that my 14 yr old has chosen golf over baseball, I'm no longer part of that crowd, and grateful not to experience it any longer; although 95% of the parents with me were definitely well-meaning, well-mannered parents.

 

Must to English.

Also to be in a relationship with theme of thread.

 

I'm sure you're thinking of a different show, but one show I find really creepy is MTV's Parental Control, where the parents try to find new significant others for their kids, and sit on couches with the kid's current boyfriend/girlfriend, watch them on their dates, and just rip on each other. It's such a disrespectful show.

Threadjack over. Carry on.

 

Considering you just composed two incomplete sentences, I wouldn't criticize one's English.

And this is in line with the topic. Youth parents' behavior is rooted in the star they think Johnny is or can be, and any challenge to that runs the risk of anything from a chewing out to a shot to the chest.

 

MTV needs to be fucking banned from the (cable) airwaves. Shut it down.

 

That show is still on? I haven't watched MTV in the better part of a decade and I remember that. It aired around the same time as Next, which was glorious trash TV.

 

I'm going to do something rare -- agree with dog eat dog. Many of the nuttiest parents are that way because they are thinking future stardom for their child -- particularly a college scholarship. That they haven't researched enough to know that at best their kid, outside a few sports, would get a partial deal is beside the point. Here's an example: my wife was talking with a couple of neighbors and mentioned, in the answer of what are your kids up to, that my then 6-year-old son was in a bowling league. Still bumpers. And their first reaction, both of them, was "you know, you can get a scholarship for that."

Even if the parents aren't dropping the word "scholarship" at the ballfield, they are thinking about it as they are screaming at how this coach is completely fucking over their kid. Certainly, parental protective (or overprotective) instincts might be an issue for some. But especially with travel parents, they're thinking scholarship and/or some grander future than what they see in the ballfield in front of them. Why else would they spend the money they do? It's not just for bragging rights.

The whole youth sports experience is professionalized down to diaper age. A lot of the tension that takes place is because one person is of the belief that the other is not taking it seriously enough/taking it too seriously.

 

I really disagree, Bob. Not about some people being worried about a scholarship, but about whether that's the driving force in their behavior in a rec league. (Which is where the signs were posted as I understand it.) Even in travel ball, I don't think the scholarship is the overriding concern, at least not in the earlier ages.

It's all just about not being able to check themselves when it comes to their kids. And also now that they're on the treadmill, the parents get this idea that their kids have to keep up. Keep up with what? I don't know. With other kids. But they have to keep up.

Asking the existential question "why are we doing this?" is really not that common.

 

I take it you haven't spent too much time around hockey parents.

 

Beat me to it, my brother. Especially in the GTA.

 

Yes, but why can't they check themselves? And are they this way all the time, or just with sports? I'll grant you that there are some parents who just have trouble controlling themselves at their kids' games, with the issue being that their kids are out of their control. Who knows, these parents might yell if they say in their child's classroom, too. With sports, at a young age, you can watch good and bad things happen to your kid right in front of you, and you can't do anything about it. That can be difficult for even the most even-keeled parents.

But I think you're underselling the scholarship issue -- or, at least, the gnawing feeling from parents that if their kid is going to keep advancing in a sport, this shit had better get serious, and that coach better not fuck my kid over. The issue is that a lot of parents, even if they don't know the details of how these things work, know that plenty of people are spending plenty of money and time with their kid, and that if they don't, they risk their kid getting shut out from the junior high or high school team, much less worrying about a college scholarship. These parents aren't trying to keep up because of some pride. They're doing so because they know how difficult the competition will be, and how much cash is being put into this.

In that way, it reflects a lot of parental anxiety about education and college in general. You know you're going to have to spend a lot of money to ensure your child has a future. And you also know that there are a lot of people spending a lot of money to make sure, in an increasingly zero-sum world, that their kid will have a better one than yours. Yet, even as this happens, there's a gnawing feeling that the investment might not be worth it -- or that it's wrong to think of your child as an investment. But you feel compelled to do it anyway. If you step off that treadmill, you do it knowing there are risks involved.