Law and Disorder

You’re going to spend a lot of time investigating the criminal activities of your children. Crimes such as The Peanut Butter and Barbie Sandwich Affair and the string of compact disc thefts from late 2003 still haunt our tiny house. And residents still whisper and lower their eyes when speaking about Crayongate. Yes, life with young children will often present you with mysteries which are difficult to solve for a variety of reasons, including uncooperative witnesses (the kids), inept law enforcement (the dog), and corrupt judicial officials (that would be me – I’ve been known to sink pretty low to get results. The Snickers Bar bribery scandal comes to mind).

My most recent investigation involved the dining room table, something sharp and one of the children’s names. I was setting the plates around the table – a job normally reserved for the children, but for some reason I was doing it myself – when I noticed one of the children’s name was carved into the table in letters about half in inch high. A rookie investigator would have been tempted to immediately call the usual suspects into the room and immediately begin interrogating until he had answers. But I have been at this game too long to dive into interrogations without a little preparation. Plus, I had a Thai coconut squash soup on the stove and it needed to be stirred or else it would get all lumpy on the bottom and nobody wants that. Not to mention the cheddar crisps I had toasting in the oven. No, I would need to prepare myself for what was sure to be a test of cunning and intelligence. Would I be able to outwit a three year old and her four brothers and sisters? Only time would tell.

The first thing I did was set a plate over the evidence. That way anyone who may want to glance over at their handy-work would spend a little more time gawking around as they tried to find the carving. Criminals almost always return to the scene of the crime – they like to rub our noses in it. Also, it was dinner time, so the criminal was forced to return to the scene of the crime, but never mind that. As the children ate dinner, they all looked fairly shifty to me – probably because they had all been up to something or other, but this was the only crime I had proof had taken place. Since no one spent and inordinate amount of time trying to look at the table, I moved on to the second phase of the investigation: casually buttering them up.

Not, you know, putting butter on them – I can see why, since this was at the dinner table, you might be confused by the term “buttering up,” but it just means to build up their confidence and lower their defenses. We haven’t had to actually apply dairy products to a child since the Skunk Taunting Milk Bath of 2001.

“So, how was everyone’s day,” I asked. I watched carefully to see who looked away. All of them did. Then they ignored me completely – this didn’t surprise me, as they were merely following Kid Law, which clearly states that unless an adult as you, specifically, a very specific question about your day, you must not answer that question. Group questions were right out. If I ask a specific kid, “How was your day?” I can expect that he will answer, “Fine.” He’ll give that answer even if his school day was marred by a terrorist in the cafeteria. Had there actually been a terrorist attack on the school, I would only be able to get that information from him by asking very detailed, very specific questions.

“How was school?”

“Fine.”

“Did you do anything fun? Did you learn anything?”

“I guess.”

“Did anything exciting happen today?”

“No.”

“Did anyone try to detonate a dirty bomb during lunch?”

“Yes.”


I move on to asking each child specific questions, but I stay away from tipping my hand too early. I am tempted to ask Achilles when was the last time he had seen his pocket knife, just to see the reaction of the table, but I bite my tongue – seriously, I bit my tongue eating a piece of pecan pie we had for dessert and my investigation stalled.

While we were clearing the table, I had my accomplice, Junior Detective Stacy, pretend to find the carving. I then called all the children into the room and swung my investigation into high gear. I put them at the end of the table like a police line-up and I launched into my speech.

“Someone has been playing games. Someone has been destructive. Someone has decided the rules just don’t apply.”

Five blank faces.

“I want you all to take a look at the table – right there at the end. What do you see?”

Five blank faces.

“Well, what do you see?”

“Wood,” says Suspect One.

“The table,” says Suspect Two.

“A wooden table,” says Suspect Three.

Suspect Four has forgotten the question.

“I wanna tell you sumpthin,” says Suspect Five. I know from experience that what Suspect Five, being three years old, wants to tell me is, “I love you,” because that is what she always says when she senses tension. I don’t suck for her tricks.

“Does anyone notice the name carved into the table?”

Five blank faces.

I change the question. “There is a name carved into the table – whose name is it?”

“I wanna tell you sumpthin,” says Suspect Five.

