Among the many good and important things organized sports can teach young people is you don’t get to pick your teammates — but they’re your teammates nonetheless.
Sports can help children and youth understand the value of teamwork, of team loyalty, of working with a wide variety of people and their different personalities and skill sets.
It’s an invaluable lesson for later in life, when as adults they find that they don’t get to pick their coworkers, their neighbours — or even their family.
So what do young hockey players learn when a father of one player singles out and humiliates a 12-year-old girl — a teammate — who had the temerity to not meet his standards for the team?
What do they learn when the unrepentant father continues his vendetta, writing on a public blog that since Kayla Watkins’ departure from the Toronto Ice Dogs peewee A club, the team “is having fun again . . . because the negative elements on the team have left.”
The background to this horrifying saga is that Kayla — the only girl on the team — was judged to be a “liability” by George Atis, a Thornhill, Ont., lawyer and father of another Ice Dogs player.
Atis drafted an agenda for a team parents’ meeting that included an item naming Kayla and suggesting limiting her play or finding her a new team. When Kayla saw the agenda in her mother’s email, she was mortified, and quit the team rather than undergo further degrading scrutiny. (The Ice Dogs’ general manager said he was “totally against” Atis’s agenda.)
Kayla is now with another team where the coach values her and says she’s helped the team improve its record.
Atis, sadly, is unique only in his high profile. He’s emblematic of a subculture of overinvolved parents in youth sports who see everything through the prism of “my kid, my kid, my kid” and the heck with anyone else.
Whether they’re acting out their own failures and frustrations, the sports version of “helicopter parents” (i.e., always hovering) or whether they believe there’s a pro sports career in their kid’s future, they are the bane of coaches’ (and other parents’) existence.
It’s bad enough when they berate coaches (all of whom are volunteers at this level), but when they publicly single out other players, that’s a bastardization of a parent’s role. Atis disingenuously says he did not intend Kayla to see the agenda. Did he really believe word of her being singled out at a meeting would not get around the team?
Atis should be embarrassed. That he’s not says a lot.
It’s important to acknowledge the ground rules on ability and skills change at some young adult/elite levels. But this was 12-year-olds playing one step above house league. (And the Ice Dogs are no better since Kayla’s departure.)
Athletics can be one of the best things in a young person’s life; they teach so many important things. Consider the positive lesson of coach Greg Walsh, who pulled his Peterborough minor league team off the ice this season in protest over a racial slur. Walsh was initially hit with a full-season suspension by the Ontario Minor Hockey Association — until public outrage made it reconsider. Walsh illustrated to his players that you stick up for your teammates, even if it costs you games or wins.
But when the spirit of sport gets knocked off the rails, when the lessons become negative ones, the game is just not worth playing.
An editorial from the Hamilton Spectator