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by John Mariani
Syracuse Post-Standard
February 11, 2010
Camillus, NY -- The Camillus Youth Basketball Association, whose games were suspended after a brawl Monday, will resume play on Feb. 22, league President Tim Schoonmaker said.
"CYBA officials, after communicating with the Camillus police and the West Genesee Central School District have decided to resume league play effective Feb. 22, 2010," Schoonmaker said this afternoon. "All commissioners, coaches, parents and players will be contacted of this. We thank the school district for allowing us to use their facilities."
League officials will meet with West Genesee Superintendent Chris Brown next week to discuss what security arrangements might be made to allow play to resume, Schoonmaker said. A game schedule also should be drawn up next week, he said.
by Paul Walsh
Star Tribune
February 15, 2010
A youth basketball commissioner was assaulted by a dad and possibly another person at a sixth-graders' game over the weekend in a dispute over officiating at the end of overtime, according to the league and police.
Jeff Shand, 50, had his jaw dislocated, suffered a concussion and has dental damage from the attack immediately after a tournament game Saturday at Burnsville High School, according to Rich Hardegger, an assistant commissioner for Burnsville boys' in-house basketball.
A 48-year-old man from Minneapolis was subdued after being kicked in the groin by one man and then tackled by several adults, said police Sgt. Jef Behnken. The man was arrested, booked in jail and then released on his own recognizance, Behnken said.
by Bob Herzog
Newsday
February 10, 2010
Gym closed. Game on.
That was the situation Tuesday as Half Hollow Hills West hosted Bellport in the resumption of a boys basketball game suspended late in the third quarter Monday, when two parents ran onto the court after contact between their son and a Bellport player.
After that, fans left the bleachers and moved toward the court but were kept at bay.
by Express-Times staff
Lehigh Valley Live
February 02, 2010
WARREN COUNTY, NJ -- A shoving match that ensued when an angry parent charged a coach at a youth wrestling tournament at Belvidere High School has officials from the Tri-County Youth Wrestling League looking to speak with witnesses as well as the parties involved.
According to police, Robert Spezza, of Liberty Township, allegedly assaulted Dan Shamsudin, a coach with Parsippany PAL, after the Redhawks had defeated Hackettstown 80-0 in a midget wrestling match.
"This guy went crazy, trampled one of our kids and sent him to the hospital," Dan Shamsudin's brother, Sharif Shamsudin, said.
Spezza, 40, reportedly accused coach Shamsudin, 28, of using delay tactics during the match then came out of the bleachers and knocked him to the gymnasium floor.
by Peter SchwormBoard members are squabbling over league rules, and jockeying for control. Managers are allegedly stockpiling talent in the minor leagues. Lawyers are involved.
No, this isn't another labor dispute in Major League Baseball. This contentious state of affairs comes courtesy of Little League - ages 9 to 12.
The Parkway Little League - one of the state's oldest leagues, known in Boston as an intensely competitive winning machine - is awash in controversy, beset by bitter disputes over how the 14-team league is run and who should run it. The infighting has dragged on for months, delayed league elections and the annual player draft, and resulted in the league's charter being suspended amid allegations that it has run afoul of a host of Little League rules.
You know that one guy. The one yelling from behind the backstop. "Hey ump, you're missing a good game here!" Or worse.
It's usually a parent on the other team, right? Maybe it's even a parent on your own kid's team.
It might even be you.
Just this summer in Colorado Springs, two girls were charged with fighting and an adult arrested for third-degree assault after a conflict at the Four Diamond Sports Complex.
The disagreement started when a softball player was hit by a pitch and charged the mound during a game between Cheyenne Mountain and Wasson High School club teams. The umpire ejected the girl and stopped the game, but tempers flared in the parking lot. Police reports say up to 30 people were involved, some with bats.