“It says, ‘Queen Mab,’” says Suspect Two.

“That’s true, it does,” says Suspect Four.

“I see wood,” says Suspect Three.

“That’s not how I spell my name,” says Suspect One.

And it was true. Despite the fact the Queen Mab’s name was the one carved into the table, I had already pretty much decided she was probably not the culprit, given that her sixth grade education would almost have certainly allowed her to spell Queen Mab without using a K. Suspects Two, Three and Four all turned to look at Suspect Five, as if I might buy the fact that the three year old had carved the name in the table. I wasn’t ready to totally eliminate anyone as a suspect just yet, so but I decided the focus of my attention should probably go elsewhere.

“You know what I think,” I asked Two, Three and Four? “I think it was one of you three.”

“It could have been one of use,” said Two, “But have you considered the fact that it may have been Queen Mab trying to get one of us in trouble?” Two is the junior lawyer in the family and often tries to argue himself out of trouble based on semantic technicalities – his win to loss ratio is atrocious, but he tries hard. In this case, he didn’t think this was an absurd idea at all. Truth be told, I had briefly considered this scenario already, but Suspect One didn’t fit that profile. If she had an axe to grind with one of the other children, she would hit them with it – that’s her profile. Suspect Two sensed I wasn’t believing this, so he shut up. A wise move.

Suspect Two does, in fact, own a pocket knife, so he was pretty high on the list, until I remembered that he had been at a friend’s house all afternoon, which was the time frame forensics had given me for when this crime took place. That left only Suspect Three and Suspect Four. They both looked guilty to me, so I just stared and waited.

“Can I speak to my lawyer?” Three asked.

“Mom is working on the dishes,” I replied. “If you cooperate I can make sure things go smoothly
for you on the upcoming Hidden Candy Bar Wrappers In The Bedroom Case.”

Suspect Three mulled this over for a moment, looked up at the ceiling, down at her shoes and said, “I ain’t no rat.”

Which, actually, she was, since she was pretty clearly indicating that it wasn’t her, which only left one suspect – Number Four. I pulled the hanging dining room light over the top of Number Four’s head.

“We can do this the easy way, or the hard way,” I told him.

In retrospect, I probably should have cuffed him immediately, because I left the room to refill my coffee mug and he fled through an open window. After a short bicycle chase which ended in a fiery crash on a neighbor’s lawn and a foot race across the park, I once again had the suspect in custody. You can catch the whole thing on COPS this Saturday night.

A Word About Trophies

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, I want to talk for a minute about trophies and why, exactly, it is that kids even play sports. As a psychology major, I greatly enjoy dissecting and analyzing why people – kids included – do what they do. Sometimes I am completely unable to understand a person’s motivation for a specific act and sometimes I think I understand, but I am waaaay off. Like the time I claimed that Jennifer Aniston was such a bad actress because she was signaling to me through the television. I have since discovered (and I discovered this before the retraining order, so I was not in violation) that this was not actually the case – she merely has bad timing. In my defense, I’d like to point out that I was not attacking her – I was merely trying to get close enough to explain that I am already married and I cannot possibly have the kind of relationship with her that she is asking for. So, sometimes I’m wrong.

But, I feel fairly confident in saying that the reason kids play sports is not to get a trophy at the end of the year. Although it is just my opinion, I believe there could be no trophies given to each team member at the end of a season and it wouldn’t increase or decrease the number of kids participating in each sport. For those of you who are reading this in preparation for your child’s first season of organized athletics, let me fill you in on what the heck I’m talking about.

At the end of every sports season your child will receive a trophy. Nothing terribly elaborate – maybe a little six inch high job with a baseball player or a soccer player or what have you. The name plate generally won’t be personalized but will list the year and sport played. And Junior is going to get one of these every single season. Every season.

The reason I comment on this is because this is Not How It Was When I Was A Kid. Now, as I have mentioned, I was a pretty good athlete. Captain of two teams, winner of three state championships – have I mentioned it? Anyway, I mention it here to point out that I was not a bookworm who never participated in sports (a fact which can be verified with my old report cards) – I played three sports a year from the time I was in second grade through high school. And I was 14 years old before I received my first trophy.

