Way back when, as an assistant coach for my middle child Nate’s soccer team, we set up an early spring scrimmage one weekend against another squad. We needed someone to referee.

I volunteered. Before the game, I gathered the kids and then the parents and told them this: I’m no soccer expert, and I’m not going to be a good official. I’m happy to wield a whistle to help keep order, but it’s only a scrimmage. I will focus on preventing dangerous plays, but I will miss many calls (offsides?… forget it!).

Despite this pregame orientation, early on, things got chippy–these were two good teams with many competitive kids–and some parents from the other team started getting on me, complaining about the officiating.

No chance. After a few comments, I walked right up to one guy, and I dangled the whistle in front of him. “You wanna do it?” I asked.

In my long years involved with youth sports, I’ve had the experience many others have had: parents are the weak link. But the growing, well documented abuse of officials has gone too far, and the repercussions are tangible: For example, New Jersey is having trouble finding soccer officials at all levels.

Deptford Little League has come up with a plan: You wanna berate the umps? Then you’re gonna ump yourself. As reported in the May 21, 2023 Philadelphia Inquirer, “Fed up with parents cursing umpires, two of whom quit in April, Deptford Little League president Don Bozzuffi made international news last month by instituting a novel punishment: Unruly parents will be banned from attending games unless they umpire three contests themselves.”

I love it.

Take these jerks out of the bleachers and hand them the umpire jersey.

Watching pro sports, you can see how critiquing the officials has become part of the flow of the game. Announcers, dopes like Jeff Van Gundy and Cris Collingsworth, make such criticism a natural part of a broadcast. (Well, at least Van Gundy’s gone now, but I always wonder how these lousy announcers keep their jobs. How do you rate them? People are going to watch the great products of the NBA finals or the NFL playoffs no matter who blabs about it–sorry… spiteful digression…).

Disdain for officials is cross cultural, but consider how ingrained it is in American sports culture. In the song “Six Months Out of Every Year” from the old baseball musical Damn Yankees, givin’ it to the ump is just part of the game, part of the fandom chorus:

Strike three, ball four, walk a run’ll tie the score,
Yer blind Ump,
Yer blind Ump,
Ya mus’ be out-a yer mind, Ump!

Officiating human beings in motion is incredibly difficult, no matter the level. In my long experience, officials get the vast majority of it right, and when there is a weak official, they are just that: A weak official, and they are missing calls all over. It’s not some crooked person who’s calling everything against your team. (In my many years as coach and fan, I did have one moment I’m truly embarrassed about. I still want to find that ref and apologize.)

I know a missed call is frustrating, especially in the age of replay. Remember, I’m an Eagles fan, and I had to agonize over a Super Bowl frittered away after a tough call.

At its base, though, the abusive, frothy behavior of fans, which often begins as soon as a competition starts, demonstrates a fundamental lack of respect for another person. Deptford’s Little League approach makes the bad fan become that person. As Bozzuffi said, “I tried to think about the one thing in the world parents wouldn’t want to do. This was it.”

My hope is not that such fans will get a taste of their own medicine, because after all that means other fans are yelling at them, but that through this experience thet will understand that the person umpiring the game is earnestly trying to do a good, fair job.

They will, in other words, learn something bigger: They will learn empathy.

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Last weekend I spent a day in a filled Phillipsburg High School gym for the N.J. State Girls’ Wrestling Championships with our freshman wrestler Samantha Domask. Sammy came out of nowhere this year, shocking the world in this year’s early season Queen of the East Tournament when she emerged from the 15th seed to reach the finals. She ended up placing 8th in the state last weekend.

She has a bright future ahead.

So does the sport of girls’/women’s wrestling: Numbers are up in both high school and college programs, and more and more states are sanctioning state championships.

I’m not much of a prognosticator (or I’d be a lot richer), but I remember all the way back around my college wrestling days in the late 80s/early 90s when Title IX rules were influencing universities to shutter men’s wrestling teams. I thought, “Why don’t colleges just start women’s programs?” For those coaches opposed to mixing genders in competition or even practices, completely separate activities could be run at the same time in the same facility.

