8U Crazy Parents Story

[orange socks]

Since Dusty said something about the content has been a little stale and something about messin' with Texas. Nobody betta mess with us Texas folks....especially 8u parents.

Let me try to set this up about as best that I can. Names and locations will be censored to protect the innocent. I am on a Rec Ball "Positive Coaching Alliance" sub committee that is part of a much larger Multi Sports Organization. I wake up to check my email a few weeks ago and see a flurry of late night emails from several folks that are umpiring, coaching, field director of the 8u fields. Apparently there was a fight! Yes a fight! A full on physical altercation. Oh Geez.

First I am hearing that there was a parent heckling a coach and the coach jumped the fence and starting fighting the heckler. Next I hear the heckler was jawing at the umpire. Then a few other derivatives the story. It turns that it was two people on the outside of the fence brawling. After they were broken up the heckler( his name shall be Nelson) left the field but the other guy (We will call him Uncle Bubba)would not leave and was lobbing f-bombs all through out the complex. Meanwhile 4 games have halted, the kids on the field were scurried away and parents were trying to calm Uncle Bubba down. I hear Uncle Bubba is a rather large and imposing "older" guy.

I call both coaches of the two teams(Hittin' Kittens vs the Flying Mustard Dawgs), as I was under the impression that we had dueling fans and coaches involved in the fracas. They indicated that they had no idea what was going nor what started it. Since this was the first game of the season the coach did not know who these people were. No coaches were involved.

A week later I was able to get contact information for Nelson and Uncle Bubba and made the phone calls. Here's the summary of what went down. These two guys were standing on the first base side outside of the fences which were chest high and Nelson starts barking at the umpire of this 8u game. He took offense to a few of the calls (it's such an important game right?)and the umpire tells him to settle down. In comes Uncle Bubba who tells Nelson to calm down or the umpire is gonna throw you out of the game. He's trying to help the guy. Nelson gets fired up and tells him to shut up and mind his own business. They are now face to face and Uncle Bubba says something else to set off Nelson. They share a loving embrace and they start to wrestle with a few swings thrown. That's when the on field coaches come flying(Most likely the Flying Mustard Dawgs coaches) over the fence to break it up. Nelson says, Hey why are you tackling me? The coach says this is my dad! That is when they both realized that they are on the same team. Ha!!!

The good news is that they were able to make up. The bad news is that there were severe punishments levied for both parties. I hope some nice parents have a GoPro and are able to stream future games.

Anyone else have some good stories to share?

[eclipse09]

I don't have too many 8u stories, but I have a 6u story. As you know T-ball is the easiest and hardest age group to get coaches. Some years we have too many and other years we are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Well in this case we scraped.

This happened a few years ago. My player agent sent me multiple e-mails about a raving coach that is making the girls run and do push ups and basically yelling at them for mistakes they made. I assumed it was 10u or something like that.

Well about a half hour later a parent I know (from the team) e-mails me saying their 6u manager was yelling at the kids and making it not very fun. The same manager from the earlier e-mails. Well we started our investigation and found out this manager was treating them like an all-star team expecting hits and plays our 10u teams would have trouble with. Safe to say we kicked her out of the league never to be heard from again.

Sad part is a number of those families never came back the next year......damn!!

[dusty]

Don't mess with Texas 8u softball parents sounds like the moral of that story. I actually do have an 8u memory to share and it goes as follows.

I was coaching a first year 8u rec team with a couple of other neighborhood dads and we didn't win a game all year but the post game treats were always awesome which was of far greater importance. It was coach pitch and a couple of coaches were allowed to stand in the shallow outfield grass behind 2b and SS to coach a defensive player if a ball happened to come that way, or just get them to pay attention. I was standing on the SS side in the outfield in a close game when the other teams runner was caught in the only "stand down" (as opposed to run down) I have ever seen between 3b and home.

It was a non-force play at the plate and our catcher had the ball in her glove. All she had to do was reach out at arms length and tag the runner but she was frozen, batting her baby blues while the equally frozen base runner just stood there right next to her on the baseline. They were both probably frozen because parents and coaches from both teams were screaming at the top of their lungs at these kids, ours to tag the baserunner and theirs telling her to run back to 3b. This probably lasted no more than 5-10 seconds but it felt like an hour as time seemed to just stand still while this was playing out. Eventually, the baserunner figured it out and ran back to 3b where she was safe.

As I'm rubbing my forehead in the outfield grass I feel a tug on my shirt. The CF came over to tell me something about the our coach on the 2b side, "I just heard coach Roger say the F word!".

[GIMNEPIWO]

Rec ball days ...Might have been 10U or 12U even ... We had these two mothers ... To say that they knew very little about the rules of anything that resembled any sort of game is a stretch of the imagination ... But every time an Umpire made any kind of a call that was not in favor of their DD or their DD's team they would start screaming ... So far that is probably a pretty common tale ... But one of these woman looked and sounded like Phyllis Dillar and the other looked and sounded like Charo ... One of those DD's was on my REC team all the way up to 18U ... Even at 18's I was convinced she was only there for the snacks ... Any way, at 18's in VA there aren't many teams around and you find yourself playing Travel Teams or REC teams from far far away ... One of those REC teams was from a very country area ... In between games of a double header my asst taps me on the shoulder and points out the other team has gathered with their parents smoking cigs and passing red cups ... Before they took the field for game two gals where spitting out their wads of Red Man ....