The Rise of Snowplow Parents

[IWokeUpLikeThis]

https://www.si.com/nfl/2019/06/19/snowp ... nts-sports

In football as in other sports, they’re drawing up business plans, starting marketing agencies, turning up at practice and even monitoring phone use.

The overactive parent is as old a concept as sports itself, but coaches and agents across football, basketball, baseball and hockey say that over the last few years, parents have become more involved in their children’s athletic careers than ever before—and it is reshaping sports.

The phenomenon also reflects what’s happening in the rest of society, says psychologist Madeline Levine, an expert on the topic. “It used to be helicopter parenting,” she says. “And now it is snowplow parenting, which is much more active: It means you are doing something to smooth the way for the child. It’s not just that you’re hypervigilant—it’s that you are actually getting rid of those bumps, which robs kids of the necessary experience of learning and failing.”

Call it the age of the sportsplow parent. And as ever, job one is controlling the narrative.

As the fifth-youngest team in the NBA to start this past season, the Phoenix Suns—average age 25.1—sometimes gave the whiff of a youth travel team. Players’ parents had a habit of showing up early to games to watch warmups and on some occasions even sat in on private team workouts and practices.

One NBA agent says he’s had a parent watch practice only once, in a special situation. “That seems super odd to me,” he says. According to a person familiar with the Suns, parents’ heavy hands had a harmful effect on players, forcing staff to provide constant instruction on basic adult tasks, like setting alarm clocks.

Nearly every pro agent has a story. One who works in baseball says a player asked him if he could sue his parents to keep them from coming to his games. There was the mother who was so “addicted to her son’s performance,” in the agent’s words, that he suggested therapy to her. And then the mom who tracked her son’s phone calls on a spreadsheet, in order to keep tabs on how much time he was wasting on the phone and who he was talking to.

“They start training their kid like an Olympian from age four, and it has really become a full-time job,” the agent says. “When the planets align and you have the crazy parent and you also have the talented child, then you have a professional athlete. That’s it, I’m telling you, [with] like 90% of the players I work with.”

One NHL agent says he’s constantly fielding calls during the season from parents who are convinced their son is going to get traded because they read about it on a blog or Twitter. “Over the last 10 years, it has changed so incredibly,” the agent says. “Now, they have the Internet and all the info that comes with it.”

For parents who successfully navigate their kids to coveted college scholarships, involvement often doesn’t end at the campus gates. Recruiting directors for two major college football programs say that in the last 10 years, it has become normal for two or three sets of parents in every recruiting class to pick up and move to town. College basketball coaches are noticing the same trend. “It’s not a lot,” says one former recruiting director, “but it never really happened before.”

College coaches and recruiting directors say that in recent years they’ve had to place more emphasis on re-recruiting players every year because many parents will suggest their child transfer if everything isn’t going perfectly. That impulse to constantly intervene to make sure the child is in the best possible position is not unique to sports. “The child’s life is the parent’s life,” says Julie Lythcott-Haims, former dean of freshmen at Stanford and author of How to Raise an Adult. “The parents feel like, What would I do if I wasn’t constantly involved in my kids’ activities? There is no trust in the systems—the parents do not trust that the adults around the child are doing a good job.”

Coaches are increasingly finding ways to deal with greater parent involvement. At Notre Dame, Brey assigns an assistant coach to each set of parents, and they are responsible for checking in with them every two weeks because “even when we have kids on campus, parents can control the vibe and the head and the attitude,” he says.

Many major programs have started football parent leadership committees to help moms and dads feel more connected and relieve some of the burden from the coaching staff of having to constantly communicate with more than 100 sets of parents. One of the first such programs was Football Parents at Ohio State, and other schools came calling for advice on how to replicate that model. The OSU group has parents who serve as president, vice president and secretary to help organize events and travel, with information hosted on their own website.

Agents are also trying to find new ways to cope. Two years ago, hockey agent Allain Roy was flying home with his teenage son after spending several thousand dollars to take him to a weekend baseball showcase to improve his chances of getting a college scholarship. He started wondering, Is this worth the investment? How much is too much involvement? He started typing out his thoughts into a post for his agency’s blog, writing, “As we rush to fix every little blemish in our kids’ lives and try to influence their way to success, we cause more irreparable damage than we know.”

High school camps are also adding curricula for parents to learn how to communicate with college and professional coaches. Meanwhile, coaches are adapting their recruiting pitches to fit the marketing and branding ambition of today’s parents and athletes. “For parents of kids that are trending toward being elite, the reward is unbelievable, with the money, the contracts, the shoe money,” says Brey. “It’s blown parents’ minds more than the kids’ minds how you can really make it financially. What you are having to sell now is, Here is how we are going to help your brand. This is what Notre Dame is going to do for your individual brand.”

Many coaches, like Brey, are setting clear boundaries with parents in order to preserve their sanity. They will not discuss playing time during the season, but they keep the lines of communication open through other coaches on staff. “Instead of complaining about it, I told our staff, We need to manage it,” Brey says. “It is part of the culture now. Manage it.”