I've done heaps of junior coaching in cricket and soccer with my young lad and hopefully I've managed to keep everyone happy.
I certainly haven't made training too hard because I am not a qualified coach and I don't believe in all the trendy things people do these days so I keep it pretty simple.
I've given away soccer though, because my young bloke has too. But I had other reasons for giving it away. Most of the parents were pretty good but I had a few who's communication was so bad that I wonder how they get through life. Things like ringing me after the start training time to say their boy wasn't coming or not even calling at all. Game day could be frustrating, I tell them to get to the game at least 20 mins before the start and most of them were rocking up 10 mins beforehand or even 5.
One parent just loved turning up right on game time or sometimes 5 minutes into the game! Repeated requests from me (I was always nice too I might add) were just ignored and the same thing kept happening. And then to top it all off, one of the parents came to me late last year to accuse my boy of bullying his. My boy is no angel but he is not one to do this and has been bullied himself so he knows how bad it can be. For the record, the other parents kid is about as soft as you can get, goes down crying in a normal tackle.
I'll be putting my hand up to coach cricket this year, parents are much better but I did have one family last year who I wondered why they even bothered signing their son up. They never came to training and many times on game days, I'd get a text to say that their son couldn't play that day. Admittedly, he is not a great player and it meant I didn't have to choose someone else not to bat or bowl on the day, but it was just rude and thoughtless on so many levels.
We have a scoring roster as well each week for parents. All of them readily accepted their job, even those who had never done it before, but this family was the exception. Point blank refused to do it and when they did come to games, they'd just sit there and not help with pitch preparation, fielding practice, putting out the boundary cones, throwing balls to kids who were coming in to bat etc.
It's not all bad though, I've had some great experiences with many parents over the years in both codes and have made heaps of good friendships through it all. But those few rotten eggs just make it so bad for everyone.
