Youth soccer referee dies after attack

I will add of the 2,000 or so scholastic sports events I've seen over the years, a hundred or so were soccer games, and I would say a disproportionate number of the extended, chin-to-chin, won't-take-no-for-an-answer coach/official confrontations seemed to happen in soccer.

Baseball and basketball of course have lengthy histories of allowing coaches to get in the faces of game officials, but over those decades I have been watching in HS sports (and even the higher levels), it's become less and less tolerated by the administrative powers that be.

In those sports the refs have developed a protocol, "I'll let you bitch for a couple minutes till I get tired of it, (in hoops) I'll tee you up to see if that'll slow you down, but after that I throw your ass out of the game, and when that happens, we are done."

Soccer seems to be the main sport where the coaches keep bitching right on through (and beyond) the final steps of that process.

I covered a soccer game once where a coach got into a 15-minute argument with the ref, stalked out to midfield to go chin-to-chin, the ref was shaking his head, etc etc, he pointed to the locker room, the coach left the field of play, went and sat in the stands, continued to harangue the ref at the top of his lungs, the ref came over and told him to leave the stadium or the game would be forfeited, so the coach went out to the parking lot, got in his car, drove around the block and parked on the street, walked up on the sidewalk outside the stadium and continued to bellow at the ref from outside the stadium.

He tried to argue he wasn't "in the stadium" any more but that wasn't going to fly.

The ref told the assistant coach running the team, "I am going to forfeit this game in 60 seconds. If you can run to the chain link fence in the end zone and tell your buddy to get out of my sight within that time, we'll finish the game, but if that fucker is anywhere within eyeshot or earshot when my stopwatch hits 60, the game is over."

So Assistant Coach Boy sprinted down to the end zone, hollered something at the head coach, who promptly turned and ran and disappeared from sight. Seconds later we heard his tires peeling out as his car cruised away down the highway.

As I recall, the guy got suspended for a couple games.


The problem is, the ref could have dispensed with about 14:30 of that entire process.

 

How many times have people here seen a ref physically assaulted at a game?

I'm guessing we have thousands of sporting events covered by the people reading this board. If they can say they have seen on more than one occasion they have seen seen a ref punched or kicked, in person, I will be very surprised. I never saw it happen in games I covered, coached or reffed.

And this guy seems to have had it happen multiple times.

Either it's the culture of the league, as Starman said, or this guy could not control a game. Getting punched once is one thing. This guy getting beaten up multiple times is another.

 

Well, there are definitely officials in every sport who are pricks and make little effort to hide it.

If they piss off enough people, usually the word gets around to the schools and leagues and they quit getting hired.

I've seen plenty of refs who were contentious, obnoxious and walking examples of the Napoleon complex, but again, I've never seen a coach or player assault them in the middle of a game -- no matter what degree of spewing douchebags they conducted themselves.

 

Goddammit, if only someone had killed this guy for his terrible calls earlier we wouldn't have to be discussing this now!

 

I don't understand why parents would want their kids involved in a sport that glorifies violence like this.

 

Kettle.

 

And for folks trolling ... errr, blaming soccer, I guess we're going to have to blame the culture of other sports too.

Like baseball ... http://miami.cbslocal.com/2012/11/07/exclusive-baseball-umpire-hospitalized-after-catcher-allegedly-attacked-him/

Football ... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/01/sarasota-youth-football-coach-player-attack-referee_n_944890.html

Basketball ... https://www.google.com/search?q=basketball+referee+attacked&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari

Hockey ... http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1842&dat=19960227&id=x1UeAAAAIBAJ&sjid=0sgEAAAAIBAJ&pg=1850,3473027

 

Inky, first guns and now soccer. Two of the most damaging things in past ten years to 'merica and once again you are on the wrong side of the debate.

 

Dawn? Shit...we're approaching high noon.

 

Doesn't appear any of them were killed for being a bad official.

 

I think I've said this before but my sister runs the youth sports leagues where she lives.

She actively recruits off-duty cops to work as officials because parents/players/coaches don't act as stupid when the local state trooper is the guy behind the plate.

The stupid is still incredibly strong in youth sports. I think she said they average about one incident a week where a parent gets ejected from the facility.