Bangor East Side Little League President Dale Duff said his father, Carl, taught him a valuable life lesson when he played baseball for him.
“There was a play at the plate that went against us and we were all upset. We thought the umpire made a bad call. I said, ‘Dad you’ve got to go argue that.’ He said, ‘I don’t think we need to do that. Let’s just play.’ Forty-something years later, I still remember that,” Duff said.
Coaches play a pivotal role for young athletes, but when those coaches also have children on their team, it presents a challenge in local athletic leagues, whose process for finding and vetting coaches is more stringent than ever.
This relationship was brought into focus recently in the Brewer Little League after one of its softball coaches, who had a daughter on the team, was ejected and then arrested at an ages 9-10 District 3 all-star game in Bangor.
The days of asking an available father if he could show up the next night to coach a team are long gone.
On the Little League level, it has been replaced by background checks. All local Little Leagues are required to conduct background checks on managers, coaches, directors, volunteers and hired workers.
Maine Sports Hall of Fame coach Paula Doughty, who has guided the Skowhegan Area High School field hockey team to 12 Class A state championships in the last 14 years, oversees that sport at every level in Skowhegan.
“No. 1, we look for coaches who love kids,” said Doughty. “No. 2, we try not to have parents coach their own daughters. I have a lot of terrific parents but they tend to lose perspective when they coach their own kids. No. 3, we ask ourselves if they can make it fun for the kids so they learn to love the sport and not just want to compete in the sport.”
Others continue to have mixed feelings about parents being allowed to coach their own kids.
“We try not to have parents coach their own kids as much as possible but it’s difficult to do that in the Bangor area,” said M.J. Ball, coaching director and a coach for the the River City Athletics travel soccer program in Bangor. “There isn’t a hotbed of coaches in the area. Sometimes it’s a good fit.”
Duff concurred.
“We’d be really scrambling for coaches if we didn’t let parents coach their own kids and that’s not just us, that’s for every sport,” he said.
Several acknowledged that parents often get involved in coaching because their sons or daughters are playing.
“It is rare to have somebody come into the program who wants to coach and doesn’t have a kid involved,” said Cheryl Derrah, Bangor West Little League baseball and softball president and former Bangor Youth Hockey president.
“We want to ensure that a person with the necessary skills is in it for the right reason, not to make sure their child bats first and plays every game,” District 3 Little League administrator Mike Brooker said.
Duff supplies a handout to parents who are coaching their own children with tips on how to handle the situation.
“One of the tips is don’t bring up the game on your way home unless your son or daughter brings it up,” said Duff, who coached all five of his children.
“You have to have the right personality and temperament to coach your own kids,” said Duff. “You have to make sure they understand that if you have your own kids on the team, people will be watching [how you handle it].”
Shawn Mott was the head coach of the Brewer-Orrington ages 9-10 Little League baseball all-star team, which meant coaching his son Brayden.
He said he told his son people would be watching him to see “how you played, how you hustled and how you reacted to different things.”
“They would be watching to see if he was playing just because his dad was the coach. It wasn’t a position I wanted him to be in or me to be in. So he was going to have to earn his playing time,” said Mott. “I was a little harder on him than the other kids. He didn’t play the whole game regardless of how he was doing. All the kids played a fair amount of time. And he often played positions he wasn’t accustomed to or that he didn’t like to play.”
Some parents who are youth league coaches are also harder on their own kids than the other players. That has been the case for Brewer Little League administrator Corey Bobb and Bangor West Little League coach Nat Clark, each of whom has coached his three children.
“My kids should know how to behave,” explained Bobb.
“You’re harder on them, even though you try not to be, because you know your child better than the other kids. You know what makes them tick,” said Clark. “I always ask my kids before the season if they want me to coach and they’re honest with me. If they didn’t want me to coach them, I wouldn’t.”
Duff said there is a small pool of coaches who continue to coach after their kids leave the program and he believes having them coach is the ideal situation.
Overall, he believes fewer people are coaching in youth leagues, but it’s not just because of the policies that are in place.
“You get a lot of people who offer to help coach but they don’t want to be the [head coach]. They don’t want the responsibility and everything else that comes with it,” Duff said.
Now in his 10th season as the president of the Bangor East Side Little League, Duff also said administrators in his league and other leagues have had to discipline coaches or ask them not to return.
“Sometimes you have to be the bad guy. That comes with [being an administrator]. I don’t enjoy that part. Sometimes you have to tell a coach to take some time off from coaching,” said Duff. “My famous line at our coaches’ meeting, something I’ve said 14 million times is, ‘It’s only Little League.’”
Duff is one of four members of the Bangor East Side Little League coaches committee, which scrutinizes every coach before he or she is allowed to take over a team. Bangor West Side Little League also has a committee that approves its coaches.
Little League International has a code of conduct its coaches must abide by and it requires that coaches re-apply every year. Bangor East has developed its own code of conduct “with a little more bite to it,” said Duff.
Brooker, at District 3 Little League, said sometimes you have to lend some perspective to coaches.
“Sometimes you have to remind coaches that what happens in Little League isn’t going to define their child’s career or their coaching career,” Brooker said. “The Red Sox aren’t going to be interested in you just because you win the league championship.”