Ah, I remember it well – Coach Page’s summer basketball camp. I received a Player of the Week trophy – the smallest trophy I ever got, I think. A little granite base holding a gold basketball player shooting the most awkward one handed shot imaginable (I think Coach Page had this designed especially for me). I remember the incredible amount of work it took to earn that trophy – how much extra hustle I had to put in, how much sweat and effort. I earned that trophy and no one else. The other players could have earned it, but it was me who beat them out – for that week, I was the star.

I had to ride my bike home with one hand to carry the glorious monument to my hard work and effort and I intentionally rode through town so that anyone who happened to see me would know that I – Aaron Bradbury – had won a trophy. During the next four years I received probably half a dozen individual trophies and they were all great, but the feeling I had from winning that first trophy was amazing. It was a beautiful thing and I can honestly say it was one of the prouder moments of my life.

Kids These Days don’t get to experience that feeling. And I don’t say that to be the crotchety old guy who thinks everything was better when he was young. As a child of the 70s and 80s, I can say with great confidence that everything was definitely not better when I was young. For proof positive, I give you disco and the Police Academy movies. I say kids don’t get that feeling because these days kids get trophies for every sport they play; therefore, it is impossible that they are getting any sort of a rush out of receiving one. After all, if you play Little League, you get a trophy, regardless of whether you were good, bad or even owned a glove. You can be the worst damned player in the history of the sport and still get a trophy. You can show up for half the games and play like a monkey humping a football during the other half and it doesn’t matter – you still get the trophy.

I’m sure this all started as a misguided effort to boost all the kids’ confidence and make everyone feel like they were a valuable part of the team. I’m sure that the same type of adults who decided every player needs a trophy were the same group that decided we shouldn’t keep score during soccer games - misguided individuals who either don’t have kids of their own or never talk to them if they do. These are the kind of adults who think kids are too stupid to keep track of the score on their own. I have news for you – the only people not keeping score are the adults. Every kid on the soccer field knows the score. Do these people really think kids can’t keep track of a game that is going to have a final score of 2 to 1? Or in the case of some of my teams, 10 to 1?

Trophies are the same kind of thing. When a kid gets a trophy at the end of the season he isn’t fooled into thinking he was instrumental to the team if his biggest contribution was accidentally tripping an opposing player on the sideline. He can see all the other members of the team getting the trophies, too. It’s not rocket science to understand that every player getting a trophy means the trophy is worthless.

To be honest, I blame my parents’ generation for starting this. When I was a kid our school held an annual field day – kind of a mini-Olympics where we did all the run and jump track and field events. At the end of the day, the first second and third place finishers for each event at each grade level were given a blue, red or white ribbon denoting their accomplishment. And anyone to uncoordinated to get a real ribbon was given a green “nice try” ribbon that my brothers and sister used to refer to as a “loser identification badge.” I never understood the concept. By sticking a green ribbon on these kids, it just advertised to the whole world that they didn’t win a damn thing that day – that just seems cruel to me. After all, if they were wearing no ribbon at all maybe other kids would just think they won a real ribbon and had decided not to wear it. Of course, that is probably also wishful thinking, because Poindexter probably wasn’t going to fool anyone into thinking he actually placed in an event – everyone has seen him during dodgeball in gym class and it would be pretty unlikely that he was anything other than entertaining during a footrace.

But you know what? Poindexter had every other day of school to shine – he got straight As and never once got yelled at for wiping boogers on the pigtails of the girl in front of him. Field day was the one day of the year where a guy like me could shine, so why give the losers ribbons, too? No teacher ever thought to give me a B just because all the other kids got an A and I shouldn’t feel left out. Shouldn’t the message be that everyone is different and some people are good at the long jump and some people understand what the quadratic equation is – it doesn’t make one person better than the other (although, statistically speaking, it makes one kid more likely to go to MIT and then make tons of dough upon graduation).

Again, my guess is that this all started as a misguided attempt to make kids who didn’t do so well feel as good as the kids that did, but it misses the mark. It’s patronizing and the kids know it. Unfortunately, there is not much to be done now – I’m not about to be the guy who crusades for taking trophies away from kids. The damage is done and the only thing left to do is make the best of a bad situation. That’s where my plan comes in.

