Last week I touched on the subject of club coaches vs. school coaches. The topic probably got a few people riled, as I am sure this week’s topic will too. I want to touch on the subject of track parents. Some can be allies supporting their kids and the team while others can be the enemy and appear to be sabotaging their own child’s success.
I have some great memories from my childhood running in club track. The parents back then were “real” parents. My mom would work on getting our uniforms together and making sandwiches and snacks for the meet while dad checked our spikes, got the cooler ready, and made sure the car was in tip-top traveling shape. Our team was very close knit. All the athletes knew all the parents and vice versa. We would meet at school and a caravan of cars would travel to the meet. If a kid did not have enough money or food, it was nothing for another parent to offer to buy a drink or sandwich. My parents always seemed to be the “team parents.” My parents came to all my big college meets and were loved by all my teammates. They screamed and cheered for everyone on the team, as if they were their own son or daughter.
It was the fathers on the track working with the kids, alongside the coaches, showing us how to come out the blocks. They had all been great athletes back in the day. It was my dad who showed me how to run and react out of the blocks. All the fathers were your coach.
I am not sure when, how, or why parents changed; but the track parents of old disappeared. The discipline was gone, dedication to their own child gone, support of all the kids, not just your own, and the team was gone. When I started my club in 1998, things had seriously changed from what I remembered. That first year, we had 60 kids come out for the team and out of that 60, only two kids had both parents living in the same household with them. I had entered the generation of the “drop off a kid”. Some kids traveled with me all over the state and out of state, yet I had never met their parent. There were some kids I had to pick up, take home every practice, and hope that someone was home to let them in the house. Many of the kids did not have a father or father figure in their life. Therefore, without asking, the coaches and I became father figures and mentors. We bought shoes, paid entry fees, and even had to buy food. All coaches know when they sign up; there is small print at the bottom of the contract that this may happen.
The involved parents I had were outstanding. They did whatever they could to help an athlete or use whatever connections they had to keep the team afloat. A parent once drove someone else’s kid to Virginia Beach for nationals overnight because another parent did not want to take the kid in their car even though they were already making the trip. I have never once had a parent try to tell me how to coach my team. They let the coach, coach. They may not have agreed with my tactics but they all knew and know today that I had the athletes’ best interests at heart. The athlete gets to high school and there seems to be another change with some. The focused, involved parent who has a goal and preaches education will ride with you until the wheels fall off. Some consider you family. Then there are others that have you asking if they purposefully trying to keep their child from being a success or from doing better than they did.
As athletes get older, some parents believe that they have gained coaching knowledge because they have watched a few workouts. They tell themselves, “I can do that just as well as the coach did. What do we need him for?” The coach has gotten the athlete to a very high level. The athlete has become well known in the community, etc. but now the parent is on par with the coach? Seriously! They, in most cases, were not as successful as their child currently is and will use the exact or portions of the coach’s workout and call themselves a great coach. The parents expect the same exact results their child had under the coach’s leadership and then get upset when it does not happen and blame the athlete instead of admitting they did not know what they were doing.
A number of parents will pull their athletes from the very thing that made them successful. The athlete has now become an “individual”. They will go to the meet on their own, stay at different hotels; the parent has completely separated them from the team. The rest of the team hangs out together – goes shopping, eats together, hangs out at the pool, beach, etc.
This separation has cost some athletes wins at the least and advancement to nationals at the most. We all know things can change quickly at a track meet because of bad weather, more or fewer participants, etc. If the parent has decided to be on their own and not arrive when everyone else does, trying to time their arrival, whole events can be missed. An athlete missed the opportunity to go to nationals because the parent was consistently late. When they arrived, the event was over and the athlete is sitting there crying.
The athlete, from what I have seen through the years, loves being on the team, practicing together, traveling together, hanging out together – this experience cannot be replaced. Yet there are some parents who are determined to do it their own way. I have even dealt with parents who were not in the child’s life, never dropped them off or attended a meet. However, when the child’s name hits the local newspaper, now they show up “look what my baby did”. One person even tried to stop his daughter from running because she was successful by telling her she was wasting her time and would never be anything. He was angry that he had missed an important part of her life but more angry that she looked up to her coach more than she did him.
Every year, parents ask the question “how can my child get on your team”. One of the first questions, I ask them is, “are you willing to support your child” Are you willing to take your child to and from practice” Just these simple questions, questions that you shouldn’t even have to ask, eliminates a lot of kids from participating. I let them know that this is not a babysitting service and there is nothing on my car that says yellow cab. If you want your child to participate, whether it is track, baseball, or soccer, you need to be involved and support your child.
I just wish the days of old would return when parents were real parents and we all stuck together. I want to give a shout out to all the parents – past and present – for what they do. This is dedicated to all the great parents involved with their athlete and to my parents who never missed a meet throughout my career.