Soccer Mom and Social Media

Again, I have come across an article published on NJ.com dealing with parents behaving badly leading to issues for a youth sports team; although, I have to admit that this one is a little different from ones I have written about in the past.  This one involves a soccer mom from New Jersey getting her daughter’s travel soccer team banned from their league due to her cyberbullying a child on the opposing team leading to her daughter’s team being banned from the league.  In my opinion, the question becomes when does a parent cross the line in defending their child and what is the leagues responsibility in defending all the children that play in any given league?

            A synopsis of the incident is as follows.  There was a highly contested girls soccer game with two teams from south Jersey that had recently played a contentious match eight days earlier (again, due to this being a youth sporting event I am not naming the teams or towns involved in this incident).  During the game, a player from one team committed a vicious foul against a player from the other team.  In viewing the video from the incident, the foul was clearly violent and should have led to the player being red carded and ejected; however, the referee only issued a yellow card and allowed the player who committed the foul to remain in the game.  Following the game, the parent of the player who was fouled posted the video of the foul and this has led to a “raging debate over game conduct, parental conduct at games, and more importantly, social media’s role in magnifying youth sports incidents and fanning them into viral clips.”  Now, the mother of the player who was fouled is claiming, “due to her persistent complaints about the incident, and pursuit of accountability from league officials, led to her daughter’s team being banned from the league this fall.”

            The parent posting the video of the event is claiming that she was only “hoping to bring awareness to the incident and spark punitive action from the league.  Instead, the video ignited a deluge of nasty comments and allegations of cyberbullying against the girl who committed the foul.”  Some of the comments are calling the player who committed the hard foul “trash” and “evil” as well as using expletives against her with the parent using the child’s jersey number to identify her in the video and calling her an “evil spirted child.”  In my humble opinion, this behavior clearly crosses the line.  Calling out a child on social media, identifying her by uniform number and then having other parents call her vile things on social media is something that cannot be condoned by anyone, let alone the league where the child’s team played.  The mother has claimed that she did not encourage other parents to post vile things on her Facebook post, but the way things are today, why would she have expected the parents would do anything else.

            The league, after reviewing the video did not dispute that the foul was vicious and the player should have been red carded/ejected from the game. The player was issued a club-sanctioned suspension, and the referee was informed that the foul should have been a red card offense and led to an immediate ejection.  In addition, the referees involved in the incident received additional training.  In my opinion, this is where this incident should have died.  The offending player was suspended, the game officials were counseled on what they should have done and they were given some additional refereeing training, but no, after the mother posted the video and other parents on the team went to social media to cyberbully this young player the league really had no choice but to remove the team from the league as you cannot have parents berating children on social media.

            As stated earlier, I viewed the video and while it is a tad blurry, the foul was vicious and the player should have been red carded, ejected from the game and probably suspended for multiple games and after initially viewing the video before reading the article, I would have been on the side of the child who was fouled, the fouling player should have been ejected from the game; however, once the parent started cyberbullying the opposing player she lost the moral high ground and forced the league to take a stand that I am sure they did not want to take.  Board members that run youth leagues have to weigh all the evidence when something comes before them and sometimes make tough decisions and as a former Board member of our local youth soccer league we were often faced with having to make decisions that would possibly hurt a child or a family; however, we always lived by the Machiavelli the word Machiavellian philosophy of “the good of the many outweigh the good of the few.”  In my opinion the league made the correct decision by removing the team whose parent started the cyberbullying campaign.  No parent/adult can be allowed to cyberbully a child, whether it was intentional or not, because the player who committed the foul is still a child who should never have been subjected to that type of behavior.

Many times, as parents, we teach our children that “actions have consequences”, well in this case it is the parent who needs to realize that her actions had consequences and those consequences caused her daughter’s team to be tossed from the league and hopefully it is a lesson that is well learned.