Instead of having a banquet or cookout to give out the trophies to everyone, the coach needs to visit each player’s house individually and present the trophy to the kid in private, telling him that nobody else got a one, but that he deserved a trophy. Tell him it has to be kept secret because, well, I don’t know – make something up. The trophy is a matter of national security and must be kept in a safe and completely hidden place such as the back of the closet.
I’m not sure that kids will buy this, but it can’t be any worse than what we do now.

What the hell is this thing called spare time?

The following is an excerpt from my new book about children's activities - I'm about 1/4 of the way through so far. This is first draft material, so don't let typos and nonsensical sentences bog you down.

From the section dealing with youth sports:


What kind of coach are you?

I ask what kind of coach you are because you will coach. Seriously. The league will ask you and you will say yes because you don’t have any will power when it comes to things like that. Actually, this applies to every activity your children have – the organizers will ask and you will say yes. It’s as much a rule of nature as survival of the fittest or that lottery winners will find a way to become poor again. When you sign Junior up for Little League, they will ask you to coach and you’ll cave like a Kentucky coal mine.

The most important thing to do is categorize yourself as a coach. If the internet has taught us one thing it is that there is a lot of pornography out there. A lot. Like, so much that it is amazing that you have to start asking yourself, where are all these naked women coming from? Statistically, we must be getting to the point where some of these women are going to be from my own neighborhood and I’ll start to recognize them at the supermarket, picking up the kids from school, etc. I’ll wander up and say, “Don’t I recognize you from somewhere?” And the woman will answer, “You may have seen some of my work at HornyMomsAreWaitingForYouSeriouslyWe’reTotallyNotEvenKidding.com.” I won’t know what to say next and I’ll probably be embarrassed and walk away which works out well since Stacy probably won’t be too keen on me talking to amateur porn stars anyway.

But if the internet has taught us anything else, it is that humans fit neatly into different categories and those categories can be easily defined by taking a simple, 30 question true or false quiz where you are not given the option of answering “I don’t know” or “Maybe.” I enjoy being alone more than I enjoy being with people – true or false. No ambiguity allowed – you’re either a Unabomberesque hermit who hates people or a Paris Hilton-like attention seeker who will die unless you are the focus of at least a roomful of people.

A quick search for “personality quiz” on Google.com (Google.com: Making meaningful research totally antiquated and irrelevant) shows a total of 2,200,000 different hits. Among these two million plus sites designed to help quantify (does that word work here?) yourself, you can use short quizzes to determine your Simpsons personality, your Harry Potter personality, your Lover personality and your Personality personality. You can take the Free Five Minute Personality Quiz, the World’s Shortest Personality Test (and, one assumes, with a little digging the two million sites, the World’s Longest Personality Test), The Church of Scientology Personality Test and the What Poetry Form Am I? Personality Test.

All of these personality quizzes give you neat little answers to let you know who you are – like a lifelong quest for self-awareness, except you can do it on company time without leaving your chair. After you take the test, you will be lumped into one of – usually – between 5 and 10 categories. Sometimes the answers suck and they just tell you who you are, which isn’t much help.

You are Dr. Julius Hibbert.

Sometimes they have semi-helpful explanation of what your personality is all about, so you can begin planning your life around whatever foolish category you have landed in.

Short, terse, unfriendly,
Yet sometimes quite emotive;
I am the Haiku.

And, of course the best tests give you famous people who also fit your personality.

Some Famous ENFJs:
David, King Of Israel
President Abraham Linclon
Randy Quaid of Bye-bye Love and Moving
Oprah

Which then leaves you wondering when the hell David, King of Israel and President Lincoln had time to take a Meyers-Briggs personality test, but you try not to let that bother you, as you have Oprah and randy Quaid in your lifeboat, too.

The point is, everyone is quantifiable and fits neatly into some category. Coaches are no exception. Oddly enough, I couldn’t find any tests designed to tell you what Coaching Personality you are (I mean, they probably exist somewhere in the 2 millions Google hits, but I lost interest in searching), so I decided to create one on my own. Then I discovered how much work it really is (hint: just enough to keep me from completing it) and I decided to just give you the answers and let you make up your own mind which coach you are based on the examples you have seen. Or don’t – lie to yourself if you want. It won’t bother me.

