https://www.si.com/nfl/2019/06/19/snowpl...nts-sports

Quote:In football as in other sports, they’re drawing up business plans, starting marketing agencies, turning up at practice and even monitoring phone use.

The overactive parent is as old a concept as sports itself, but coaches and agents across football, basketball, baseball and hockey say that over the last few years, parents have become more involved in their children’s athletic careers than ever before—and it is reshaping sports.

The phenomenon also reflects what’s happening in the rest of society, says psychologist Madeline Levine, an expert on the topic. “It used to be helicopter parenting,” she says. “And now it is snowplow parenting, which is much more active: It means you are doing something to smooth the way for the child. It’s not just that you’re hypervigilant—it’s that you are actually getting rid of those bumps, which robs kids of the necessary experience of learning and failing.”

Call it the age of the sportsplow parent. And as ever, job one is controlling the narrative.

As the fifth-youngest team in the NBA to start this past season, the Phoenix Suns—average age 25.1—sometimes gave the whiff of a youth travel team. Players’ parents had a habit of showing up early to games to watch warmups and on some occasions even sat in on private team workouts and practices.

One NBA agent says he’s had a parent watch practice only once, in a special situation. “That seems super odd to me,” he says. According to a person familiar with the Suns, parents’ heavy hands had a harmful effect on players, forcing staff to provide constant instruction on basic adult tasks, like setting alarm clocks.

Nearly every pro agent has a story. One who works in baseball says a player asked him if he could sue his parents to keep them from coming to his games. There was the mother who was so “addicted to her son’s performance,” in the agent’s words, that he suggested therapy to her. And then the mom who tracked her son’s phone calls on a spreadsheet, in order to keep tabs on how much time he was wasting on the phone and who he was talking to.

“They start training their kid like an Olympian from age four, and it has really become a full-time job,” the agent says. “When the planets align and you have the crazy parent and you also have the talented child, then you have a professional athlete. That’s it, I’m telling you, [with] like 90% of the players I work with.”

One NHL agent says he’s constantly fielding calls during the season from parents who are convinced their son is going to get traded because they read about it on a blog or Twitter. “Over the last 10 years, it has changed so incredibly,” the agent says. “Now, they have the Internet and all the info that comes with it.”

For parents who successfully navigate their kids to coveted college scholarships, involvement often doesn’t end at the campus gates. Recruiting directors for two major college football programs say that in the last 10 years, it has become normal for two or three sets of parents in every recruiting class to pick up and move to town. College basketball coaches are noticing the same trend. “It’s not a lot,” says one former recruiting director, “but it never really happened before.”

College coaches and recruiting directors say that in recent years they’ve had to place more emphasis on re-recruiting players every year because many parents will suggest their child transfer if everything isn’t going perfectly. That impulse to constantly intervene to make sure the child is in the best possible position is not unique to sports. “The child’s life is the parent’s life,” says Julie Lythcott-Haims, former dean of freshmen at Stanford and author of How to Raise an Adult. “The parents feel like, What would I do if I wasn’t constantly involved in my kids’ activities? There is no trust in the systems—the parents do not trust that the adults around the child are doing a good job.”

Coaches are increasingly finding ways to deal with greater parent involvement. At Notre Dame, Brey assigns an assistant coach to each set of parents, and they are responsible for checking in with them every two weeks because “even when we have kids on campus, parents can control the vibe and the head and the attitude,” he says.

Many major programs have started football parent leadership committees to help moms and dads feel more connected and relieve some of the burden from the coaching staff of having to constantly communicate with more than 100 sets of parents. One of the first such programs was Football Parents at Ohio State, and other schools came calling for advice on how to replicate that model. The OSU group has parents who serve as president, vice president and secretary to help organize events and travel, with information hosted on their own website.

Agents are also trying to find new ways to cope. Two years ago, hockey agent Allain Roy was flying home with his teenage son after spending several thousand dollars to take him to a weekend baseball showcase to improve his chances of getting a college scholarship. He started wondering, Is this worth the investment? How much is too much involvement? He started typing out his thoughts into a post for his agency’s blog, writing, “As we rush to fix every little blemish in our kids’ lives and try to influence their way to success, we cause more irreparable damage than we know.”

