Sound of silence speaks volumes about bawling parents
Lancashire FA’s Silent Weekend, where parents can watch but not shout, proves to be a big success
By Jim White
7:39PM GMT 12 Mar 2014
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There was an unusual noise emanating from the parks and public spaces of Lancashire last weekend. In recreation grounds and council playing fields across the county it was a clatter quite unlike that which can be heard in similar places around Britain every Saturday and Sunday. It was the sound of children’s voices; piping, clear and undisturbed by adult bellowing. And what a glorious row it was.
This was the first of what the Lancashire Football Association hopes will be regular Silent Weekends. The vast majority of junior clubs in the county, covering ages from seven to 18, had signed up to a simple initiative: for one match at least parents, spectators and coaches had to remain silent throughout a football match, restricting their noise to applause in the event of a goal. The only people who were allowed to utter a sound were the players themselves, who could shout as much as they wished.
“It was extraordinary,” says Neil Yates, the Lancashire FA’s county welfare officer and the man whose idea it was. “I went to about half-a-dozen games across the weekend and the best way I can describe the atmosphere was to say it was like going to a school play. The only voices you heard were children’s and the only contribution from adults was the odd round of enthusiastic clapping. It was completely unlike what normally goes on in our parks at the weekend.”
Yates had come up with the idea when he had been watching an under-nines game last year. One of the children playing was in tears. It soon became apparent that the little boy was petrified by the noise emanating from the touchline.
“He was genuinely scared,” recalls Yates. “His bottom lip was trembling. It wasn’t abusive, the shouting from the parents, it was just absolutely overwhelming. Poor lad was simply terrified by all these baying adults.”
Peter Kay used to have a funny line in his stage show about supermarkets being places that British people took their children in order to smack them. Well, junior football has long been the place we all take our kids to shout at them. Not necessarily out of malice or spite, but because that is how we behave at the football. We engage in exactly the same behaviour when watching seven-year-olds as we do when we watch the professional game; yelling, shouting, loudly vocalising our opinion on everything from the referee’s eyesight to the necessity of hitting the target.
And imagine for a moment what it must be like for a child kicking a ball around on a Saturday morning, surrounded by grown-ups yelling at them, bawling at the top of their voices instructions to pass, or shoot, or dribble, opinions flying around at a volume sufficient to provoke industrial injury. It is hardly an environment conducive to improvement or education, let alone enjoyment.
“Junior football is a relatively new concept and we’re only learning how best to approach it through experience,” says Yates. “We’ve now realised kids can’t play as well on big pitches with big goals, so we’ve shrunk that down. But still we parents behave like we do when we go to watch the big boys of a Saturday afternoon. We’ve yet to get our heads round the fact it’s little children out there playing.”
This is the point: junior sport is a new concept for us parents, too. When we played football as kids we did so in pick-up games in the park with our mates, organised by us, without any adult involvement. So we have no idea what it is like to play a game with 40 or so adults bellowing like sea lions at our every touch. If we did, if we imagined how unpleasant and stifling it was, chances are we would not now be behaving like that.
Indeed there is a junior club in the Midlands which every year stages a game for adults, in which the children are encouraged to stand on the touchline yelling the kind of things they have heard during the season. For those adults participating, it is a challenging experience.
I have to confess, when I first started watching my sons play, I would have formed the perfect reverse role model for Yates. I could bawl for Britain. My Damascene conversion came when I went to watch the Manchester United academy train. They did so without any sound emanating from those watching. Parents were encouraged to attend training sessions, but were obliged to sign contracts in which they agreed to remain silent; if they breached the covenant their child could be evicted. The coaches too made no noise at all while the ball was in play.
The reason, I was told by Rene Meulensteen, then in charge of the set up, was that footballers cannot learn how to make their own decisions if they are used to receiving instruction from the touchline. It seemed so obvious when he explained it like that. And I realised that, if that was the best way for elite development, it must be appropriate for the grass roots too.
“I think that’s why the weekend was so successful,” says Yates. “It provoked a raging debate. Some of our coaches felt a bit frustrated, some parents felt it stifled their ability to encourage. But what we were trying to say was: trust the kids, let them work it out for themselves. They’ll never discover how to play properly if you keep shouting instruction at them.”
One of the curses of our time is the rampant adultification of children’s leisure time, the manner in which we have sought to micro-manage our offsprings’ every free moment. It is nowhere more evident than on the touchline of a junior football match – or rugby, or hockey, or tennis, no sport is exempt. All of us parents need to take a step back and analyse our behaviour. Which is why the Lancashire FA’s move was such an enlightened one, an idea which should be rolled out across the country as a matter of course.
The urgency with which it needs to be done is evident in the response of the children themselves to the Silent Weekend. Yates says the universal feedback from youngsters participating in the experiment was that it made it all so much more fun. And ultimately that should be the singular aim of junior football: to nurture a love of the game in the next generation.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/10693435/Sound-of-silence-speaks-volumes-about-bawling-parents.html