The Coaching Types

Clueless: Clueless can’t believe he got roped into coaching a sports team. The closest he’s ever been to a sporting event was when the Star Trek convention was held across the street from Fenway Park. Everyone knows Clueless has no idea how to play the game, but by the time the season starts they are so desperate for coaches they’d take anyone with a pulse – or even a guy without a pulse if they could get Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman to drag him around the field.

Because Clueless has spent his entire life being such a non-athletic nerd, he will have developed the condescending notion that there is nothing more to sports than brute strength. Therefore, when he finds out he will be coaching, he mistakenly believes that he can Google “soccer” or “basketball” and find out everything he needs to know about the game in 15 minutes. Thus, when he shows up for the first practice, he may have some vague idea how the game is played, but he quickly discovered that every sport has approximately six trillion subtleties built into it that take years to figure out. For instance, if he is coaching Little League, it will be at the first practice that he discovers he has no idea which is left field and which is right field. I know, athletes reading this are saying, “Right field is to the right, Poindexter.” Ah, but the right in relation to what? The fence? Home plate? I only bring this up because one of my children had a coach that asked this very question not once, but twice last year.

Clueless has two bits of good news coming to him, though. First, there will be no shortage of parents who do know what’s going on and aren’t afraid to scream it from the stands. My advice is to pretend you don’t hear the shouts – don’t even acknowledge that someone is yelling at you, even if it is over the fence from four feet away. Wait thirty seconds, then do exactly what the yelling parent said to do. The delay will serve to piss off the moron who doesn’t understand he is watching 7 year old play basketball and no amount of incorrect coaching (or correct coaching, for that matter) will effect the score a noticeable amount. Also, the delay will give the impression that whatever you were doing wrong was completely planned and on purpose. Of course you knew you only had three players on the court – it’s all part of The Plan. But now that you’ve bewildered the other team, maybe you’ll go ahead and slide those last two players out onto the court.

The second piece of good news for Clueless is that his job is completely safe. No matter how many fans and parents are screaming for his head and no matter how many times he forgets the rules of the game and no matter how badly the other team is destroying his team, he will make it through the season without being replaced. Why? Because if they could have filled the position with someone more competent than him they would have done so at the beginning of the season.

How to tell if you are Clueless: This is very simple. Ask yourself the following questions. 1. True or false: When I found out I was going to coach the team, I went out and purchased a whistle and an outfit suited to the particular sport I am coaching. 2. True or false: I researched the sport before the season.

If you answered true to either question, you are Clueless. Good luck – you’re going to need it. Of course, Win At All Costs will also answer true to both of those questions, but he won’t have been wondering whether or not he is Clueless. He’ll be sure, for reasons which will be apparent, that he knows his sport.

Season Prediction: 0 - 10 (that’s no wins and ten losses, Clueless). Unless another team fails to show up and is forced to forfeit. But, there is a chance that Clueless could lose even that game. On the plus side, Clueless won’t care, because even at the end of the season he’ll still be under the impression that it isn’t about winning or losing.

Win At All Costs: Most everyone will hate Win At All Costs – the parents, the players, the refs, the league, his own kids. He will be universally despised and talked about like he is a lower life form (Which he is. Which explains why he has the ability and time to become so invested in a youth sports league).

The most interesting aspect of Win At All Costs is that he is the only category of coach that may not have children of his own on the team. Sometimes he actually has a kid on the team. Sometimes he kid will be on the team in a few years and he’s building a team in the meantime. Sometimes he won’t even be married and will have no children of his own, which means he’s either a Pervert or he is such a moron he thinks coaching a Little League team is his first step toward being picked up as the manager of the Red Sox. If you are a parent of a child on the team, pray he’s a pervert – he’ll do less damage to your child’s psyche.

Like Clueless, Win At All Costs has done research to prepare for the season; however, Win At All Costs didn’t Google “soccer” and call it good. No, he spent weeks watching World Cup video, a month breaking down an offensive play called “Walking The Line” and at least half a year researching obscure rules such as 501.8c – “A player wearing green socks may obstruct the ball out of bounds only if the opposing team maintains a three goal lead (I made that up, Clueless, so just ignore it).” And then he’ll find a way to use it during a game that season. Interestingly enough, Win At All Costs can remember every rule in the book, but he can’t remember the PIN for his debit card without writing it down – but he “cleverly” writes it backwards on the protective envelope so no one will ever figure it out. This pretty much sums up Win At All Costs’ life and why he’s living in a van down by the river and eating cardboard for dinner.

