In Florida and beyond, youth sports has problems, and it’s costing the kids

Ed Pena has heard it dozens of times.

On a Saturday at the soccer field, amid the sounds of whistles and cheers and cleats thumping mud ― there comes an F-bomb sailing through the air, aimed directly at him.

“I’ve been cursed out, I’ve had my car keyed,” Pena said. “It didn’t used to be this way.”

As one of Florida’s longest-tenured soccer officials, he’s seen it all: Parents shouting profanities at players, fueled by thermoses full of alcohol. Coaches chasing officials to their vehicles, spitting incessant insults. Even threats of violence.

Youth sporting events have always paired orange slices with a healthy dose of competition. Heckling or sharing a tense exchange with a coach after the final whistle is par for the course, especially as the level of play climbs. But the last decade, Pena and other officials say, has brought a wave of hostility that’s eroding the culture of youth sports.

“We’re losing refs, and we’re losing players because of it,” said Pena.

It’s not just taunts and jeers chipping away at the joys of youth sports. Hefty fees and pressure-cooker stakes have ramped up tensions on the sidelines. Parents want payoff, officials say, and the spillover can be damaging to kids still developing as athletes.

Hanging up their whistles

In February 2022, the organization that oversees high school sports across the U.S. issued a statement of crisis.

They had lost approximately 50,000 referees in three years, mirroring shortages at the travel and recreational sport level.

The COVID-19 pandemic played a part, but there was another culprit: poor sportsmanship and abuse from coaches and parents.

Today in Florida, just shy of 8,000 referees work at the high school level, down more than 400 from the 2015-16 year, the last time there were healthy numbers, according to Jeremy Hernandez, director of officials for the Florida High School Athletic Association.

Numbers are ticking back up after a pandemic low point. Still, Hernandez gets multiple calls a month from officials ready to hang up their whistles.

“It’s not just the new ones. It’s our veteran officials who have been doing this for 20 or 30 years,” he said. “They don’t feel that it’s worth it anymore because of the risk.”

Last year in Florida, a dad at an Osceola County baseball field was arrested for punching an umpire. The year before, in Georgia, a referee got 30 stitches after being attacked by parents and eighth grade players at a church basketball game. At a Colorado hockey game, a parent sprayed Lysol in a referee’s face.

In Ohio, a parent was arrested and three coaches suspended after a “brawl” at a Little League football game. At a youth football game in Texas, shots were fired after parents got into a fight and one pulled out a gun. And this month, in Pinellas County, a physical altercation between soccer parents ended with a call to police.

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A survey of some 35,000 referees across the U.S. by the National Association of Sports Officials last year found that more than half reported feeling unsafe at work.

After all, referees are vulnerable: They don’t often have a locker room and they take midgame breaks in plain sight. Officials also have no enforcement mechanism when reprimanding parents or coaches slinging hostilities beyond the last resort of ejecting a harasser. And when the game ends, they often walk to the parking lot alone.

More than 1 in 10 reported having been physically assaulted during or after a game. Then there’s verbal abuse, which often goes unreported.

“Where else is that behavior acceptable? You wouldn’t treat a bank teller like that, a teacher,” said Dana Pappas, who as director of officiating for the National Federation of State High School Associations oversees officials all over the country.

The shortage and dearth of recruits should concern anyone invested in youth sports, said Hernandez, the Florida officiating director. Without enough officials, games have to be rescheduled or canceled.

“They need to feel safe doing their job,” he said.

A rise in incivility

Like many officials, Ava Cassa was drawn to the job because of her love of the game.

Ava, now 17, had been playing soccer for more than a decade when she got certified to referee at age 14. She liked the idea of getting paid to be outside, and the weekend hours worked well with her school schedule.

She had already intuited that sportsmanship was on the decline. She’d heard parents shout red-faced at referees and teammates — seen them get kicked out of games.

But it wasn’t until she wore her own whistle, until a parent called her a “f---ing idiot” while she was reffing a U-10 game, that the extremity of it all sunk in.

“You’re 45, and you’re yelling that at a 17-year-old,” Ava said. “The way people speak is so inhumane.”

From political discourse to the way we interact with service workers, research has found that we are, in fact, growing less civil.

A professor at the University of North Carolina surveyed 2,000 frontline employees, including sports officials, and found hostile exchanges to be on the rise. Driving those emotions, she found, were feelings of stress and overwhelm. Another reason was “general negativity” tied in part to the news cycle.

“We’re picking up on the negativity and taking it out on others in ways that are problematic,” said Christine Porath, who co-authored the book “The Cost of Bad Behavior.”

