Psycho Coaches, Snoop Dogg, & Spider-Monkey Parents

What is it about youth sports that can turn seemingly normal members of society into psychopaths?  One minute you’re sitting in the bleachers enjoying a nice game of pee wee football when all of a sudden some woman from the stands is lying on the sidelines covered in blood, her nose broken by a football coach.  I think I speak for middle America here when I ask the probing question: What does this have to do with spider monkeys?  Let me back up.

I’ve been around youth sports for a few years now, football for 8-12 year olds in particular.  Last weekend I took in the first half from the opponents sideline, just behind the other team’s coaches.  After watching a season’s worth of games, I had already seen the rantings of some crazy people who are apparently justified by virtue of being football coaches.  I’ve had a lot of coaches in my life.  Yelling and screaming is sometimes necessary as urgent moments will arise.  There is a difference, however, between intensity and psychosis.  I think we’ve blurred that line a bit much.

So there I am the other day, taking in the game, when a receiver on my boy’s team catches two deep balls in a row and scores.  Judging by the reaction of the sideline coach, you would’ve thought his defensive player had just lost the Super Bowl, only instead of just losing the world championship, this coach would have to be strapped naked to an outgoing missile.  He looked like a crazy person.  A rather large crazy person.  The kids on the field were 9-years-old.  Despite sitting there by myself, I made a comment which he heard.  He turned and glared, a rather large glare.  I held my ground and returned a Forrest Gump glare, you know the one where Jenny gets on the bus in D.C. and the psycho boyfriend looks back.  It’s the kind of look that says learning disability or not, I will fight you in the middle of a Black Panther Party.  Imagine if he had been coaching my boy.

That brings us to crazy parents.  You know who you are.  Actually, you probably don’t because many psychopaths are delusional. 

How do I even set up the scene that took place in Ohio this past week?  It all started at a game of the Wee Aviators of Vandalia, a suburb of Dayton.  Things were said in the stands, tempers flared, a coach became involved.  According to reporter Cornelius Frolik (I swear I am not making up his name or story), Coach Jeff Starnes was attacked by a crazy woman while confronting her for some nastiness toward a teenage girl. 

The woman jumped on the coach’s back and started punching him in the head.  According to Brian Baird, a parent accompanying the coach into the parking lot confrontation, “She jumped on him like a spider-monkey and started wailing on him.”  Seriously.  The situation got way out of hand when the woman’s partner, who is on dialysis, got pulled into the fracas and ended up being kicked until his pelvis broke.  The coach took care of his female attacker by breaking the woman’s nose.  Whether he punched her in the face or acted in self-defense is in dispute.

I’m sure the coach shouldn’t have pursued the woman and her companion out of the stadium.  On the other hand, any woman who goes all spider monkey on someone in public is clearly in need of some anger management or at least a few anti-psychotics.