Without sports, Win At All Costs would probably be in prison (in fact, he may have done that, too). Unable to relate to people on a normal level, he talks in sports analogies with everything he does. He talks about hustle and spirit and grit. He’ll bluntly inform you that your kid isn’t playing because he sucks and has no coordination. He’ll bench his own kid for two games because of a fielding error. He’ll make a star athlete wonder if it’s all worth it. He’ll make a spastic nerd kid want to quit during the first 15 minutes of practice. By the time the season is over, the parents won’t know whether to lynch him or chip in and buy him a present.

Win At All Costs isn’t all bad – he will win games. In fact, should he ever lose a game the players will be so traumatized after his tirade that the lesser players will quit en masse. He’ll scream and spit and froth and tell the players they play like little girls (even if they are little girls, which will still be an insult for some reason). He’ll hold double session practices for the next week and pretty much make everyone’s life a living hell until the team they play next has been absolutely humiliated in a crushing defeat. And even them he will wake with cold sweats in the middle of the night thinking about the one game they lost. Anything less than absolute perfection will not be tolerated.

When I said he isn’t all bad, I guess I mean if you are just like him you may not think he’s all bad.


Season Prediction: 9 – 1 if he has a bunch of no talent hacks on the team – undefeated if he is lucky enough to have a few quality players.


The Pervert: Fortunately, the Pervert is much less common today than he was years ago. Today sports organizations generally have the good sense to run background checks on the coaches, so at least all the pervs who have been arrested are weeded out. Remember back in the early nineties how you would constantly see news articles about how Mr. So and So who had coached Little League and was a Scoutmaster for 37 years was discovered to have been arrested 17 times for distribution of child pornography? Background checks have eliminated that sort of thing, so now you know that if the coach is The Pervert, he’s been hiding it pretty well.

Of course, the Pervert is still easy to spot – he’s the coach that’s waaaay too interested in the kids and never seems to even be aware that there is a game happening. 90% of the time he’ll have an arm around one of the kids, giving them a “pep talk” and completely creeping them out.

Unfortunately, because all the pervs who have prior arrest records have been weeded out, what we are left with is, essentially, the competent pervs who know how to hide it well. So, be careful, as the Pervert has been known to disguise himself as Clueless, Too Good To Be True and Mr. Laid Back. As a general rule, you won’t find him masquerading as Win At All Costs or The Screamer since he won’t want to make the kids afraid of him.

Season Prediction: No record – parents will quickly start pulling their kids when he is discovered to be a big perv.


The Screamer: During the first game, most people will incorrectly identify the Screamer as Win At All Costs. After all, he yells, he freaks out at the smallest things – sometimes getting in a lather over what appears to be nothing at all. Parents figure he must be Win At All Costs, right? It’s only when the team falls to 1 – 3 that everyone realizes the coach is actually The Screamer – mostly hot air.

The Screamer may sound like Win At All Costs, but he actually has a knowledge base of his sport more along the line of Clueless. The Screamer believes that the best way to mask his total incompetence is to simply yell at everyone he sees. Kids can’t hit the ball today? A good tongue lashing ought to motivate them. Other team seems to be scoring at will? A good old fashioned tirade, complete with throwing equipment should do the trick. Sometimes the Screamer resembles the Tasmanian Devil as he flails around and kicks at dirt.

The child athletes aren’t the only people to get yelled at – the Screamer has no problem bombing targets of opportunity as they arise. The more people he screams at, the better job he must be doing. Parents who bring their children late to practice often find themselves on the receiving end of the Screamer’s invective. Umpires and referees will be completely bewildered by the Screamer as he disputes calls which went his team’s way. Nobody will be able to figure out why he yelled at the concession stand attendant.

