Sigh.

It was a busy week, so the blog was quiet.

My older son is in Little League playoffs right now. Some of you may recall my previous post (or posts?) about the lunacy of youth sports in southern California, and things haven't become more sensible since then. Overall, I have to say that both of my kids have been lucky to play for good coaches who tend to do a nice job of being both encouraging and instructive with regard to the fundamentals of the sport. Most coaches are good, decent folk who have the best interest of the kids in mind and do a great job - as volunteers - to make the sport fun and instructive.

Sadly, in his team's opening round game, they faced a team whose coach has taken a decidedly different approach to working with kids. His methodology is comprised of varying amounts of the following ingredients:

1. Screaming
2. Yelling
3. Swearing
4. Bullying
5. Public humiliation
6. Acting like an idiot

At one point, some fielding errors on the part of the opposing team allowed a player from my son's team to advance from first base to third base. The opposing team's coach stormed out of the dugout, pointed at one of the players on his team, and screamed "that was your fault!". Shortly thereafter, one of his players was not moving quick enough for him, so he screamed, "Throw the damn ball!". He also screamed "what part of second base don't you understand?" to the right fielder for throwing the ball to the wrong spot.

These kids are between the ages of 8 and 11. 8 and 11.

I won't go into the rest of the story (including my reaction and my wife's efforts to keep me from creating an incident that might have landed me on CNN), but the whole thing has me quite sickened. My son's team won the game by a comfortable margin, which only underscores the ineffectiveness of the bully's coaching methods. Even though my son didn't play for the idiot in question, I wanted the guy off the field and - most importantly - away from kids.

I like youth sports and what they strive to achieve in the lives of kids. However, I can't stand the bullying and abusive behavior I see from a small (but unfortunately not small enough) minority of parents and coaches. It makes me sad.

The only bright spot in the story is that I sat down with my sons after the game to talk about the bully coach's behavior. When I told my older son that I'd remove him from any team coached by a bully, he agreed with me and smiled. (And he expressed to me how much he appreciates his current coaches, which was nice.) My younger son simply looked at me and said, "that man should be in jail". And I agree. If you bully kids, you should go to jail. I'm not sure what the charges should be or how long you should be in there, but there should be some sort of incarceration.