Picket Fence Post

Item #1: Are Football Parents Nuts?

The Eldest Son plays football, so I suppose, by definition, The Spouse and I would be considered football parents. And, from what I’ve been able to discern, the parents watching their sons play Pop Warner football are no more or less engaged — shouting everything from encouragement and cheers, to criticism and frustration at the refs — than are the soccer parents on the sidelines of The Girl’s soccer matches, or the baseball parents on the sidelines of The Eldest Son and The Youngest Son’s epic baseball games.

But a recent column in the Boston Globe makes football parents out to be a little bit more, oh, what’s the word, crazy, than your average, garden variety sports parent. While writer Chris Bohjalian did say that “parents scream at umpires and referees” at more than just football matches, he penned these observations after watching a middle school football game:

“All of a sudden, an attractive woman sitting near me in capri pants and a fashionable hoodie stands up and bellows, ‘Gut check, boys, gut check! Now’s when you have to stick it to ‘em!’ She is, apparently, a mother of one of the young warriors.

. . . Other parents were screaming at their children to ‘hit ‘em’ or ’stand tall’ or ’show ‘em what you’re made of.’ One grandfatherly looking gentleman in a windbreaker barked, ‘Take it to ‘em boys, take it to ‘em! Pop ‘em! Pop ‘em hard!’”

Wondering what it was about youth football that made parents go berserk, he wrote that the sport “appeals to our usually dormant atavistic core” and that he “left the field that Saturday morning feeling a little bit bloodied.”

And maybe, in some respects, he’s got a point. I know that whenever my kids are physically hit or knocked around while playing sports – whether it’s on the football field or during a soccer match — the mama bear inside me wants to rise up and protect my cubs. But I can’t. My only hope is that the refs and coaches watch out for all the children’s safety and that my kids hold their own against the wretched children who would dare to jostle my kin. Although if I were sitting near the woman Bohjalian described in his column, I likely would’ve rolled my eyes.

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