How to deal with crazy parents

Crazy parents, they have infiltrated the lacrosse world, and the crazy parent is somebody who has really their son or daughter’s best interests at heart and they just go a little bit overboard with what they want for their son or daughter. And a lot of times, the love that they have makes them so biased that they cannot see what is fair and what is not.

I think that a good coach really needs to communicate with all parents, not just the high maintenance parents, but if you communicate with all of your parents and all of your kids on a regular basis, it really helps to limit the encounters that you would have with the high maintenance parent.

One of the things that we do on a regular basis is that we try to incorporate parents into our program. We give them responsibilities, committees, whatever it may be as far as having a game day food or team dinners or working on the apparel for the players or the parents, or doing things on game days as far as helping out with the statistics or scoreboard or anything like that to help the parents channel their energy.

For a parent who is really overzealous and has the ability to become disruptive, a one on one meeting is going to be required. Docking a parent like that, avoiding their phone calls, avoiding their emails only makes it worse, and you need to be able to communicate with them the role of what their daughter is.

The other thing is that anytime you do have a meeting, I highly recommend having the daughter there. That is the same thing that goes with the son. What the son or the daughter wants is not necessarily always what the parent wants.

If you have both of them there, and we are talking about the role of the player on the team, what we expect and what the team expects a lot of times the parents will forego their thoughts to go with what their son or daughter wants and it puts a lot of pressure on it. It takes away a lot from the “he said, she said” type of thing.


Transcription by: Scribe4you Transcription Services