Parent coaches. Soccer club board members.
These people are volunteers. Be nice. If you disagree with their vision, do so politely.
Referees make a
tiny bit of money. Be nice to them, too.
Dealing with referees can
be tricky. Through a certain age (in our area, U8), we have no
referees, and coaches are responsible for making games fair
and safe. Then coaches hand over that responsibility to referees who are
often young,
inexperienced and timid. These referees might not call the fouls that
would have made coaches stop the game and
talk to the kids. They might not even understand the simple mechanics of
keeping a game running smoothly.
Most youth clubs -- and certainly most referees -- will tell coaches to say nothing to
the refs other than “thank you” after the game. And that should be the goal. But you’ll run into some practical problems.
Some
young refs don’t make clear
signals --
which team takes a throw-in, whether a free kick is direct or indirect,
and so on. Many a U9 coach has yelled instructions to his team for how
to take a free kick, something not often covered in
practice, only to find that the other team is the one taking the free
kick. Oops.
The bigger concern is safety. What do you do when a ref isn’t controlling the games, and the fouls are
getting harder? What do you do when a kid gets bonked in the head, and you’re caught
between obeying your licensing course’s concussion protocols and your club director’s admonition
against yelling at the ref?
I’ll give two situations from my experience -- one of which I’ll apologize for, one I won’t.
We
had an All-Star tournament in which our guys were getting fouled a good
bit. In the second game, with our second laissez-faire referee, I had to
go out on the field to check on an injured player. I made a sarcastic
comment to the ref: “You know, you can call fouls
at U9.” He chirped back that they were 50-50 plays. Things went downhill
from there. The ref
could’ve handled it better, but I could’ve, too. When I surveyed youth
referees about
what I should’ve said in this situation, the responses ranged from
“nothing” to “Pardon me, but this is a little more physical than we’re
used to.”
Back in
our House league, a hard shot nailed one of my players in the head.
Somehow, he didn’t fall. He just held his head and started crying. Play
continued. I screamed to stop play. The ref
didn’t,
the other team didn’t, and our team did. After the other team’s
inevitable goal, I went out to check on our team’s injured player, and I
yelled to my team not to worry
about the goal they had conceded.
I’m not apologizing for the
latter. My responsibility for my player’s safety trumps my
responsibility to let refs build up their self-esteem.
The ref and I had a good conversation afterward, so all was well. Some of the other team’s parents
might’ve thought I was a freak, but they could deal with it.
But
that is, of
course, a rare situation. Don’t yell at refs over offside calls. They’re
going to get those wrong. And it’s often tough to see who played the
ball before it went out of play for a
throw-in. No harm will come from getting those plays wrong. Give the
poor kid or well-intentioned adult a break.
So to sum it up: Safety first; shut up otherwise.
The is an excerpt
from new Beau Dure’s book, “Single-Digit Soccer: Keeping
Sanity in the Earliest Ages of the Beautiful Game,” 2015, 237 pages, Kindle Edition $4.99.
(Beau Dure
is
a freelance writer
and author who has published three books on soccer since leaving USA
TODAY in 2010. He lives in Vienna, Va., where he has coached his two
sons through the Single-Digit Soccer years.
Follow his blog at sportsmyriad.com and catch him on Twitter: @duresport.)
Monday, Sept. 7, 2015