Confessions of a netball dad: Parents’ worst sideline behaviour

Illustration / Rod Emmerson

OPINION

For 10 years, I have been a netball dad, in which time I have seen enough to be sure that at the school level, the game meets every criteria to be considered toxic - devoid of core values, dominated by adults with big egos and warped ethics, and elite players with a hard-to-understand sense of entitlement. What follows are true confessions from my time standing courtside.

I’m not going to deify my father and say he was without fault, but as a sporting parent he was exactly what I wanted and needed.

He came to watch me play - football, rugby, athletics - whenever he could, and he never once embarrassed me or made me wish he hadn’t been there.

He was mostly quiet and if he ever did say anything from the sidelines, it was mostly when I was close enough to hear him without him having to shout, and it was always constructive and supportive.

If he ever did shout something, it was always positive - usually a spontaneous exclamation because I’d done something well.

Read More

- Part 1: The worst things I’ve seen courtside in NZ

- Part 2: The rotten, toxic truth about trialling for top school teams

- Part 3: My daughter dodged a bullet missing the top team

I never once felt like he held unrealistic expectations or expressed them - overtly or passively - and the only time he put pressure on me was when I was uncertain if I wanted to sign up and get involved with a sport.

He always pushed me to take part, to give new things a go and I have borrowed his approach with my own kids because I am conscious that parents play an enormous role - whether they want to believe it or not - in shaping their children’s attitudes and feelings towards sport.

And I am equally conscious that I am a parent all the time - not just on game day - so there had to be consistency in my own attitude and behaviours to ensure I didn’t send out mixed messages.

As a netball dad, I never shouted anything from the sidelines. I never gesticulated at or verbally berated an umpire.

I never questioned or even talked to any of my daughter’s coaches other than to say hello.

I was conscious of my body language so didn’t react physically or obviously negatively when my daughter made a mistake.

If I hadn’t been able to get to her game, my first question would always be, “How was netball?” and leave it up to her how she interpreted that.

I did this because I didn’t want my first question to be, “Did you win?” and for her to think that I only cared about the result.

If I had been at her game, my first question would be, “Did you enjoy that?”. In the car home, I’d only talk about the game if she led it and if I sensed she was over-talking about it, I’d switch topics.

I’d never offer advice about what she could have done better - that was the coach’s job.

Mine was to tell her that I was proud of her, that I was there for her and to try to keep her on a relatively even emotional keel to ensure she never got too up about the wins and too down about the losses.

And perhaps most importantly, I didn’t give her free rein to vent about the umpiring. I’d let her moan for a bit, but once I thought she was starting to attribute blame, I’d wheel out my well-worn speech about officials being human, that they make mistakes that affect both teams and that this is the beauty of sport.

It is imperfect and therefore you have to suck up what is thrown at you and respect that one day decisions might go your way and the next day they won’t - and no matter which one it is, you still thank the umpire and your opposition and walk off the court with your head up.

My gut feeling is that most netball parents conducted themselves in much the same way.

But I saw enough to believe that there was a significant minority who didn’t model appropriate behaviour on the sidelines and were enabling their kids to display similarly poor attitudes.

I have no doubt, either, that some parents were guilty of belittling their kids, slowly draining them of self-confidence through relentless negative interactions.

The worst parental behaviour was always aimed at umpires. Some parents simply couldn’t help themselves and constantly felt the need to undermine the officials loudly and aggressively.

The worst example I was aware of happened to a girl in my older daughter’s team. While my daughter didn’t make the top team at her school, she played for one that still had to umpire one of the junior teams on match day.

She was rostered to umpire a game involving the school’s Year 9 social team, but swapped with a teammate who had been allocated one of the school’s elite Year 9 teams.

The teammate had never umpired before and thought it would be better to take charge of the social game, but she encountered a parent of one of the players - from our school - who spent the first quarter following her up and down the sideline, telling her what a terrible job she was doing.

After 10 minutes, Mr Angry was so incensed at what he was seeing that he grabbed the whistle out of her hands and took over, despite seemingly not knowing many of the rules.

What he didn’t know was that the girl he had abused then humiliated was the principal’s daughter, and so at least he faced a highly uncomfortable meeting with the head on Monday morning.

My other daughter once had a game at primary school abandoned - it was between our A and B teams - because one parent, who was also the coach, upset the umpire so much that she refused to carry on.

The game being stopped like that set him off even more and as a Board of Trustees member at the time, we made the decision that he couldn’t coach anymore because we were genuinely fearful he may elevate his rage to physical abuse.

The source of his anger, it turned out, was that he felt his daughter should have been in the A team.

In some ways these incidents, although awful, were at least easy to detect and deal with.

What was harder to see each week were the kids, some of whom were in my daughter’s team, some in opposing teams, who were obviously embarrassed by a parent while they were playing.

Occasionally that embarrassment was just teenagers being generally mortified by anything their parents do - horrific things like existing - but mostly it was justified.

Mostly it was easy to see why a kid was so enraged, their parent constantly critiquing, incessantly offering advice about where to stand, who to cover, when to pass.

There would be the constant glaring at the touchline, the mouthed “shut up Mum” or “shut up Dad”, and then the cold and angry exchange at the end of the game where the poor kid would brush the parent away and storm to the car.

And just as hard to see was the overtly disappointed/helicopter parent who couldn’t help but tell their kid to “watch their passing” or “get their head in the game”, or “wake up, you’re doing nothing”.

There would be the theatrical reactions, too: the hands to the head when a shot was missed, the open-armed quizzical “what was that?” reaction or the slow shaking of the head while staring at their feet if a pass didn’t meet its intended target.

Some coaches were just as bad, if not worse, providing running commentaries as the game played out, none of which was helpful to their team.

To an alien dropped in from Mars, the whole business would have looked awfully like the adults were the children, and the children the adults and that whatever was going on, no one was enjoying it.