Bad sportsmanship defeats East County school athletics {Contra Costa, CA}

Contra Costa Times ^ | 11/27/6 | Andrew Becker

[SmithL]

PITTSBURG - The recent decision to abandon after-school athletics at Pittsburg's two junior high schools was the last strand in the unraveling of a middle school sports league in East County.

While Pittsburg Unified School District board members based their decision to not fund the teams on a lack of money, league officials said the collapse of the Delta Valley Middle School League started with over-the-top competitiveness and the boorish behavior of spectators and coaches. Some suggest that racial undertones and sore losers also contributed to the demise of the once-robust league.

The breakdown illuminates bigger concerns, such as the growing emphasis on youth sports and diversity issues in East County, where the demographic landscape has changed considerably in the past 25 years.

"When it comes to the public middle schools here, I'm appalled" by the behavior, said Gary Abono, who assigns referees to area games and has officiated high school basketball for 31 years. "High school is nothing compared to what's going on at the middle schools. ... There's definitely a lack of sportsmanship."

Once composed of schools from Pittsburg, Antioch, Brentwood, Oakley, Byron and Knightsen, the league splintered into an east division that keeps to itself and a west division consisting of Antioch -- which has decided to not play other districts this year -- and Pittsburg, which had some of the league's best teams. Few East Bay middle schools play sports against teams from outside their districts.

Calling the behavior of parents and coaches "outrageous," Abono said some officials don't want to officiate East County middle school games, and he's not sure he wants to assign them.

Among the incidents since the league started in 2004 are an upset coach throwing a chair against a gym wall, a girl taking off her jersey and tossing it across a gym floor to protest a call, and even two parents fighting in the stands and starting a brawl that Antioch police had to break up, Abono said.

"Parents a lot of the time set a bad example for kids. People feel like they've paid $2 to get into the game and can act how they want," said Annette Taylor, a Park Middle School parent who has also coached boys and girls basketball there. "The emphasis needs to be on scholar-athletes instead of athlete-scholars."

A father of a Bristow Middle School girl earlier this month yelled obscenities and poked the chest of a woman who coaches the Knightsen School seventh-grade girls basketball team. The man, upset after his daughter's team lost by two points, accused the Knightsen coach of instructing her players to play dirty, said former league commissioner Vickey Rinehart.

"Ninety-nine percent of the time, the problem is parents' behavior at games -- how they treat referees, how they treat coaches," she said. "It's very, very sad."

Rinehart, who was commissioner during the league's first two years, said that between December 2005 and May 2006 she received more than 25 complaints regarding spectator, coach and player behavior, with the bulk having to do with parents or spectators. All the complaints stemmed from basketball games.

John Engh of the Florida-based National Alliance For Youth Sports said bad behavior has become more common because of the importance society puts on getting children involved in competitive sports at an early age.

"The more pressure on the field, the more emotion there will be in the stands," Engh said.

He added that many parents live through their children's sports experiences: "They consider themselves a failure because they didn't make it, so they are going to do everything possible so that their child makes it."

He said about 70 percent of children quit sports by the age of 13, with the No. 1 reason being it's not fun anymore because parents and coaches put too much pressure on winning.

Several people interviewed for this story, including Rinehart and Pittsburg school board member Ruben Rosalez, said far East County schools were frustrated because Pittsburg teams regularly beat them. But Hillview Principal Todd Whitmire, who serves as the commissioner of the east division even though his school is not in the league, said the collapse goes beyond competition.

"Pittsburg has the worst reputation for fan and spectator behavior," he said, adding that he had to visit far East County schools for "damage control" -- allaying parents' fears of Pittsburg students. "Some parents are flat-out racist. ... The underlying premise is, far East hasn't addressed issues of diversity."

Rinehart sees three reasons for the far East County schools not wanting to play the west schools -- safety, a losing record and race issues.

"People don't want to talk about it, but I think it was always there under the surface," Rinehart said of race. "Knightsen and Byron are not ethically mixed."

But Greg Hetrick, principal of Delta Vista Middle School in Brentwood and commissioner of the defunct west division, said race has nothing to do with it. At Delta Vista, for instance, white students are in the minority, he said, so the racial makeup of other schools isn't a concern. Rather, it was transportation issues -- cost and time -- and competitiveness that made such schools question their participation, he said.

"We felt we needed to break away from it," he said. "Nothing against Pittsburg or Antioch. It takes a long time to get there."

The far East County schools have dropped championships, but they still keep score. That was evident at a recent game between Excelsior and Delta Vista, when some parents yelled repeatedly across the court that the score was wrong.

"It's hard for parents to not get involved, but they need to realize how they respond is a lesson for their kids," said Lorraine Simpkins, who has daughters who play on the sixth- and eighth-grade basketball teams at Excelsior School in Byron.

The catalyst for the league's disintegration was the fight that became a brawl last December during a girls west division championship game between Antioch's Dallas Ranch Middle and Pittsburg's Central Junior High. According to an Antioch police report, at least 10 adults were involved in the fight, which Stephanie Anello, who was a vice principal last year at Dallas Ranch, described as "disturbing."

The day after the fight, Abono sent a letter to the league's commissioner and all the schools stating that he wouldn't supply officials to league games until the behavior problems were resolved.

Following a series of meetings over the winter and spring, Antioch schools decided the league had become too competitive and they would no longer participate. Pittsburg dropped out of the league in June after being told that schools in Brentwood, Oakley and other areas in far East County would not travel to Pittsburg to compete.

Clarence Isadore, Black Diamond Middle School principal, declined to discuss past incidents other than to say "both parents and students were at issue" and that the league had become too competitive. He said that it was time to go "back to the drawing board" to create a new tone for the school.

When asked why the school needed to start over, he replied, "Why not start over?

"We need to take charge and teach," Isadore said, adding that he held a parent meeting to discuss good behavior. "Antioch wants to start with values."

[Mr. Jeeves]

Another wonderful example of writing a whole story without quite mentioning the elephant in the ballroom: ill-behaved black kids, who can't be properly disciplined due to the politically correct attitudes of school administrators.

[USMCWife6869]

My husband has coached (voluntarily, mind you) for the high school's football program for the past two years, and he does so at every duty station we go to. It takes up an enormous amount of his own time, even through the summer. I am shocked at the amount of parents that are horrible to him because their kids aren't good enough to be out there the whole game. These kids will blow off practice, or they are foul and vulgar to the coaches and their teammates, so they don't get played one game. Then the parents show up and start screaming in dh's face and poking their finger in his chest. It just blows my mind. Dh's response is always this: We are desperate for more volunteers, you are more than welcome to come out and help.

Even if he weren't deploying, he said he wouldn't do it again this year. He says it just isn't worth it anymore. Sad, really. He said too many kids have T.O. syndrome now and the parents take whatever fun is left in it after dealing with that.