High school camps are also adding curricula for parents to learn how to communicate with college and professional coaches. Meanwhile, coaches are adapting their recruiting pitches to fit the marketing and branding ambition of today’s parents and athletes. “For parents of kids that are trending toward being elite, the reward is unbelievable, with the money, the contracts, the shoe money,” says Brey. “It’s blown parents’ minds more than the kids’ minds how you can really make it financially. What you are having to sell now is, Here is how we are going to help your brand. This is what Notre Dame is going to do for your individual brand.”

Many coaches, like Brey, are setting clear boundaries with parents in order to preserve their sanity. They will not discuss playing time during the season, but they keep the lines of communication open through other coaches on staff. “Instead of complaining about it, I told our staff, We need to manage it,” Brey says. “It is part of the culture now. Manage it.”

I'm in two minds about this. On one hand, doing everything you can to make sure your child doesn't struggle and setting the table for their success so they don't have to does stunt the child horribly. You're going to see more Dwight Howards and Tiger Woodses as this gets worse. On the other, that's kind of the direction sports culture has gone down. You want your kid to get the big scholarship, so you can't have any character questions popping up, meaning you have to sometimes be in front of problems he should handle on his own. Parents often have to invest $5000+ a year on select teams just so their child can get into a varsity high school team, thanks to the corruption you see on that level. It's a massive time and money investment parents are being asked to put in, and the sunken cost does have an impact on the ones financing it. Plus once the child gets to a certain point, every aspect of their life gets gone over with a fine-toothed comb. Thanks to the internet, you can't go and make mistakes when you're a teenager and outgrow them. Ask Josh Hader. You invest so much time and effort and emotion only to see your child end up in the Truman Show. Are you really going to be that willing to stop at 18? 20? 25? That's not even getting into the shifting goalposts regarding childhood.

It's just a sign of the times. Higher costs, smaller margins for error, and the continued infantilization of adults is a bad brew but that's what they're all having to swim in.

(06-21-2019 07:29 PM)Mav Wrote:  I'm in two minds about this. On one hand, doing everything you can to make sure your child doesn't struggle and setting the table for their success so they don't have to does stunt the child horribly. You're going to see more Dwight Howards and Tiger Woodses as this gets worse. On the other, that's kind of the direction sports culture has gone down. You want your kid to get the big scholarship, so you can't have any character questions popping up, meaning you have to sometimes be in front of problems he should handle on his own. Parents often have to invest $5000+ a year on select teams just so their child can get into a varsity high school team, thanks to the corruption you see on that level. It's a massive time and money investment parents are being asked to put in, and the sunken cost does have an impact on the ones financing it. Plus once the child gets to a certain point, every aspect of their life gets gone over with a fine-toothed comb. Thanks to the internet, you can't go and make mistakes when you're a teenager and outgrow them. Ask Josh Hader. You invest so much time and effort and emotion only to see your child end up in the Truman Show. Are you really going to be that willing to stop at 18? 20? 25? That's not even getting into the shifting goalposts regarding childhood.

It's just a sign of the times. Higher costs, smaller margins for error, and the continued infantilization of adults is a bad brew but that's what they're all having to swim in.

That’s a very fair and balanced view of the situation. There’s such a fine line between letting a kid make mistakes and learning from them versus protecting them from the much higher costs of such mistakes today compared to prior generations. An incident that would have been forgotten instantly in the past can now be captured forever on video on YouTube and Instagram.

You mention that people need to spend thousands of dollars to get their kid onto a varsity high school team and it’s honestly even worse than that. Our *middle school* basketball coach flat out says that it’s pretty much impossible to make a *middle school* team in our area without having had several years of travel experience.

