HOCKEY: Family of boy suspended
Could it be that, no matter how clouded the parent's vision might be, the kid just wasn't the league's Most Valuable Player??
The family of the 16-year-old boy suing the New Brunswick Amateur Hockey Association over not winning the MVP award has been suspended from the league. Michael Croteau and his son, Steven, will meet with a lawyer to discuss their situation. The boy was suspended by the provincial amateur hockey association. There was no comment Tuesday from the New Brunswick Amateur Hockey Association. Croteau is seeking $300,000 in psychological and punitive damages from the association. He claims that his son was robbed by the association of two awards he should have won: the league's most valuable player award and the top playmaker award.
The most recent issue of Sports Illustrated had an excellent piece on the growing trend of parents suing coaches.
For a youth league baseball coach, what could be worse than going 0-15? Ask Rodney Carroll. Soon after Carroll guided the Brunswick (Ohio) Cobras to a winless season in 1999, a summons arrived, informing him that he was being sued for $2,000 by the father of his catcher. The complaint? Poor coaching. Carroll's incompetence, the suit claimed, cost the team a trip to a tournament in Florida. "I didn't understand it," says Carroll, 43, a street-maintenance worker who had volunteered for two years. "I wanted to be a coach just to help kids."....
A surprising number of coaches are being taken to court for matters involving game plans, lineups, teaching and all the other things that they normally do. A group that studies sports-related lawsuits in North America, From the Gym to the Jury, reports that more than 1,300 suits involving high school and youth sports have been filed in the last five years, a jump of about 35% from the previous five-year period. Some cases deal with negligence and injury, but many are what lawyers call "personal feelings" suits -- cases that, to a large degree, hinge on the notion that a coach who ticks off a parent or student is liable for financial damages.
"Ask a room full of coaches if they've been sued, or if they know anyone who's been sued," says Tim Flannery, assistant director of the National Federation of State High School Associations. "Everyone in the room would raise their hands."
Don't these parents have anything better to do with their time than to spend their time and money clogging up the American (and Canadian) legal systems?
It used to be that an adult volunteered his time to coach kids because he wanted to help kids. Now, anyone who coaches children, whether he or she is paid or volunteering, must spend time looking over their shoulder. Coaches are purchasing insurance because they are afraid of being found liable for a coaching decision that rubbed a parent the wrong way. This is just WRONG.
Thankfully, American and Canadian courts have to date sided with coaches in lawsuits that have come before them. What happens, though, when a court finds (as will eventually and inevitably happen) for a plaintiff? What will be the fallout from that precedent? What will happen when we can no longer find anyone willing to coach little Johnny's Little League team because he can't afford the liability insurance? What happens when players and parents show up at little Johnny's game with their legal team in tow?
The biggest question, of course, is what sort of lessons are we teaching our children? That it doesn't really matter how talented you are or how hard you work, as long as you have a good attorney behind you? So Steven Croteau wasn't selected as the league MVP? How and why is that a case for the courts? One of the lessons to be learned from sports is that sometimes things don't go the way you'd like them to. You lose games you don't expect to, you shoot poorly, your receiver drops the winning touchdown pass- any of us who have ever competed in anything know what it's like. It's part of life as an athlete. Dealing with and learning from adversity is part of the deal. Not everyone can be MVP, not everyone can score the winning goal, and not everyone can play at the same time. How you deal with those facts of athletic life go a long way towards determining what sort of adult you will become.
I spent the largest portion of my high-school basketball career picking splinters out of my butt. In the final analysis, I was a short, slow point guard afflicted with White Man's Disease, and nowhere near as talented as I thought I was at the time. Even in college, I was a backup goalkeeper on a horrible soccer team. I always felt that I deserved more playing time, but the guy in front of me had been an all-state 'keeper in South Dakota, and he WAS far more talented. It never would have occurred to me to sue my coach for not giving me more playing time, even though he was a bit of a dork.
Somewhere along the way, we as a society seem to have lost respect for the men and women who teach and guide our children. What has happened to change that attitude? Why can we not just let our children play and leave it at that?
Last year, my stepson played in a soccer league where everyone was required to be rotated into the match, and no one kept score. Kids had fun, they all got some exercise, they had an activity to look forward to- and no one brought an attorney with them to the games. Kids having fun- isn't that what it really should be all about?