The N.J. Girls’ States reflected the growing pains of the sport. In N.J. States, wrestlers compete for places one through eight. The girls in Phillipsburg wrestled for every medal except first and second. The final match was moved to Atlantic City a week later so the girls could wrestle before the boys’ finalists in front of the big AC crowd. The concept was good, but it split the championship girls’ matches from the other place winners, breaking up the tournament’s continuity.

Watching these hard-nosed competitors in Phillipsburg, I got amped about the girls’ path in this great sport. I also realized a little part of that is because of my growing frustration with boys’ wrestling in New Jersey. And I’m not the only one. As this nj.com article describes, team wrestling for boys “is in trouble.” Driven heavily by private schools that have no boundaries in populating their rosters, talent has polarized to fewer and fewer teams. The nj.com piece analyzes considerable chunks of match data to show the lopsided competitive direction the sport has been moving in.

(Help may be on the way, as during the course of drafting this post a proposed solution appeared in nj.com: the state will create private school districts that will funnel into one private school region before states. This is a long overdue move–but that’s a discussion for another time.)

Recruiting does not equal coaching. Right now, girls’ wrestling seems still at the stage at which coaches work hard with athletes in their own schools, in many cases building practices and competitive schedules for a few bold girls who sign up for wrestling in their schools.

Another thing I was heartened by in Phillipsburg was the number of boys who showed up, some traveling far, to support their teammates. This was after many of them had battled it out in the regions themselves all weekend, emphasizing the team nature of the sport.

N.J. Girls’ States was a great day of tough athletes gutting it out for medals. And, yeah, as a coach I had a difficult time the next week watching the 235-lb. state championship final streamed from AC, as I realized what could have been for Sammy. Her only losses to girls this year were to 2nd, 3rd, and 7th in N.J.

She’ll re-focus this spring and summer, hit the weight room, and wrestle those off-season tournaments. She’ll further commit.

It’s what wrestling has always been all about.

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I grew up playing football in a school that, back in the day, was probably like a lot of other schools: We were indoctrinated not to like soccer.

Our coaches used it as a foil, calling it, to put it nicely, a gentleman’s sport compared to our violent, blood-and-guts endeavor.

As with most forms of indoctrination, this flew in the face of the empirical evidence in front of our faces. My school had one of the best boys teams in the area, a team that included several tough dudes who also were my wrestling teammates.

I never saw a high school game. In fact, I never watched a soccer game at all until I became the team reporter for the Rutgers-Camden student newspaper, The Gleaner, my frosh year at college. (And oh what heights I would climb at The Gleaner, only a year later becoming the woefully unprepared editor-in-chief.)

I became friends with several players, especially my boys the DeFeo brothers, and I began to develop an appreciation for the sport.

But even as late as the early aughts, I was still basically a block-headed American when it came to soccer.

Then dad-dom struck. Soccer is a big socializing event in my community, so early on we enrolled our five-year-old daughter as a way to meet folks. The league always needs coaches, so I volunteered for my first group: The Purple Lions. (I also coached Blue Thunder before settling into red teams, mostly because then I would always have spare red jerseys: The Red Hot Chili Peppers, The [incredible] Red Hot Lava Rocks, The Flaming Cardinals, among others. Every team had a talisman/good luck charm; I am especially proud of the spray-painted concrete chunk “lava rock”.)

I grew interested in the nuances of the game, and I paid attention to what any coach near me was doing; I collected drills by writing them on index cards and then a booklet.

But I was yet an outsider who didn’t appreciate the broader sport, even expressing annoyance at what I considered the overhyped World Cup (!).

I still didn’t get it.

My kids, though, kept playing. All three of them enjoyed the sport and had decent success, but it was also a communal activity that connected them with friends and some high-quality adults. I thought my boys would play football some day, just like their old man!, but it never happened. They didn’t even watch Eagles games, a ritual that remains a rare afternoon couch-surfing activity for me.

So I had a choice. Even if I was supportive–you know, giving rides, attending games–would I really embrace this thing they loved, or would I remain an outsider? I suppose it’s a bigger question, regardless of the activity or interest: You have these kids who become–and just as everyone said, this has happened in a blur–full-blown people with their own interests, and will the day come when you realize you have nothing in common?

