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The new participants in youth sports: Adults gone wild
Kids just want to have fun, but parents have introduced violence, unrealistic expectations into the games
It’s a community park that Shaquille Latimore had long considered safe, but as the youth football coach navigates the patchy green grass separating the field and the parking lot, his body begins to shake.
“Anxiety, man, it’s like going crazy,” Latimore said during that visit to Sherman Park in St. Louis in November 2023. “The last time I was here, I almost lost my life.”
That last time, Oct. 10, 2023, was the day Latimore, a volunteer assistant coach of the St. Louis Badboyz, excused himself from his team’s practice to speak with the father of one of his players. Latimore and the father previously had a disagreement about his 9-year-old son’s playing time.
Words were exchanged as Latimore approached the parking lot (Latimore said he had a firearm with him because of the crime in the area, and that he handed it to a friend before reaching the father).
“That’s when I saw his gun,” Latimore said. “I tried to run, but I ain’t that fast.”
The first shot penetrated Latimore’s back, sending him to the ground. Three of the shots, in his forearm, buttocks and stomach, left him critically wounded. (Daryl Clemmons was arrested and charged with first-degree felony assault and armed criminal action. St. Louis police would not release the police report of the shooting to Andscape, saying the incident was “an active investigation.”)
“I’m still in shock,” Latimore said, walking gingerly near the spot a month after the incident. “I think I’m a fair coach. But it’s a job within itself when you have to coach the kids and manage the parents.”
Welcome to the world of youth sports, where instead of the kids being cheered and celebrated the atmosphere is becoming more and more dominated by adults gone wild.
Occasionally, the adults behaving badly carry marquee names including:
- Cam Newton, an NFL MVP, who apologized for his fight with coaches during a 7-on-7 football tournament in Atlanta in February.
- Matt Barnes, an NBA champion and current podcast host, who was accused of shouting expletives at a referee during his son’s high school basketball playoff game before putting his hand on the shoulder of a high school student broadcaster. The student broadcaster, Jake Lancer, claimed Barnes threatened to “slap the s—” out of him. Barnes, fired from his NBC Sports California gig after the incident, said he put his hand on Lancer and “it was almost like I was talking to my son.”
- Mike McCarthy, the current coach of the Dallas Cowboys, who had a complaint filed against him in 2018 for verbally abusing officials following his stepson’s high school game.
More often, the out-of-control adults are people you’ve never heard of exhibiting shocking behavior in spur-of-the-moment attacks that have caused serious physical harm and — in extreme cases — death.
- In Florida, a 63-year-old umpire was knocked out in 2023 by the father of one of the high school players who told police he was “defending his kid.”
- In Washington, a 72-year-old referee suffered a broken nose and cheekbone in 2021 after he was shoved to the ground by a 31-year-old former Division I basketball player who was unhappy that his son was being separated from another player during an altercation.
Uncivil parents and adults in youth sports represent more than just viral videos. Their actions have led to adults being banned from games, referees abandoning their profession, and emotionally damaged kids who often walk away from sports for good.
Can this current climate of out-of-control adults in youth sports be fixed?
“Honestly, I don’t think so,” said Tracy Murray, a 1995 NBA champion who now helps coach his brother’s AAU program in California. “They are too far gone, and I don’t think they can be reeled back in.”
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A youth basketball coach for more than 45 years, Todd Taylor vividly recalls the stress-free era of coaching when parents would drop their kids off at the camps he ran.
“Most times, I’d never see the parent,” Taylor said. He began coaching in Jamaica, Queens, the New York City neighborhood where he grew up, at the age of 17 in 1979. “Back then, parents were looking at our basketball teams as a place where their kids would be off the streets.”
The changes Taylor sees in parents today are the result of the repositioning of youth sports from a safe place where kids were dropped off to have fun to high-pressure environments where parents often closely monitor their child, and their investment.
“Now, kids come to practice with their grandparents, their aunts, little brothers, sisters, everybody,” Taylor said. He is a retired New York City police officer who coaches an Under-9 team in the esteemed Gauchos program in New York City. “Kids today are seen as a meal ticket.”
And parents see more opportunities with the increasing stream of NIL deals that have turned college athletes into millionaires, and have even been extended to kids before high school. When parents see a 13-year-old girls soccer player inking an NIL deal with Nike, and a 9-year-old youth football player signed to a six-figure NIL deal with a sports agency, the thought that is increasingly entering their minds is, ‘Why not us?’
“When Alex Rodriguez signed his [$252 million] contract, my mother said to me, ‘if I knew this, I would have been out there throwing a baseball with you,’ ” Taylor said, laughing. “But it wasn’t about [money] for us. It was about recreation.”
