Taming the Sideline: How to Be a Supportive, Not "Crazy," Sports Parent

Skye Eddy, a former U.S. Women’s National Team hopeful and now a fervent advocate for positive youth sports parenting, believes the phenomenon of "crazy sports parents" is actively detrimental to the experience for everyone involved. These are the parents who become overly invested, living vicariously through their children’s athletic pursuits. They often harbor unrealistic expectations and can be so unreasonable that constructive communication becomes nearly impossible.

Eddy speaks from experience, both as a player and a coach. "As a coach, I’ve had an irrational parent on my team, and it has made my season miserable," she recounts. "They’ve been taking way too much of my time and energy from the children by asking too many questions. And so as coaches, when we’ve been in those experiences, we say, ‘OK, well, we’re just gonna avoid all parents, because that was a really difficult season.’"

The irony is that even Eddy, a former defensive MVP for George Mason in the NCAA women’s soccer Final Four and a former coach at the University of Richmond, found herself facing the “crazy parent” label. She describes a palpable shift in demeanor from an organization’s executive director when she approached him. Suddenly, she was perceived as "a crazy parent, complaining about my daughter." Eddy clarifies, "I’m like, ‘Oh no, no, no, I’m just here to help,’" but the door had already closed.

This experience became the catalyst for her passion project, soccerparenting.com, a nationwide resource boasting approximately 43,000 members. The website offers guidance, training, and encouragement for coaches, parents, and youth sports leaders, all with the shared objective of fostering better understanding and communication within the youth sports ecosystem.

Eddy’s insights, gleaned from both personal experience and extensive research, reveal that the vast majority of parents are far from "crazy." Instead, they are generally level-headed individuals simply dealing with heightened stress levels.

"Parenting is stressful these days, like society’s stressful," Eddy, a 53-year-old mother of two, emphasizes. "You add on a sports experience, and there is a lot."

Her work encourages parents to take a more introspective look at their own behavior and its impact on their children’s athletic experiences. USA TODAY Sports, drawing from Eddy’s insights, has identified practical strategies for managing stress and improving the overall environment in which young athletes participate.

Eddy, a former goalkeeper who played professionally in Italy and reached the highest levels of U.S. women’s soccer in the 1990s, vehemently rejects the notion that she was projecting her own athletic aspirations onto her daughter, Cali, who also became an elite soccer player in high school.

"I loved my athletic career," Eddy states firmly. "I just didn’t know what to say to her to help her, because our mindsets are so different."

Cali expressed a strong desire to play Division I soccer and was attracting interest from various programs. However, she struggled to actively pursue those opportunities. "She would not pick up a phone and call the coach," Eddy explains. "She was struggling with her self-esteem, her confidence around herself as an athlete, and so she really needed coaches calling her. She needed to be built up like that.”

Eddy initially viewed the situation through the lens of her own experiences and how she would have approached the situation. Later, she encountered the concept of "Decoupling," which helped her understand Cali’s perspective.

Decoupling, a term often associated with romantic relationships where individuals intentionally reduce their emotional connection while maintaining a friendship, can also apply to the evolving relationship between parents and their teenage athletes.

"It’s sort of like not feeling things so deeply, letting our children dictate the path and us really being OK with it," she explains. "That is the learning, the making the mistakes: Not calling the coach, not eating the right food, or going to the sleepover the night before and playing really badly."

Eddy believes that parents, driven by a sense of high stakes, often over-intervene in their children’s athletic journeys.

So, how can parents redirect their behavior and create a more supportive environment? It begins with being mindful of their actions on the sidelines, even when their children are very young.

Many parents, perhaps unintentionally, project their own stress onto their children. Excessive cheering, jumping up and down, and constant calling to them can all be signs of this.

"That’s stress," Eddy asserts.

Soccer Parenting’s Sideline Project aims to educate parents about appropriate game-day behavior. It identifies three distinct types of sideline behaviors.

"Distracting behavior serves one primary purpose: To alleviate our stress as parents and coaches," Eddy explains in her Sideline Project online course. "Players should be hearing their teammates and reasonable information from their coach, not their parents."

She utilizes the Stroop Effect, named after an American psychologist who studied selective attention, processing speed, and interference, to illustrate the impact of parental distractions on a child’s focus. The interactive exercise highlights how even seemingly innocuous interruptions can disrupt a child’s concentration during a game.

“There’s a lag,” Eddy says, describing the effect. “This moment of interruption. That is how your child feels when they are playing, concentrating on the technical skill and what their decision is going to be, and they hear your voice telling them to shoot or pass.” Instead, Eddy suggests, a good youth coach provides subtle cues, such as a nod, a whistle, a finger point, or a closed fist, to trigger something they worked on in practice.

“Whatever it is that we’re screaming, we’re taking away their learning opportunity,” Eddy emphasizes.

Eddy also shares an anecdote about her daughter, Cali, a tough defender who once reported that another team’s parent was giving her the middle finger from the sidelines.

"I said, ‘You do realize I’m 13 and you’re a grown adult, right?’” Cali recounted to her mother.

