Hockey parents — play nice
If you’ve ever been to a junior hockey game, you’ve probably encountered an example of the Raging Puckhead, a troubling class of hockey parent. If not, type “bad hockey parent” into YouTube and behold the horror show. These moms and dads, a small minority in the seats, will obnoxiously scream their displeasure at a player’s performance, a referee’s call or, most commonly, a coach’s failure to give their child ice time, evidently forgetting that they are watching kids playing a game.
Some go much further. One Toronto dad was fined $2,000 and barred from entering most city arenas for five years after choking his son’s coach to the point of unconsciousness. In 2013, a dispute between several parents over a Bantam game in Tweed, Ont., escalated into a full-blown brawl in the bleachers. A classic of the genre is the Woodbridge mom who became the butt of a Jay Leno monologue joke in 2004 after she exposed her bra and shook her breasts while taunting parents of opposing players during a game between 11-year-olds.
Parents whose passion for the game gets perverted into bullying and violence drain the fun from Canada’s beloved pastime and teach precisely the wrong lessons in the process. That’s why, as thousands of kids from across Ontario prepare to suit up and take the ice this fall, their parents will for the first time be required to complete a course that encourages respect in sport. It’s a good move by the Ontario Hockey Federation for the future of the game and the thousands of kids who play it.
“Parents are a key component of the sports experience,” Wayne McNeil, co-founder of the company that provides the course, told CBC Sports. “They are the reason why referees and officials quit. In a lot of cases, they are the reason their own kid either quits or has a bad experience is sport.”
Sadly, in hockey, bad experiences seem to be increasingly common. A 2014 study by Hockey Canada and the sports equipment company Bauer looked at why only one in 10 Canadian hockeyaged kids were playing the sport. Among the top four reasons provided by families was that it just wasn’t fun anymore.
Part of the problem is that as pressure on young players to train like pros continues to increase, so, too, does the game’s emotional and physical toll. Too often parents add to, rather than seek to ease, that pressure.
The online Respect in Sport training, which costs $12 and lasts half an hour, is meant to help hockey moms and dads keep their emotions in check, maintain perspective, encourage balance and ensure their kids avoid burnout. It’s important that parents, especially those with heady dreams of their child sipping from the Stanley Cup, remember such fantasies will never be a reality for most young players — and that’s not the end of the world.
After all, competition is not the only value the game has to offer. Fitness, sportsmanship, co-operation, hard work — surely these are every bit as important. For too many Raging Puckheads, winning is all that matters. There is no easy solution to that essentially cultural problem. But the Ontario Hockey Federation is right to do what it can to remind parents of what really matters and bring some measure of fun back to Canada’s game.
Ontario Hockey Federation is right to require hockey parents to take a Respect in Sport course