For me, I basically had to stop being an idiot.

Sure, NFL mania still courses through my systema nervosum, but I watched soccer with my kids and their friends and began to understand.

Of course, now that I’m just getting it, my run as a soccer coach is at an end. Who will inherit my pile of index cards and notebooks?

The other day, I settled on the couch to watch Liverpool vs. Manchester City. I’m rooting Man City all the way–it’s my older son’s favorite team. I know most of both rosters, and I have a favorite player on each team: Virgil van Dijk–hey, my boys were both center backs!–and the sublime Kevin De Bruyne.

My youngest was visiting his siblings in Philly to get a taste of college life (that young’un returned home with pink hair is a tale for another time…). I was by myself, enjoying the two-hour sojourn just like an NFL game.

The kids arrived a few hours later for Sunday dinner, filling up the house with presence.

You know, I think we all have lots in common and always have lots to cover, but when the boys saw me, they both gave me a knowing nod: “How about that game?” And I knew exactly what they were talking about.

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Note: To people who don’t care about football, this one has little for you. Also, those of you who grew up around Dallas and/or in the 70s or 90s, you get a free pass here: I still hate your team, but not you. Any reader may be puzzled if not stunned by my visceral anger about this topic.

I won’t say I’m a reasonable man. I don’t like to leave myself that wide open to my “friends.”

So I’ll just say that I’m particularly unreasonable about that loathsome football group from Dallas. We have a duty to make sure kids don’t become Cowboys fans. The things that are wrong with football, sports, and our country are embodied by this pompous, underachieving team.

First, they have a nickname–and nobody outside Dallas should ever mention it–that consists of using a shortened form of the United States of America and making it appear through insidious use of possessive case that the entire country feels deep connection to this organization, a bit of linguistic- and grammar-fueled subterfuge.

This shameless marketing ploy was developed in the late 70s by, of course, a broadcaster. As a result, because the perception of the team’s popularity increased their games were televised more, a vicious cycle, a vortex of fame.

Putrid. If you don’t see how the long shadow of such celebrity behavior soils our whole culture, you’re not looking.

The organization also stands as an exemplar of entitlement, that you deserve something just because. Certainly, pro sports has plenty of entitlement, but the Cowboys and their despicable, ghastly, prunish owner take such hubris to another level.

The NFL has bent over backward for this club. Pay attention! After the Cowboys lost ungracefully in the playoffs this year (more about this in a moment), a screen chyron noted that it had been blank blah-blah # of years since this loser franchise had been to an NFC Championship game, as if it’s their birthright, as if it’s shocking news.

(Note that both analysts on the champion game broadcasts were former Cowboy quarterbacks. The league will not break the addiction! [Although, truth be told, dammit, I don’t mind Aikman, even though he was overrated as a quarterback: see below].)

Get this: In the past quarter century, of the 32 NFL teams, only six scrub organizations haven’t made it to the conference championship game. The Cowboys are in this group: The bottom 20%. In this century, they have the 12th best record. This is an average-to-bad franchise with a long-standing record of failure that surrounds it like a miasma.

The Cowboys also exemplify how those who do the real work get overlooked. Dallas was solid in the 90s, but those teams were good primarily because they had the best offensive line in history, a squad regularly at the top of lists like this and this.

If you’re a football fan, you know what I’m talking about. This line allowed the skill players, the guys who get all the ads and attention, to lead overly inflated career. Running back Emmitt Smith is the worst example. He was a solid little running back who would have had a decent NFL career, but behind this line, he ended up in the Hall of Fame.

Watch his “highlights” compared to those of any of the truly great running backs. Mostly he’s running untouched down the field with maybe a porky little stiff arm at the one-yard line or he’s jogging untouched through a massive hole for yet another two-yard score. I have a less-than-svelte friend who could’ve scored 20 touchdowns a season behind Smith’s O-line–and I don’t mean in my buddy’s “prime” 30 years ago. I mean now. Smith is completely overrated and despite his gaudy stats isn’t even a top 25 all-time NFL back.