Eddy estimates that only a small percentage of youth sports parents, perhaps one per team, exhibit such overtly hostile behavior. However, many more engage in distracting behaviors that can be corrected with awareness and effort.

U.S. Soccer has recently implemented a referee abuse prevention policy for youth and amateur soccer, imposing suspensions ranging from two games to lifetime bans for individuals who belittle, berate, insult, harass, touch, or physically assault sports officials.

Eddy encourages reporting abusive behavior and removing those individuals from the youth sports environment. "They are not part of our experience," she stresses.

Eddy adds, "I like to sit with the opposing team’s fans when my sons are pitching in their baseball games. While I get a different video angle, I meet new people and feel and hear their emotions. Sometimes I just listen to them. It helps remind me why we are all in this. We care so much about sport because of the connection."

Cali briefly quit soccer at the age of eight because she found it boring. The practices involved standing in lines, repeating the same warm-up routines, and lacking adequate instruction. Despite the program being labeled as "advanced development," Eddy felt it was failing to inspire a love for the game. When she inquired about other parents’ opinions, they seemed content with the environment.

"It struck me that until parents understand what a good learning environment looks like, to lead to player inspiration and joy and really giving kids a connection to sport, then we’re really going to be missing a big part of the solution when it comes to improving youth sports," she says.

Eddy believes that parents often avoid questioning or challenging the status quo for fear of being perceived as "crazy." "The last thing we want to do is be perceived as one of these irrational parents, so we’re not curious, we don’t ask questions, we don’t listen to our instincts, we don’t follow up when we probably should, because we don’t want to be perceived to care too much when there’s a big difference between being irrational and caring."

This realization prompted her to become a youth coach herself and ultimately led to the creation of soccerparenting.com.

A foundational principle of soccerparenting.com is to foster open communication between coaches and parents while establishing clear and appropriate boundaries.

Here are some suggested parameters a coach can use:

The door is open to chat… When your kid comes home from practice in a bad mood or doesn’t want to go the next day; if he or she is having trouble playing a particular position; if you don’t fully understand the scoring system or rules of the sport.

The door is closed to chat… If you have a complaint about another player that doesn’t involve a safety issue; if you’re wondering why the coach made a tactical decision; if you don’t respect a coach’s time and want to have a long conversation after practice. (You can schedule one instead.)

“We see the correlation between parents having more understanding and the children’s experience getting better, and then therefore clubs and coaches having to get better,” Eddy concludes.

Eddy acknowledges that even with the best intentions, parents can slip up. She recalls an instance where she spontaneously blurted out, "You really need to work on your left foot," to Cali during a game, despite having no intention of saying that.

Palmer Neill, a parent from Dallas, shared a helpful rule of thumb: “Basically, when you feel like doing something at a game or practice other than cheer or clap… just don’t do it. Let the coach be the coach and let the ref, ref. You don’t have (a) role. Life gets a lot easier when you realize this."

Neill also recognizes that mistakes happen. When he finds himself instinctively yelling instructions to his 10-year-old son, he consciously makes an effort to remain seated, giving himself an extra moment to think before reacting.

Eddy emphasizes that self-education and reflection can significantly reduce parental stress.

She suggests the following:

Know the rules (and recent modifications to them).

Know your kid’s goals in sports.

Be curious, not upset, when other kids have more skills than yours.

She encourages parents to consider factors such as the Relative Age Effect, where athletes born earlier in their age group may have a physical advantage, or the fact that some children may have developed better movement skills through participation in multiple sports or unstructured play.

Eddy also encourages parents to put their own athletic experiences into perspective.

"What did you do when you were eight? Twelve? Sixteen?" she asks.

Reflecting on her own childhood, Eddy recalls spending time socializing at the local skating rink. She only trained with her soccer team twice a week, spending her off days practicing in a local park.

She used to wonder if Cali, who returned to soccer on her own terms, was getting enough practice.

“What would I have been doing if I was in intense practices for an hour and a half four days a week, plus traveling to a lot in the games?” Eddy says. “Would I still have been doing that? Likely not.”

Eddy recognizes that youth sports seem to carry more weight in today’s world, particularly with increased opportunities for college exposure. However, she also acknowledges the value of recreational sports, recalling instances of parents yelling at her son, Davis, when he missed a shot during a rec soccer game.

Davis, now in college, had a positive experience playing sports at a smaller high school. "Having that outlet for sport was really important to his development, just as a person, and getting some space and, kind of way to blow off some steam as a student," she says.

Cali’s decision to work at a sleepaway camp the summer before her junior year, a critical time for college recruiting, proved to be a pivotal moment. While she missed out on some recruiting opportunities, she ultimately became a Division III All-American and now works for the Columbus Crew.

"I remember thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s so hard for you,’ but not saying that out loud," Eddy recalls. "That was a really important capstone to a really important thing in our life. Yet, she really missed a lot of opportunities, and there were consequences of that. We just need to make sure that it’s our child’s voice that we’re hearing. We are when we let them lead the way, to choose friends over sports when they wish, and to have those sleepovers. Well, maybe not the sleepovers."