Kristen Browning-Blas
July 20, 2009
The Denver Post
Little Johnny Smith winds up to fire a high, hard one toward home plate. Tommy Jones takes the borderline pitch, which umpire Specs Callaghan calls ball four, forcing in another run. Tommy's manager goes crazy, berating Specs loudly and with exaggerated gestures, as fans in the stands pick up the infection and begin their own profanity-laced tirade against the arbiter. The tirade turns even uglier, and pretty soon Specs is wondering whether he's going to survive to ump another game.May 30, 2009
Connecticut Post
Move over Jose Offerman, you now have company in the Bridgeport Baseball Hall of Shame.
The former Long Island Duck's bat attack, which gave former Bluefish catcher John Nathan a concussion after Offerman charged the mound at Harbor Yard two years ago, marred the national pastime, at least in this city, forever.
But Anibal Perez's recent actions are even worse.
Perez took poor sportsmanship on the baseball diamond to an entirely new level last week when he started a melee at the Thorme Street field that ended with the 36-year-old Bridgeport resident being charged with third-degree assault, breach of peace and risk of injury to a minor.
According to the police report, Perez, who was coaching the Red Sox in the Bridgeport North End Little League, had a dispute with the mother of a player on the Cardinals during the game that led to opposing coach William Garay, who is a Stamford police officer, also getting involved.
Perez, according to police, assaulted Garay during the incident before both benches emptied and fans also poured out to the field to straighten things out. Bench-clearing brawls are unfortunately nothing new to this sport -- but now at a Little League game?!
I'm a big believer that most coaches and parents involved in youth sports get it.
That, then, leaves a handful of coaches and parents who don't get it.
Whether it's a coach who has to put on some sort of sideshow, or the parent who can't go a game without hollering at an official, or the parent who can't go a game with outward complaining on the sidelines ... it's nonsense.
There is a way to deal with this nonsense, although it isn't easy. The people who get it - the coaches and parents who make youth sports such a great experience for kids, filled with fond lifelong memories - have to show courage toward the people who don't get it.
No more turning the cheek when a coach crosses the line; no more staying silent when a parent crosses the line. That's the easy thing to do, but it doesn't solve the problem.
The only way this problem can get corrected is to let the people who don't get it know that they've crossed the line. Politely say something; maturely talk to the coach after a practice; fire an e-mail to the league director ... something. I'm not saying go nose-to-nose with anyone, and I'm not saying tattle on every little nickel and dime thing under the sun. However, if someone at a game has clearly crossed the line, someone has to hear about it.
Bill Wells
May 30, 2009
© 2008 MassLive.com LLC
Tonight is the smackdown between the Denver Nuggets and the Dallas Mavericks. It's hold-your-breath tense as fans await the competition. It's also National Etiquette Week (apparently Mark Cuban didn't get the memo). What can parents of teens garner from the hubbub surrounding comments made between the two teams? Plenty.
Roughly 75% of all boys and girls in the United States play organized sports, according to a study commissioned by the Women's Sports Foundation. It's a big part of a lot of kids' lives. Many parents like organized sports as an extracurricular activity because of lessons learned that kids can use in all areas of life.
The study, titled "Go Out and Play: Youth Sports in America," documented increased family wellness due to children's participation in sports and exercise. When children are young and just starting out on a team, it's a black and white world: play by the rules; respect your opponent; share your snack; and be a good loser. These basics continue to apply as young athletes age. All the way to the pros.
Sheryl Butterfield
May 13 2009
examiner.com
The news of parents losing control at youth sporting events seems to never end. In Bethesda, Md., officials of a soccer league have banished all the parents from one team from the sidelines of the first two games. The reason? Some parents apparently harassed a referee over a call at a match between 13-year-old girls last season. The parents have to watch - some with binoculars -- from no closer than 100 yards away.
As a youth soccer coach in San Francisco for the past seven years, I have seen and heard about some scary behavior from parent spectators. Once when I was refereeing a match between six-year-olds, a mom from the other team ignored my repeated requests for her to stay off the field per league rules. She kept following around her little tyke, and afterwards, she and her husband confronted me angrily about "being so serious" at a kids' game. I chose not to engage, but the encounter left me rattled because it easily could have led to an ugly shouting match, and quite possibly violence.
