BEHIND THE PLAY #70

And I think I’m starting to understand why.

Around the time a month ago that we, as a club staff, were getting really concerned with the number of discipline issues we were seeing in the first couple months of the season, BC Coastal Soccer League, the largest league in the province, made it clear it wasn’t just our club that was experiencing it. The BCCSL league manager put out an email detailing that in the first month of the season red cards issued to players were up 27% and yellow cards 54%. More worrying, to me anyways, was that when it came to team officials (ie. adults), reds were up 125% and yellows 94%.

We were seeing this at our club as well. But skewed even more to adults with parents being the biggest concern. I’m not going to detail actual events but it was clear that most were rooted in severe over-reaction. Seven separate incidents to date so far this season with the latest and perhaps most serious, hitting my inbox this past weekend.

Why is this? Maybe it’s just a statistical fluke but there had definitely been a bump in discipline issues involving adults last season as well. The bump though has become an earthquake and if I had to put my complete lack of sociology knowledge to the task of explaining what’s going on, it would boil down to post-COVID anxiety dunked in an excessive amount of social media and this having led parents to being very concerned about where some of their kids are at in terms of their overall social interactions. In turn, the anxiety that parents are seeing in their kids is jumping the gap and resulting in their anxiety manifesting in unusual and highly confrontational behaviour.

A combined 40 red and yellow cards for BCCSL team officials in one month is not a sign of the apocalypse. It does go a bit deeper than that though. Parent misbehaviour (ie. not team official) at games generally does not result in red cards. That’s been the case for several of the cases I’m familiar with. That’s generally left for clubs to deal with internally and when we do, what I see are normal adults who have had an uncharacteristic outburst based around a perceived injustice to their child. A foul not called for the most part with a lack of playing time in second place.

Back to COVID and social media.

Soccer shut down entirely in the middle of March 2020 and didn’t re-open until July 1 when a version of the game that involved physical distancing and regular hand sanitizing was allowed. In the months that followed we’ve never had so much good will from parents. They were so glad that their kids were being allowed to play outside with other kids even if it was a truly bastardized vesion of the game. Zero complaints about anything for a good six months.

Then it went back to normal. And then it got progressively worse. Why?

Some kids skated through COVID without any effect on them mentally, socially or, in terms of their family, financially. Some did. We started hearing from parents far more about anxiety issues with their kids, some involving hospitalization. We had far more, and more serious intra-team conflicts between players. This has not abated.

The science on the effects of social media on teens, particularly during COVID, shows there were both positives and negatives but that it generally acted as an accelerant based on whether the user was already fairly happy or unhappy. So while not every child is dealing with negative outcomes even if it’s only 10% that do that would be at least one player on every team on average.

If you are a parent of a child who did not do well during COVID and that has now manifested in a lack of social connection in their lives, you are likely to look for proxies to fill the growing social gulf your child is experiencing; all the while negotiating the reality of your own anxiety over your child’s unhappiness. This is where, as I’ve said several times in this often haphazardly scheduled newsletter, soccer can play a very helpful role for adolescents as a second network outside of their school network. Things aren’t going well in one aspect of your child’s life? Okay, let’s double down on their soccer environment to get them through this phase. Now, as a parent, you become overly-invested, often in impractical or unreasonable ways, in soccer solving a problem quickly and clearly. And it may work. But it may not and when it doesn’t parental concern works its way through disappointment up to blame, anger and eventually discipline hearings. Sometimes very quickly.

My three kids are all adults now. All played through to U18. Only the youngest really went through the massive cultural imposition of social media on teenage life. I really do feel a lot of empathy for parents negotiating this landscape today. It’s far worse now than when he was 14-18 years old. It must be harrowing to see personality changes in your child that you know are unhealthy while at the same time the constructs that have been facilitated for them to socialize in have shifted from live, in-person situations to digital encounters that you struggle to have any influence over. That said, modelling abusive behaviour in public settings like soccer games is not the solution they need or want to see from their parents. It will not reduce their time on Instagram and it will not move out of their bedrooms to face to face socializing.

This is not blame. This is concern. My window into the issue of ongoing generations of teens being over-stimulated yet under-nourished by social media is through the lens of a soccer provider. It’s limited and I don’t know the answers but even just this narrow lens is making it clear that the parenting landscape is a desperate one at the moment and more conversations around what parents, teachers, coaches, curriculum shapers, sport administrators, government and the kids themselves can do to right this ship are incredibly important and must be had.

The CPL final was played yesterday. In an absolute snowstorm in Ottawa. The women’s university final was also played. This was in Hamilton. The men’s university final was played in Toronto. Both on snow-covered fields as well. The second leg of the Northern Super League semi-final between AFC Toronto and and Montreal Roses was supposed to be played in Toronto but was postponed to today. Again because of snow.

That’s four incredibly important games being scheduled in places where it is known to snow at this time of year. Does it happen every year? No. Should administrators of these competitions respect what athletes have accomplished to get to national finals and semi-finals and make absolutely sure that they are given conditions that befit their abilities to play? Yes.

Stop scheduling championship games in regions where the weather makes a mockery of players’ ability to play and reduces the competition to luck and attrition.