In this new era where 8-year-old players compete for national rankings, and coaches and personal trainers are convincing families their child has a chance to cash in, many parents believe the hype.
“People are telling parents that their 6-year-old kid can go Division I or go pro,” said Mike Sharrieff, the football coach at Johnson Middle School in Washington. “How can you tell a kid at 6 that he can do that?
“To the father who has never played big-time sports, he’s thinking those people know what they’re talking about.”
The bigger the lie the parents hear — as they’re being sold promises of fame and riches — the more they believe. As the parents dream big, the kids often become collateral damage.
“I’m one of 4,700 players in the 75-year history of the NBA to play in the league, so the chances of getting there are slim to none,” said Murray, a UCLA Athletics Hall of Fame inductee who played 12 years in the NBA. “Instead of putting their eggs into one basket with dreams of making the league, the parents should be thinking about getting their kid a college scholarship so they can start their adult life debt-free.”
Those parents, according to New York AAU coach Shawn Simms, believe constant demands of their kids to be better are coming out of a place of love.
“But they don’t understand that their love is outweighing the understanding of the game, and their love for their child is actually hurting them,” said Simms, who has been coaching for 30 years. “Not only are the kids messed up mentally, but they wind up falling behind in life because they’re looking at their parents and saying, ‘what can I do to please this person?’ ”
“I had a father pull his kid off one of my teams because he felt I should have been doing more for his kid. So, he started a whole new team built around his son, so he could get the ball and be the man. All that’s doing is teaching the kid to be selfish.”
— Todd Taylor
Having worked as a youth soccer coach for more than 30 years, Northern Virginia resident Vince Villanueva and his family find themselves at a crossroads about his path.
“One daughter tells me, ‘you love doing this, this makes you happy,’ ” Villanueva said recently. “The other daughter says, ‘it’s time to leave. It’s too risky.’ ”
Three decades of coaching soccer didn’t become risky for Villanueva until a Saturday afternoon in August 2023 when he filled in to coach a friend’s U-9 boys soccer game. During the game, Villanueva approached the boy to ask if he was OK to return to the game. The boy’s father said no, and witnesses told police that when Villanueva turned to speak with the father he was hit in the head with a metal water bottle. (Villanueva agreed to an interview, but said he could not speak specifically about the incident because of a pending court case.)
“I had a blowout of the orbital wall,” Villanueva, who does not remember being hit, told Andscape. “Back in October, doctors explained to me that my eye was healing, but healing in the wrong spot and causing double vision. Now I’m back to normal.”
Villanueva’s life has returned to normal, but the violent behavior of youth sports parents has continued. The viral videos of fights at youth sporting events are so disturbing that a youth soccer referee’s attempt to shame parents has attracted more than 100,000 followers to a Facebook page.
For Taylor, parents’ behavior has gotten so obnoxious that he established a rule not to coach the kids of his friends. That rule stems from a bad experience 20 years ago when he coached the 13-year-old son of a childhood friend who, growing up, possessed spin moves that made him virtually unguardable.
“We’re at a game at Roy Wilkins Park in Queens, and every time his son gets double-teamed I’m telling him to pass,” Taylor said. “But his father’s on the other side of the fence telling him ‘don’t pass the ball, do that spin like I taught you.’ ”
Taylor, seeing the kid he’s coaching confused by the conflicting directives of two adults, was furious.
“I turned around and told him ‘shut the f— up — that’s what you do but he can’t do that,’ ” Taylor recalled. “Parents have to let the kids play the game correctly.”
Villanueva recalls a girls U-9 soccer game two years ago where the constant screaming from overzealous parents left players from both teams and the young referee in tears.
“I gave the parents a warning: No more talking, just let them play,” Villanueva said. “It wasn’t even five minutes later and they were back at it, so I called the referee and the other coach over and said we forfeit, the game’s over.”
Robert Bannon, a sports official in southeastern Pennsylvania, recalls a mother who got so heated after being ejected from a game that “she went to her car, got a tire iron and started swinging.”
In more than two decades of officiating basketball, soccer and softball from the high school to the preteen level, Bannon said, there’s an age group who he believes he has to be the most alert about.
“I don’t have any problems with those games with the older kids,” Bannon said. “But I have a body cam that I keep in my ball bag that I [pull out] when I’m scheduled to do a 10- or 12-year-old event.”
It’s not the kids that Bannon fears, it’s their parents. And Bannon has a theory why.