Indeed, I got off easier than another parent ref in our league. A dad flew off the sidelines to attack him when the ref put his hand on the shoulder of the man's son to make a point during a game between second-graders. The dad was banned from attending his son's games for the rest of the season, and the incident helped prompt a crackdown by the youth soccer league against aggressive parental behavior. As part of the league's efforts, parents were required to attend special group seminars on how to behave at their kids' games.
Jim Carlton
April 28, 2009
The Wall Street Journal
As the 13-year-old girls chased the soccer ball around the verdant field Sunday, one set of parents watched from the sidelines in comfy collapsible chairs, sipping coffee. The others were banished to a nearby hill, straining to see the action with binoculars.
The parents rooting for Bethesda's Legacy travel team at the Maryland SoccerPlex in Boyds were being punished for behavior at the end of last season, when a referee was berated for a call. Saying their actions were "nothing less than egregious," the Washington Area Girls Soccer League took the unusual step of banning them from the sidelines for two games, and a referee made sure they stayed back.
The soccer league, home to many of the area's best soccer players with 600 teams and more than 15,000 participants, has a strict disciplinary system, in which players and coaches receive yellow or red cards for rough or unsportsmanlike conduct. Some have to explain themselves at disciplinary hearings. There are also sportsmanship liaisons on each team, who are supposed to keep fellow parents in check.
Aggressive or otherwise inappropriate behavior by individual parents at soccer games or other youth sporting events happens with regularity these days. But this case was unusual because the whole team's parents were punished.
Kathie Diapoulis, league president, said the parents had gone too far. The league's disciplinary board has had better luck barring individual parents from attending games in the past three years rather than fining them, because the parents would pay the money and continue the bad behavior.
Annie Gowen
April 21, 2009
Washington Post
It's taken a while for this So-Cal sports gal to find a place in her heart for Chico's sports community. I was stoked to watch the Pleasant Valley High School AAU Springtime basketball showcase tournament, but sadly, my time was wasted.
With more than 120 teams comprised of kids from fourth grade to 12th grade visiting from different areas of Northern California, I was excited to watch them all.
I'm usually glued to the action on the court, but my eyes seemed to focus on parents in the stands telling the girls to be more aggressive and to try to take the other team down.
So, these ninth-grade girls from Santa Rosa did just that.
Elbows flying, arms flailing and coaches screaming out of control - but they still couldn't dominate on the scoreboard, as the team lost 35-10.
Pushing and shoving was the objective of the game, as scoring baskets didn't seem like much of a priority for the "Nothin' but net" Santa Rosa team.
I was truly disgusted with these girls.
4/8/09
Natalia Ferruggia
© Copyright 2009 The Orion
At 6 feet 4 inches tall and 330 pounds, Steve Hodges is a pretty intimidating figure. But in 40 years of officiating, he has taken his share of abuse from fans.
"One time I had a mother of a player on a varsity girls basketball team follow me almost all the way into the dressing room, cursing me and telling me I was the worst she'd ever seen," he said. "I told her 'I'm getting ready to shower, so unless you want to scrub my back, you're going to have to leave.' "
Hodges laughed when he told that story, but he and other officials are concerned about an upswing in bad behavior. Hodges, a Democratic state representative from southeastern Missouri, is co-sponsor of a bill with Rep. Jason Grill, D-Kansas City, that would stiffen penalties on anyone who attacks a sports official.
Whereas most of these incidents are minor, the National Association of Sports Officials gets more than 100 reports every year about physical contact between coaches, players, fans and officials. In Missouri, the confrontations are classified as third-degree assaults and are punishable by up to a $300 fine. But Grill and Hodges want the penalty for an official's attacker to be up to $1,000 or one year in jail. Illinois already has a similar law.
Anyone whose been around youth sports has seen the ugly side of these athletic contests. There's the parent who taunts the referee the entire game or the one who screams at the coach about playing time.
Hodges said he hoped this legislation was just the beginning of a discussion we should be having about youth sports in Missouri, and I couldn't agree more.