There’s also this illusion about Dallas gentility. People love to blab about Philadelphia Eagles fans throwing snowballs at Santa, but that is an overhyped and misrepresented story. One, it happened 54 years ago, and, two, it actually shows Eagles fans are hard to fool!: That day, they were disgusted by a shabby Santa at the end of a shabby season and they let their club know it!

Okay, Philly did have a jail in the bowels of old Veterans Stadium. That one is harder to explain away, but at least Philly fans have the sense/class to beat up the other team, as opposed to the in-bred fight club among Dallas fans after their typical nosedive in the playoffs this year, when the fans actually beat each other up after another early elimination. This left their QB apologizing.

The Cowboys have long been an example of what’s wrong with everything. If you know a young person rooting for Dallas, fix it. They deserve better.

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I started writing this a few weeks ago, right after the last weekend of the NFL regular season. A few things have happened since, but I’ll stay the course.

2020 saw many a hope and dream crushed, including those who had thought their kids were fast-tracking to sports glory. The pandemic ended youth seasons, froze recruiting, and in some colleges led to an extended year of eligibility, causing many frosh to face a peculiar roster glut, as they tried to join teams that didn’t graduate anyone.

Of course, many of these athletes had already reached their peak. I thought about this a lot in the final weekend of the NFL and the playoffs, which I watched, as always, with much interest. This year, I was noticing the chasm between starting quarterbacks and most of the rest, especially because many backups got a shot, even with playoff spots on the line at the end of the season.

Often, these games made for tough watching. Aside from a couple outliers, the backup-led offenses were mostly inept, and the drop-off in talent was stark, almost painful.

I listened to announcers (in between the incessant blather) discuss just how good these players were at previous levels. In college, they were nothing short of amazing–I mean, that’s the word: They put up these amazing numbers and won everything. Some of them played in other pro leagues, where they were nothing short of amazing. You can imagine how good they were in high school–yep, there’s that word again: amazing.

Hearing this while watching the bumbling on-field play, I wondered how difficult it must be for players who had been dominant their entire lives suddenly to drop off the cliff when they took another step forward.

It must be a tough reality to face after years and years of being amazing that you have little place at the next level. In fact, there was even a secondary narrative I noticed: Stud quarterbacks at previous levels who had been moved out of that position in the NFL.

Hell, I’m not criticizing these athletics warriors. They still have reached the pinnacle, and, hey, they’re making a ton of cash. I love the hard-work quest for excellence in sports–or anything–and believe the journey is its own reward.

But watching them, thinking about the hours they spent, made me wonder about the quixotic quest of many parents of young athletes, rushing breathlessly forward without considering that for the vast majority, it will end much earlier than they think. The higher, more unrealistic, and more external expectations are, the more painful the thud must be for the kid.

It was a stark reminder that in my experience with sports, there are big jumps in levels. Young athletes often bump against the ceiling of their current level rather abruptly, in nearly all cases not only before the pros, but before college. In tough cases, kids peak before high school: You know, the sixth-grade playground god who sits the bench in high school.

In these NFL games, it must be surreal for the old hometown fans to gather ’round when they hear that the local boy is going to finally play and then watch a game that’s too fast, too much for him. They’ll remember the high school state title, the pride of the town, like it was a million years ago.

For me, it’s enjoyable to work with kids who are giving their all to be the best they can. It’s less enjoyable to talk to some parents who, often with a maniacal gleam in their eyes, see their kids as destined for high-level greatness and have, all by themselves, set the expectation mark at those heights: scholarships and all the rest.

If the kids themselves, yes, encouraged by the supportive structure around them, want this glory, they should go for it! Most will recognize their limits, and that will be part of the experience.

But as I watched those games, thinking of these players, I realized that we toss around the word “best” a lot, often forgetting what it means and just how few people can occupy the space it fundamentally describes.