We could apply that to anything these days. The difficulty of getting into top colleges is WAY higher than prior generations where perfect grades and test scores aren’t enough - you essentially need to also be an Olympic-level athlete, virtuoso musician, or have filed several patents as a teenager on top of that. Think about that: even being *perfect* academically actually isn’t enough to get into the Ivy League. I wouldn’t ever excuse poor behavior, but it’s not a shock that we see helicopter parenting because the institutions and goals that kids are working towards are literally demanding *more* than perfection just when social media can capture every single mistake that a kid has ever made forever.

(06-22-2019 12:23 AM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  You mention that people need to spend thousands of dollars to get their kid onto a varsity high school team and it’s honestly even worse than that. Our *middle school* basketball coach flat out says that it’s pretty much impossible to make a *middle school* team in our area without having had several years of travel experience.

Yes, they have to start young and dole out thousands of dollars *each year* for travel teams. And when parents have invested $25,000-50,000 or more in travel teams and private coaching even before their kid gets to high school, it's not surprising that they "baby" their kid's sports career as much as they would baby a Maserati.

(06-22-2019 12:23 AM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  

(06-21-2019 07:29 PM)Mav Wrote:  I'm in two minds about this. On one hand, doing everything you can to make sure your child doesn't struggle and setting the table for their success so they don't have to does stunt the child horribly. You're going to see more Dwight Howards and Tiger Woodses as this gets worse. On the other, that's kind of the direction sports culture has gone down. You want your kid to get the big scholarship, so you can't have any character questions popping up, meaning you have to sometimes be in front of problems he should handle on his own. Parents often have to invest $5000+ a year on select teams just so their child can get into a varsity high school team, thanks to the corruption you see on that level. It's a massive time and money investment parents are being asked to put in, and the sunken cost does have an impact on the ones financing it. Plus once the child gets to a certain point, every aspect of their life gets gone over with a fine-toothed comb. Thanks to the internet, you can't go and make mistakes when you're a teenager and outgrow them. Ask Josh Hader. You invest so much time and effort and emotion only to see your child end up in the Truman Show. Are you really going to be that willing to stop at 18? 20? 25? That's not even getting into the shifting goalposts regarding childhood.

It's just a sign of the times. Higher costs, smaller margins for error, and the continued infantilization of adults is a bad brew but that's what they're all having to swim in.

That’s a very fair and balanced view of the situation. There’s such a fine line between letting a kid make mistakes and learning from them versus protecting them from the much higher costs of such mistakes today compared to prior generations. An incident that would have been forgotten instantly in the past can now be captured forever on video on YouTube and Instagram.

You mention that people need to spend thousands of dollars to get their kid onto a varsity high school team and it’s honestly even worse than that. Our *middle school* basketball coach flat out says that it’s pretty much impossible to make a *middle school* team in our area without having had several years of travel experience.

We could apply that to anything these days. The difficulty of getting into top colleges is WAY higher than prior generations where perfect grades and test scores aren’t enough - you essentially need to also be an Olympic-level athlete, virtuoso musician, or have filed several patents as a teenager on top of that. Think about that: even being *perfect* academically actually isn’t enough to get into the Ivy League. I wouldn’t ever excuse poor behavior, but it’s not a shock that we see helicopter parenting because the institutions and goals that kids are working towards are literally demanding *more* than perfection just when social media can capture every single mistake that a kid has ever made forever.

The fault lies with parents who set ridiculous goals for a child.

In 1947 when my grandpa got into MIT, he just wanted good training to get a good job. But people don't go to MIT or the Ivies for that any more. They want to Achieve Something, which translated means hypercompetition to Beat Someone Else at Something.

If your goal is to get good training for a good job, it's still just as easy as ever to get into a good school for that. If anything it's easier than it used to be because a lot of schools have lowered their standards.

Same thing with sports: if you're spending $5000 or $25000 a year to increase the odds of your 8 year old getting a college sports scholarship, that's your fault. If that's not your goal, it's still easy to find a rec league for your kid to learn teamwork, competition, and sportsmanship.

The only acceptable snowplow parent:

(06-24-2019 03:26 PM)Cyniclone Wrote:  The only acceptable snowplow parent:

But he's a loser whom I hear is a boozer. I would go with the Plow King instead.