03/17/2009
Susan Weich
Copyright 2008 St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
DACHER KELTNER
December 7, 2008
A FEW YEARS AGO my daughters and I were searching for sand crabs on a white-sand beach near Monterey. A group of sixth graders descended on us, clad in the blue trousers and pressed white shirts of their parochial school. Once lost in the sounds of the surf, away from their teacher’s gaze, they called one another by nicknames and mocked the way one laughed, another walked. Noogies and rib pokes, headlocks and bear hugs caught the unsuspecting off guard. Two boys dangled a girl over the waves. Three girls tugged a boy’s sagging pants down. Dog piles broke out. In a surprise attack, one girl nearly dropped a dead crab down a boy’s pants.
As they departed in sex-segregated lines, my daughters stood transfixed. Serafina asked me, “Why did that girl try to put the crab in the boy’s pants?” “Because she likes him,” I responded. This was an explanation Serafina and her older sister, Natalie, only partly understood. What I witnessed might be called “the teasing gap.”
Today teasing has been all but banished from the lives of many children. In recent years, high-profile school shootings and teenage suicides have inspired a wave of “zero tolerance” movements in our schools. Accused teasers are now made to utter their teases in front of the class, under the stern eye of teachers. Children are given detention for sarcastic comments on the playground. Schools are decreed “teasing free.”
And we are phasing out teasing in many other corners of social life as well. Sexual-harassment courses advise work colleagues not to tease or joke. Marriage counselors encourage direct criticism over playful provocation. No-taunting rules have even arisen in the N.B.A. and the N.F.L. to discourage “trash talking.”
The reason teasing is viewed as inherently damaging is that it is too often confused with bullying. But bullying is something different; it’s aggression, pure and simple. Bullies steal, punch, kick, harass and humiliate. Sexual harassers grope, leer and make crude, often threatening passes. They’re pretty ineffectual flirts. By contrast, teasing is a mode of play, no doubt with a sharp edge, in which we provoke to negotiate life’s ambiguities and conflicts. And it is essential to making us fully human.
Copyright © 2003 - 2008 Cayman Net Ltd
Wesley Dennis
December 9, 2008
Movies, music and its videos, and some cultural icons seem to have links to violence that, by reading daily headlines, have a bigger influence on the wider world than I realised. By now everyone must have heard about the biggest story in the NFL, and perhaps all of sports - the dumb move of Plaxico Burress. What bothers me is how the world, especially our youth, views this.
Recently Cayman Islands Customs officers, thanks to a trained dog, found a refrigerator full of guns. Is this the island I grew up on?
First of all, the alleged smuggler must have thought he could get away with bringing in that much ammo and weapons. But, additionally, and more disturbingly, where were they all headed?
Could anyone guarantee these would not have ended up into the hands of absolutely the wrong people?
I am convinced that situations occur because of television, along with the stories of the exploits of real-life athletes and entertainers who glorify toting a ‘piece’.
Plaxico is the biggest moron the world has ever seen…scratch that…you can rank TI right up there with him. In case you are not aware, TI brought machine guns to the BET Awards.
Really!?
Machine guns!?
Then he went on a late-night show and tried to justify his action. And all this coming from a guy who can easily pay for licensed, armed professionals to go with him if he felt so threatened.
The NFL has a phone number to call for a licensed private investigator, off-duty police officer or federal agent, or trained guards. Why didn’t Plaxico call one of them?
What’s worse, and for the life of me this is something I can’t understand, is why go somewhere you feel you need to be packing?
And why would you put a .40 calibre glock in the waist of your sweat pants?
And, ironically, this all happened the day before his team was playing the Redskins, who were retiring the jersey of Sean Taylor who had been shot and killed in his home.
© 2008 The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
October 26, 2008
Robin Pyle
When a parent pulled a gun at a local youth soccer game last weekend because his daughter wasn't getting enough playing time, it was the third time this decade a parent has pulled a gun at an area youth sports event.
Parents also scream at coaches and swear at umpires and referees ... setting poor examples for their embarrassed children.
"It seems to be getting worse every year," said David Murphy, who has officiated numerous youth sporting events for more than 35 years. "Parents have become more and more abusive."
Many youth sports leagues have parent codes of conduct, but it doesn't stop everyone.
"A few apples spoil the whole bunch," Murphy said, adding most parents get an A on conduct. "One abusive parent at a ball game and it can ruin the whole ball game."
