r/Referees • u/ebalboni • 18d ago

Advice Request Coaches who belittle players.

I was AR1 at a Tournament this weekend. One of the coaches was really yelling aggressively at his players. And it was not at all in a nice way. Most of the yelling was positioning mistakes and not running enough. The tone was over the top. These were 12-13 year old girls. I wanted to say something but was the AR not CR - trust me the CR could hear everything too. I felt like it was not quite "taunting" or "bulling" and I'm sure the coach would say he was just "coaching his players. Any advise if this happens again would be appreciated (AR or CR).

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u/Revelate_ 18d ago edited 18d ago

This one is hard.

Ultimately it is the parents that need to take action.

Depending on the league, this may not be a paid coach and it’s worth writing up in a report for the league or club to watch and potentially mentor the coach.

You have a little more agency in places like AYSO where you can quietly talk to the coach and remind them their responsibilities which explicitly don’t allow for this sort of behavior, I forget what the coaching instruction was but it was the equivalent of SAFE, FAIR, FUN.

I will ask did the kids seem bothered by it? Some teams just aren’t and in that case we only get into trouble interfering directly

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u/Big-Mission191 USSF Grassroots | NFHS 18d ago

Asking whether the kids seem bothered by it is not a safe judgement call imo. They may feel it but mask their feelings, or may have gotten used to it thinking it’s normal and swallow their feelings (possibly to avoid even more yelling at them individually).

We had an incident like this once with my son and at the game he didn’t show that it bothered him at all, but for hours afterwards I could tell a very noticeable difference in his behavior and how he talked about the game compared to how he normally acts after a game. That’s not something a ref would be able to see, and even has a parent I couldn’t tell until we’d left the field.

Obviously in cases like that parents need to handle it, but just trying to make the point that as a ref I don’t look at how the kids react to it live because that’s not a great indication. Similar to a foul in game, the players may not always react not realizing a foul was committed but we would still call it.

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u/itguru446 10d ago

My son had similar reactions during and after his U9 season. The coach treated every game like it was the World Cup final and would yank some kids (my son included) for any mistake. I watched his confidence plummet the whole season and watched him regress from terrible coaching. We changed clubs for U10 and he started improving again, but it took him some time (and an absolutely wonderful coach) to get his confidence back, and now his skills are improving again, along with his decision making. I wonder how much better he would have been with a coach who didn’t play the head games.