There are other ways a coach can become The Screamer. In the old days, the Screamer might have been Drunk Coach – the kind of guy who could coach Little League because he didn’t have a day job. These days it seems parents have decided to reconsider the wisdom of dropping a kid off at practice with a guy drinking tall boys at 3:15 on a Tuesday. Drunk Coach usually didn’t care too much what happened on the field, so long as he greatly inconvenienced by the game, i.e., he runs out of beer before the sixth inning. However, now that Drunk Coach is no longer socially acceptable – in as much as he was ever socially acceptable – he usually ends up becoming the Screamer as he finds his tolerance for young children to be much lower when he has to wait until 5:00 pm for his first drink. He may or may not understand the rules of the game and how to play, but none of that really matters as he’s still seeing double from the bender the night before. He finds the easiest thing to do is just yell at someone every so often.

Season Prediction: 6 – 4. The Screamer’s team wins a surprising amount of the time, given that he isn’t really coaching. Fear, it turns out, will motivate many of the players to actually try harder in a vain attempt to avoid becoming the object of a full-blown rage. If the little boogers were smart enough to figure out that there is no way to avoid the Screamer’s fits, they’d all quit – fortunately for the Screamer, they never figure that out.


My Kid Plays: There is an unwritten rule of kids’ sports: If you are willing to devote the time and energy to being the coach of the team, you have earned the right to play your kid slightly more than the other kids/more than he deserves. Sure, once in a while you’ll hear The Complainer (a sports parent type) whine about how his kid should bat lead off because he has a higher OBP than the coach’s kid, but any reasonable parent who thinks about it for a moment will agree that the coach’s kid should get more playing time as a thanks that you didn’t have to coach. There aren’t too many perks to coaching the Under 8 St. Mary’s Basketball Team, so rational people should begrudge the coach’s kid extra playing time even if he has the coordination of a newborn fawn.

My Kid Plays, however, misses the point and clearly has chosen to coach for the sole purpose of making sure his kid plays every second of every game, even if the kid hate’s the sport. At first, it may My Kid Plays is making the reasonable choice to bat his kid lead off every game – but when he decides to bat him every other man, people start to notice. My Kid Plays will always put his kid at pitcher, even if the kid throws like a right handed girl throwing left handed (Whoah! Put away the pitch forks and torches – I have a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why “throwing like a girl” is a valid description which does not warrant a lynching of the person who uttered it – watch for it later). My Kid Plays is operating under one of two assumptions: either he has totally fooled himself into believing his kid is the next Michael Jordan, or he believes playing as much and as often as possible will transform the kid into the next Michael Jordan. Unfortunately, the sad truth of the matter is that the kid is usually mediocre to terrible and generally couldn’t care less if he played or sat the bench.

My Kid Plays is often an ex-athlete himself who dreams of glory for his spawn – he should read my notice to new fathers at the beginning of this section and just stop.

Season Prediction: 7 – 3. Then they lose the first round of the playoffs because My Kid Plays decides his kid should start at center against an opposing center a foot taller.

Other Minor Coaching Types

Mr. Laid Back: Easy to spot in his Hawaiian shirt and sandals, Mr. Laid Back is just there to get the job done. Usually Mr. Laid Back has a relatively respectable knowledge of the game and its rules – he just doesn’t care. The upside is, all the kids will play the same amount. The downside is that all the kids will play the same amount.
Season Prediction: 5 –5

Too Good To Be True: Maybe he is more coach than you deserve, maybe he’s pervert in disguise, but the one thing that is certain about Too Good To Be True is that he will make you feel totally inadequate as a parent when you discover that he coaches the team, volunteers down at the senior center, reads to the kids and tucks them in bed at night and still manages to hold a job earning $150k a year.
Season Prediction: 8 – 2. The kids will do well, but he doesn’t demand perfection. Go ahead – hate him for being perfect. Everyone else does.

So there you have seven basic types of coach. Feel free to pick a style for yourself, but be sure to dress it up a bit and make it your own. If you want to be the Screamer, carry a machete just for the reactions it will get. If you’re going to be the Pervert, be the best pervert you can be – carry good quality candy not American chocolate to lure children behind the dugout.

Remember, choose something you’ll be comfortable with because you’re going to have this personality as long as your kid is a kid. Why? Because only thing you can be sure of than being asked to coach is that if you say yes once, you’ll be coaching forever.