Most of the time bad parent conduct doesn't escalate into something more, but it has happened.
Lubbock Police Sgt. Ross Hester said police usually arrest two or three parents a year for threatening an official at a sporting event. Those parents get charged with Class B misdemeanor assault charges, an elevated charge because it involves sporting event officials.
The 25-year-old man who pulled out a gun Oct, 18 at the Berl Huffman Athletic Complex faces aggravated assault charges, officials said.
League officials say a few parents each year are escorted off the property during a game because of behavior.
© 2008 , Osprey Media
October 29, 2008
While a group of disgusted parents of young football players and hard-nosed league officials from the Manitoba Minor Football Association squabble over alleged racial slurs and who said what to whom, who heard it, and who did anything about it, a much more critical issue is facing young hockey players in Winnipeg. A steady decline in the number of referees over the past several years has created a crisis set to jeopardize upcoming seasons.
“It’s very tough being a referee. It’s very demanding. These are not professional referees. These are young men and women who are trying to provide a service for the people of Winnipeg and Manitoba,” Doug Lischka, president of the Winnipeg Minor Hockey Association told Sun Media. Two different sports and two different sets of athletes suffering from the same stench: A disrespect for authority and a lack of sportsmanship from the stands, not the ice.
Enough male and female referees and linesmen still exist this season to handle games involving close to 10,500 players, but a lot more than just the tip of this iceberg is showing.
Minor hockey executives blame much of the dwindling numbers on verbal attacks from spectators, aka, parents. Parents in the stands expecting perfection on the ice, not from their offspring but from the men and women with the whistles.
Emotional outbursts at sporting events have been commonplace for decades at hockey rinks and on football fields. The competitive nature of team sport has always fuelled emotion and it’s been “part of the game” for anger to, now and then, get the better of a player or a coach. But rudeness and vulgarity aimed at those enforcing the rules — from the stands and bleechers — is the ugly new reality of youth sports. Referees are simply fed up and who could blame them?
Copyright © 2008
By ABBY SEWELL
October 22, 2008
BARSTOW • Emotions have had time to simmer down since Saturday, when a mass brawl broke out among spectators during a Barstow Youth Football game against a San Bernardino team, ending with one man knocked unconscious, a coach suspended and four people arrested.
Conflicting accounts have placed the blame on both sides. Officials are still piecing together the full story of what happened and trying to find a way to go on with the season, making sure that there is no repeat of Saturday’s events.
“The main thing is that when these players get back out here that they feel good, safe to play,” BYF President Ray Silva said in a meeting between officials and team parents Tuesday.
BYF has already bought orange construction fencing to set up between the field and the spectators’ stands, Silva said. At Tuesday’s meeting, some suggested setting up video cameras and requesting police presence or some type of security at the games.
Silva said that he and BYF board members will make a point of being present at games and will talk to Barstow Police Department about bringing in reserve officers to patrol the last home game before playoffs. In the future, BYF will develop an evacuation drill for dealing with violent situations, to make sure the players are safe, he said.
Barstow head coach Jerry Pinkney, who was cited on suspicion of disturbing the peace for his role in the incident, will be removed from coaching duties until at least next October, said BYF Commissioner Don Depue, who is in charge of handling disciplinary issues for the chapter. Barstow High School head varsity football coach Jose Rubio will take over Pinkney’s position, Silva said.
The fight between Barstow and San Bernardino spectators began after Pinkney reportedly pushed a San Bernardino player while breaking up a scuffle between the San Bernardino boy and Pinkney’s son, a player on the Barstow team. An emotional confrontation between Barstow and San Bernardino coaches and spectators followed the incident, eventually escalating to mass violence.
When asked the question: "What threatens your
safety and emotional health?" most kids say, teasing and bullying
(Kaiser Family Foundation & Children Now, 2001). Yet many adults,
even your parents and teachers, may not realize how often you see or
experience bullying at school and elsewhere. Often adults don't see
bullying when it happens. And those adults who see it, and do nothing,
may not understand that kids can be hurt by bullying.
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