Knuckle Dragger Nation is not just a growing cultural identity but a metastasizing disease easily diagnosed by anyone who has attended a youth sports event.
Toxic parents and their self-absorbed entourages are consumed by Freudian inadequacies and grievances. They’re making life so miserable for amateur officials and umpires that they’re fleeing fields, courts and rinks in droves.
These are good citizens performing thankless oversight for their love of the game, forced to absorb venom for having the audacity to rule against little Johnny and Janey as if it were Game 7 at the Garden.
The inexorable path to replay in T-ball is being accelerated by tone deaf parents who are failing their children in ugly public tantrums that are embarrassing, regressive and consequential.
We have reached a tipping point with youth sports in this coarsening country. Major-league expectations and 2023 arrogance have convinced arbiters the chump change they earn for their civic duty is not worth the abuse from lunatics in the bleachers and cowards on social media.
Imagine that.
This is a manufactured crisis of conscience that is entirely correctable. But it takes a village to silence the village idiots who demand perfection from sport’s imperfections and have no shame in lashing out with crude outbursts that shame us all.
“We as citizens need to get a grip on ourselves,” says Barry Mano, president of the National Association of Sports Officials in Racine, Wis.
He would know.
There are 50,000 fewer youth officials in 2023 than there were before the COVID-19 pandemic. High schools and sports federations are scrambling to staff games. Leagues are canceling games left and right.
Mano, who founded NASO in 1980, acknowledges antisocial behavior among parents and fans are a scourge as old as time. But it has become way too personal and relentless.
“A couple weeks ago, some parent sent us a clip of their 8-year-old who was called out at second base, but they insisted the video showed he was safe and that there’s no way this umpire should be allowed to umpire again,” Mano recounted. “Are you kidding me?
“But this is our brave new world, where officials not only have to worry about being chased into the parking lot but having their life trashed on social media for 40 or 50 bucks a game. They’re asking, ‘Do I really want to do this anymore?’ ”
One Little League administrator in New Jersey became so fed up with unruly parent behavior that he imposed a code of conduct banning offenders from the ballpark for one year until they complete an umpiring training course and officiate a minimum of three games.
Bravo.
It’s all fun and games to swear at umps until you have to strap on a cup, shin guards, chest protector and mask and make real-time decisions as a part-time official for six-plus hours of your precious existence.
It’s no wonder how we got here. The ruthless scrutiny of professional and major college sports and nightly whining about blown calls, missed calls, biased calls has seeped into all levels.
Moreover, high-definition television, K-zone boxes, super-slow-motion replays, endless reviews and legalized gambling have turned every viewer into a forensic expert on balls and strikes, high sticking, pass interference and loose-ball fouls.
Coaches and players are all flawed. Officials are too. But it’s not good enough to accept errors are baked into the product. And now the replay terrorists are threatening to turn sandlots into “Sunday Night Football.”
Mano said some Hollywood entrepreneurs want to pitch replay for youth sports at NASO’s annual convention this summer in Riverside, Calif. He would not identify the company or investors, but said they promised plug-and-play technology to equip fields, rinks and gyms with up to 20 cameras to ensure no angle is missed.
“This might be all pie I the sky,” Mano says, “but these folks feel like this is needed and that there is a market for it.”
All it takes is one rich suburban association or club teams to pony up dough to make instant replay duties part of volunteer dibs like working the concession stand. Suddenly, everyone has to keep up with the Roone Arledge Joneses.
Try explaining challenges and inconclusiveness to coaches who barely can identify a balk or the infield fly rule.
And good luck hiring tech-savvy replay officials to oversee the vanishing number of officials on the field.
Another overwrought solution in search of an overrated problem.
All to appease parents who would serve their coddled children so much better by explaining that life isn’t fair, adversity is something to overcome and encouraging them to take up a trade or a college major instead of grievances on the Little League diamond.