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I’ve been involved with wrestling since 1982, so you can imagine that I’m enjoying that my son is having a good sophomore high school season. It didn’t start out that way, though, and the journey through it reminded me that at times, you gotta get out of the way. [Read more →]

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Conversations about the mind and sports that I have participated in over the years have tended to consist of topics like mind over body, “training” the mind, etc. Now there’s a different, and growing, dialogue: Mental health and sports. [Read more →]

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Sometimes in an unexpected, tucked-away place I’ll come across a piece of writing that hits home. Brandon Day, a veteran youth wrestling coach, wrote a piece for the Times Herald in Port Huron, Michigan, and he opens bluntly: “After 17 years coaching at the high school level, I am not a big fan of the youth sports culture in America today”. [Read more →]

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I had a specific reason for watching the NFL draft last weekend: I was waiting to see when Kelvin Harmon, a wide receiver from North Carolina State who played his high school football at my local high school, Palmyra, was going to be drafted. [Read more →]

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Sorry, haters, but I enjoyed Super Bowl 53. To me, it was anything but a snooze-fest, and I’d say I was surprised that so many people saw it that way except I kept getting jolted with a reminder by almost every Super Bowl ad about what people want: Explosions and crashes and cliched one-liners. Shiny objects and loud noises. [Read more →]

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There was a big moment in South Jersey wrestling last week: Kingsway High School and Rancocas Valley High School squared off in a match. Both teams were comprised of girls.

It’s about time. [Read more →]

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I was watching the Vikings-Patriots game Sunday, and the announcers were talking (I mean, they’re always talking) about Viking Sheldon Richardson. Unlike most announcer blather, this ended up being an interesting story about a player who had gone through some self-imposed rough times to be where he is today. In a Minneapolis Star Tribune piece, Richardson discussed what he would say to his younger self: [Read more →]

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Summer’s getting darn near over for many (as I’ve said before, though, not for me, so direct your sad thoughts elsewhere). Children will be taking to the fields again. Parents will be preparing for time on the sidelines and bleachers. For an unfortunately sizable portion of the latter group, their time will be spent… yelling at the officials! [Read more →]

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As I trailed the ambulance that transported Nate, my 16-year-old middle child, to the hospital last weekend, it struck me: In all their years playing sports, none of my kids had ever been seriously hurt. [Read more →]

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I’ve marveled at the war that’s been waged on youth sports through our hypercompetitive culture. Everyone wants their kid to play up. As someone who has become increasingly involved with soccer, I was particularly flummoxed when I heard that the club soccer system was discouraging kids from playing high school ball. [Read more →]

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My last kid, the erstwhile little guy, my 8^th-grader, finished up his youth wrestling career this winter. Spring soccer will be done in a month. After about 20 years of coaching youth sports, I now look ahead into the great unknown. [Read more →]

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Hi everyone. I will freely admit that I am easily annoyed. It’s part of my charm, I guess. If I were never annoyed, I would have a lot fewer opportunities to be indignant, and that would be no fun. Fortunately, I rarely have to search for things to get under my skin, as the sheer volume of media outlets and the blink-of-an-eye news cycle has created an environment where content is so in demand that it really does not matter if the content has any merit whatsoever.

Over the last day or so, I have repeatedly come across this story about a supposed illegal formation penalty that should have been called on the Philadelphia Eagles during the now-famous “Philly Special”play that produced a touchdown at the end of the first half of Super Bowl LII last week. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports, sports by Alan Spoll
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The Eagles beat the Patriots to win the Super Bowl! I was, like many area folks, standing stunned at the end, but my plans were in place: I had already decided we were driving immediately into downtown Philly. I knew it was going to be a celebration like no other at City Hall. And my boys, football fans though they ain’t, were going with me! [Read more →]

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10. The Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell Doubles Luge

9. Snowplowing

8. Russian Doping

7. Bottomless Ski Jump

6. Icicle Toss

5. Nordic Hot Tubbing

4. Ice Hockey Free-For-All

3. Uphill Speed Skiing

2. Synchronized Curling

1. The North-South Korean Demilitarized Zone 100-Meter Sprint
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

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I have been coaching Palmyra Junior Wrestling for 13 years, ten of those as head coach. I do it because I love it, but make no mistake, volunteer or not, it’s a part-time job. Some weeks I put in about 25 hours, and my total time commitment must be over 3,000 hours. [Read more →]

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