“If I work a tournament with 16- or 18-year olds, the parents or grandparents aren’t really there and they’re having fun,” Bannon said. “But with the little ones, the parents are there. And it’s almost as if they’re living through their kids.”
What you see in today’s NCAA transfer portal with the constant movement of student-athletes is just an extension of what’s been occurring for years in youth sports. Parents and kids, unhappy with playing time, simply move to different schools and different teams in a never-ending search for stardom.
“I had a father pull his kid off one of my teams because he felt I should have been doing more for his kid,” Taylor said. “So, he started a whole new team built around his son so he could get the ball and be the man. All that’s doing is teaching the kid to be selfish.”
In the end, it’s the kids who suffer.
Many of those kids wind up leaving the games they play, as indicated by a report released in January by the American Academy of Pediatrics that found that 70% of kids drop out of organized sports by the age of 13. Villanueva recently witnessed that abandonment firsthand when he sent out alerts to players and parents at the beginning of soccer season.
The response from one of his players surprised him:
“I’m done.”
He reached out to the player, a 15-year-old girl, who was one of his best players and had a solid chance to play collegiate soccer at the Division II level, to find out why she didn’t want to be on the team. Her response: “ ‘Every game I can hear my dad yelling at me,’ ” Villanueva recalled. “ ‘And when we get in the car after the game, the whole ride home I’m being berated about how poorly I did.’ ”
So, when she turned 15, an age where she felt she could make her own decision about sports participation, she quit.
“I coached her for six years, she was always energetic,” Villanueva said. “But over the years you could see it waning. When we had that discussion, I knew.”
Solomon Alexander, director of the St. Louis Sports Foundation, which operates under the St. Louis Sports Commission, said the problem of kids giving up sports completely will only worsen in this current climate of parents gone wild.
“I taught math for 10 years, and one thing I never heard was a kid getting all A’s and someone saying, ‘there’s the next Einstein,’ ” Alexander said. “But if an 8-year-old lucks up and hits a 3, the parents are saying, ‘that’s the next king, that’s the next LeBron.’ ”
That’s an added burden that few kids, especially preteen and teenage kids, can shoulder.
“Parents need to stop putting pressure on these kids, because nobody knows what they’re going to be,” Alexander said. “Kids are looking at sports as something ‘mom and dad want me to do.’ When that happens, you have rebellion, and you have kids that walk away from sports for good.”
Which, if kids abandon sports, could deny fans a chance to see future greats.
“We’re moving to the point where the next Serena Williams didn’t pick up a tennis racket,” Alexander said. “Because when she did this other thing, her parents didn’t yell, and it was something she could have on her own.
“Kids will move away from youth sports because they’ll feel it’s not worth the trouble.”
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On the day Latimore was shot just off the Sherman Park parking lot in 2023, the kids on the field nearby panicked: Some ran, others hit the ground (as they are taught before the season in a situation with an active shooter), and all were frightened.
“We were in the middle of our normal practice, so when we heard the shots we didn’t know where they were coming from,” said Dejuan Bolden, who was also an assistant coach with the Badboyz. “We teach the kids not to run, and we reiterate that because we live in a dangerous city.”
Latimore was lucky. After arriving at the hospital in critical condition, he was discharged within a week. Seeing him at Sherman Park almost a month after the shooting one never would have guessed that he was standing in a place where he nearly lost his life.
Latimore’s visible scars tell his story. The kids present that day left the field minus any physical scars, but one wonders about the long-term effect of the violence they witnessed.
As Latimore looks down at the area where the shots that hit him were fired, he notices a shell casing on the ground. Picking up a stick, he poked the fragment.
“Different shell casing,” Latimore said. “Not from what hit me.”
A month after he was shot, Latimore was unclear whether he would return to coaching. But he’s was back on the sideline with a new team he helped launch, the North County Mustangs, in preparation for the 2024 season that begins in June.
“It’s bittersweet and I still have a lot of anxiety,” Latimore said of returning this season to coach. “But I’m happy to be back. Plus, my son just turned 4, and he’s going to be out here playing with the 5- and 6-year-olds.”
While approximately 10 players from the Badboyz have joined Latimore on the new team, there were several parents who decided not to follow him to the new program.
“We understand why,” Latimore said. “If they want to come, our door is open. We want to let everyone know that our main priority this year is safety.”
As Latimore spoke by phone recently while at his new team’s practice, there was a sense of normalcy heard in the background with the sounds of enjoyment from the kids a half a year after — for some of them — gunshots ended their season.
“We just wanted to have a fresh start,” said Latimore, whose new team holds practices about six miles north of Sherman Park. “We have the kids in a safe place and a better overall environment.”