High School Athletes and Their Actions

Source: http://blog.ctnews.com/insight/files/2014/01/fight2.jpg

  Professional athletes are not the only athletes expressing poor behavior.  We can see athletes making poor decisions all the way down the high school level.  High school sports have seen an increase in fights on the field or court in the past couple of years.  These high school athletes have not learned the true meaning behind sports and aren’t getting the great lessons that high school sports can teach when then act like fools.  Eric Sondheimer in his article from The LA Times titled “Time for Coaches and Parents to Stop Athletes’ Bad Behavior” seems to believe that the lack of authority in coaches and parents in the high school level is the problem.  Sondheimer states, “What's baffling is that some athletes no longer respect their coaches. In the old days, you were so scared to make your coach mad that no one had to worry about players leaving a bench or a fan taunting an official. The coach's stare or the coach's voice would bring an immediate halt to bad behavior.” These athletes no longer have the fear in their coaches which made them behave according to Eric Sondheimer.

You might ask, Well, why aren’t these coaches being harder on these kids to make them behave? Eric Sondheimer would argue that parents threaten to transfer if the coach doesn’t treat their athlete in a respectful manner he states in his article, “Some people say transferring has become so rampant that coaches have seen their authority diminished. A coach yells at an athlete or puts him on the bench, and Mom or Dad's response is, "So long."’” The coaches of these teams feel like they need to treat these athletes differently now because of their parents threatening to transfer if they are rude to the athletes. In my opinion, I have seen this at the high school level here in Chicago.  We played a team in which their best two players were complete bastards on the court.  They elbowed opponents, talked back to the referees, and got into it with other players.  That team was in the West Suburban Conference.  The worst team (attitude wise) that I have ever played against was Crespi Carmelite, a team who is from California, around where this article was written, so maybe there is a bigger problem out west then here, but it is definitely still a problem in the midwest.  I will not get into specifics about why their manner and respect for the game, officials, and coaches was so bad, but it was the worst that I have ever seen or played against.

Overall, the reason why high school players can get away with so much now is because their coaches don’t have the authority that they once did back in they day.  They do not have the authority over the players because they are figuring out they they can transfer and be better off at a different school then stick around with a coach who yells at them all the time.