Incivility, she found, is contagious. On the sidelines, for instance, one particularly rowdy fan can degrade the atmosphere.

“When people are very bought in and emotions are high, it doesn’t take a lot to get others riled up,” Porath said. “Even when people are responding in an effort to mitigate, it can escalate.”

Alcohol doesn’t help, said Pena, the Florida referee.

“You pull up to any sports complex on a tournament weekend and there are parents tailgating at 9 in the morning, mixing Bloody Marys from the back of their trucks,” Pena said. “They’re buckling in for a long day, and having a good time, and it shows. Not always in a good way.”

Even indirect exposure — like a player hearing a parent jeering at a referee — can hurt performance, Porath cautioned.

Abigail Alvarez, an 18-year-old from Palm Harbor, said that’s been true for her. Once a five-sport athlete, she now plays basketball at junior college.

“I would mess up and I would hear these parents yell at me and I don’t even know who they are,” Alvarez said. “Sometimes you want a kid to do better, but you’re actually causing them more harm.”

Recently, during a college game, a man in the stands called her a “fatass,” loud enough for everyone to hear.

“There is no reason for a grown man to be saying that to me,” Alvarez said. “You can be passionate, but still be a decent human being.”

The pay-to-play problem

Youth sports in the U.S. is an estimated $19 billion industry — roughly equivalent to the NFL’s revenue in 2023. The Aspen Institute found that the average family spends $883 per child, per sport, each year, though costs vary drastically.

To compete at a high level of youth soccer, for example, parents can shell out around $10,000 a season between travel expenses, uniforms and club fees — all for one kid.

In decades past, youth sports were offered through local recreation departments or the YMCA, said George Cunningham, chairperson of the department of sport management at the University of Florida. Today, more sports are offered through club — or travel — organizations, with full-time coaches and multimillion-dollar sports complexes. As investment grows, so can parents’ expectations of things like championship trophies and college scholarships.

“They want to see a return,” Cunningham said. “That can carry over to the pressures athletes feel.”

Of more than 150 comments responding to Tampa Bay Times inquiries about the changing culture of youth sports in local Facebook groups, a third mentioned the rising cost of participation.

“We’ve spent thousands of dollars,” one parent wrote. “The cost of college tuition.”

Clubs have a responsibility to enforce “zero tolerance” policies for abuse, said Christina Unkel, former president of the Florida Soccer Referees, now the president of Tampa Bay’s new professional women’s soccer club, the Tampa Bay Sun.

“But no one wants to enforce it because the parents are the ones who are paying, and it’s a business,” Unkel said. “That has to change.”

While youth club administrators and high-level coaches can earn healthy salaries, the people who oversee referees are essentially volunteers. Money needs to flow into referee administration as well, longtime officials said.

“It takes a lot to be a good official,” said Terrell Dukes, lead coordinator for basketball referees in Pinellas County. “You have to spend a lot of money out of your own pocket, and then you don’t get compensated well,” Dukes said. “So as quick as we get good officials, they leave and go try their hand at college or walk away altogether. This isn’t going to pay their bills.”

Saving the game

Earlier this year, Bruce Hoffman was refereeing a high school girls’ soccer game near Gainesville when a group of fans had to be removed from the stands for making inappropriate comments to players.

Afterward, a police officer escorted Hoffman and other officials to their cars when a man began hurling insults from the back of his pickup truck.

The officials hardly noticed, Hoffman said. The officer, however, “read the man the riot act.”

“We were kind of amused,” said Hoffman, who has been officiating for 40 years. “When you’ve been doing it this long, you tend to get hardened to it. You just don’t hear it.”

But newer officials, said Hoffman, really do.

According to the National Association of Sports Officials survey, most referees quit within their first three years.

Across all sports, referees’ average age is 57.

For many years, Hoffman ran classes for new referees. Of the 50 or 60 enrollees, Hoffman said it was fairly common there’d be no more than two or three still refereeing by the end of the year.

“They’d get out on the field for the first time and somebody starts screaming at them, and that’s it, they’re gone,” Hoffman said. “I mean, how many people want to go into work and be verbally abused every day?”

Becoming a good referee takes time, said Unkel.

“Parents will expect these high-level, professional referees refereeing their kids’ games,” she said. But in this supercharged environment, “you’re no longer getting enough referees just to fill games, let alone high quality.”

She likens the declining culture to climate change.

“It’s happening, it’s alive, it’s real,” she said. “And we’re at the point where it’s going to be irreversible if we don’t do something about it.”