How to be the best possible FOOTBALL FATHER

Author's Note: The following column appeared in today's (Aug. 16, 2007) ediiton of the Dallas Morning News' Collin County Opinion Pages:
This month, the son of a dear friend of mine is embarking on his high school-level football career at one of Collin County’s programs. He is a young, talk strapping lad, with dreams of sacks and tackles dancing in his head.
His mother will sit in the stands for each of his games with a singular desire – that her little boy not get hurt – because that’s what mothers do. Despite a heavy business travel schedule, my friend’s husband will be there for his son’s games, either on Thursdays or Fridays. I hope that his eyes are filled with tears of joy from the pride he will feel watching his offspring perform.
In my years of watching and covering high school football (I estimate at more than 300 games), I have seen and heard it all – much of which is not pretty or useful – from all kinds of dads – the good, the bad and the really, really ugly. You can talk all about stage mothers and little league parents, but bad behavior by a football father can be as abhorrent as it gets.
There have been fathers who have charged the field to attack coaches and officials as well as grabbing their child by the face mask or even slapping the head. I’ve heard language that would make sailors blush and seen behavior I would believe to be “certifiable.”
Here are my suggestions to be the proper “football father.”
1) Do NOT yell at your child from the stands. There are too many ears in the stands, connected with too many mouths. Such boorish behavior only makes the father look bad and such impressions are quickly spread. Besides, unless you’re alone in the stadium, or have a voice like Foghorn Leghorn that can pierce through the shrill of 5,000 others, the intended target can’t hear you anyway.
2) Do NOT live your sports fantasies through your son. He is who he is; not who you used to be … or wanted to be. Living vicariously through a 15-, 16- or 17-year-old only hampers any athletic development on his part and will ultimately be injurious to the ongoing father-son relationship.
True, they don’t understand YOUR music or why you do what you do (and vice versa), but, in most cases, they will make you, as a father, proud.
3) Do NOT criticize your son’s coaches out loud in public. Bad plays are almost always due to poor execution (physical mistakes) rather than poor play calling. Besides, if you could do better, you’d be out there with your lower-than-you-should-be-paid teacher’s certificate, listening to verbal abuse heaped upon you, working six or seven days a week for 12-14 hours daily during the season, with your job performance splashed across the sports section every Saturday morning.
4) Analyze rather than criticize. The object of post-game analysis is to learn why things went right and, if some aspects failed, to discover why they were wrong. This is the true nature of coaching. What coaching needs to promote is effort; if you try to do your best all the time, no one can ask for more out of you.
One truism is not expressed to young athletes enough – sometimes your best just isn’t good enough. There are times when the other player or the other team is just better. But if you give that total effort, then you can hold your head high regardless of outcome.
5) Be positive, be happy, be there! He’s young, healthy, and wants to be part of a team effort rather than a lone wolf. A young man can learn so much more about life and relating to other people through team sports than individual activities. Football, in its purest form, promotes that more than any American sport on the landscape.
It is true that those positions that produce the points (quarterback, wide receivers, running backs) earn the acco­lades; it’s the nature of the game. However, without a collective effort of 22-plus men (linemen, defenders and even kickers), nothing gets done, no play succeeds and no touchdowns are scored. So encourage him.
I learned the hard way. The worst summer of my life was trying to coach a T-ball team with my son as its second baseman. It was a total no-win situation because nothing I said, or didn’t say, was going to be right in his eyes. I broke too many of my own rules and it took years to right that ship. I’ve watched and learned; I’ve been there and experienced most of that – to obtain a pretty good conception of how a football father should act from what us old-timers used to know as “the peanut gallery.”
Dad, let Mom do the worrying and you do the cheering. Your son will worship you for it.