I'm a first year volunteer middle school cheer coach. I have set some rules that have been previously agreed upon and that are considered fair by the administration. However, now that some of these girls have broken the rules, their parents have gone over my head time and time again complaining that I am being too strict. Additionally, I have recently named a captain and co-captain for the team, but many parents are complaining about my decisions.

With all that said, how do I try to rectify a situation if the parent continues to go over my head until they find an answer they like? How do I get the parents to see that rules are meant to keep these girls safe? How can I convey that their girl may have an attitude problem as well as a performance problem?

Response from PCA Lead Trainer Joe Terrasi

Thank you for asking the question during a difficult season. Unfortunately, challenging parent situations, attitudes, and actions are a common issue for most youth sports coaches at some point. I’m sorry yours arose in your very first year. I have seen too many fine people leave youth coaching due to difficulty working with parents, and I applaud you for working to resolve the problem and for continuing to coach. Your model of resilience and kindness through difficult interactions will stick with your athletes for their entire lives. Your lessons will stick with them because you stuck with them, and children always remember the coaches and teachers who never gave up on them.  

Throughout most of my career, I have worked as a basketball coach and school administrator. For the last several years in my role at Positive Coaching Alliance, I have been fortunate to work closely with the U. S. All-Star Federation, the organization that supports competitive cheer and dance coaches and athletes and sanctions competitive events in the sport. I have found cheer and dance coaches to be among the most well-informed, skillful, and passionate coaches I have known. I’ve also heard a lot about parents and challenging circumstances like yours. The fierce love of sport is a powerful connector of athletes, parents, and coaches, but it can also make a fertile environment for conflict and disagreement. You didn’t indicate whether this is a competitive cheer squad, but it’s been my experience that the cheer community shares this passion whether their team competes or not. 

As you continue to coach cheer, the powerful emotions of the sport will be a tool you use to help your athletes learn life lessons in a way that is rich and meaningful. At this point, however, you’re facing the challenges created by those emotions. One of the key elements in your story is that communication struggles have caused some people to build further barriers to good communication. As a coach, you are called on to be the master communicator who can model effective problem resolution even when others in the situation can’t (or, as it seems in your case when they won’t). 

One communication strategy I’d offer in your situation is to stress and model the powerful importance of face-to-face communication when the conversation is either important or contentious. No thorny parent problem in youth sports has ever been solved by email. If an issue arises that is important enough for parents to discuss with a coach (or even important enough to contact the school’s administrators), it is important enough to talk about in person (or at least on the phone). You have a great opportunity in this regard right now. You could go to your administrators and thank them for their support thus far. Let them know that you are inviting the parents who are having difficulty to meet with you, and tell them they’re welcome to attend.

It will be essential to start this meeting with an important consensus: The goals of all the adults are aligned. Coaches, parents, and administrators all want to see cheer become a positive experience in the athletes’ lives. You all want them to learn lessons that will serve them long after they are no longer on this team. You may have very different ideas about how those lessons are most effectively taught, but the core belief and goal are almost certainly shared by all of you. Like it or not, the adults at that meeting are a team striving toward shared goals. This disposition is essential. 

In the service of that goal, it will be important to agree that conflict between you that plays out in sight of or within earshot of the athletes does not help any of you. One of the many great life lessons that can come from sports is the belief that we can succeed alongside different kinds of people in the attainment of common goals. At some point, your daughter and her teammates will have a colleague at work with whom they don’t get along. The way the parents and you move forward will have a direct impact on how they face this situation when it inevitably arises.

This meeting also allows you to help the parents understand that speaking ill of coaches or teachers in front of their children helps no one. As I mentioned earlier, powerful emotions can affect us in many ways. They can lead us to react in ways that are contrary to our purpose. If the parent sincerely wants their child to have a great experience, it stands to reason that planting seeds of discontent or mistrust would be a threat to achieving that.

You mentioned rules and rigidity in your question. You also alluded to some very specific criteria for becoming a team captain. Successful teams don't follow rules because they had the good fortune in finding athletes who are inherently better rule-followers. Instead, successful teams are marked by a powerful culture of community, family, and service. When team culture is powerful, athletes are more likely to adhere to team rules because it is uplifting to be part of something great. When I coached younger athletes, I usually chose not to have named captains. Rather, I tried to point out moments in which athletes were doing a great job of being kind and of service to one another. When I started coaching, I worked hard to try to build team cultures that empowered and celebrated athletes. What took me much longer to understand (and even longer to do effectively), was that I was also tasked to build a larger team culture that included parents, teachers, administrators, and other adults invested in the children’s success. 

The rules, violations, consequences, and captaincy are likely some of what is at the core of the complaints. Working with the parents face-to-face will allow all of you to find ways to debate, resolve, and commit to the next steps. Your open-mindedness and kind demeanor will help build trust. Your insistence on working closely as a team of adults will show them that you are not being “soft” or permissive, but that you are a coach and parent who can collaborate to solve problems.

Let’s talk about next season! Keep coaching. Every year I had messy parent problems as a coach, I had a better pre-season parent meeting the following season. Parent concerns and complaints are part of the job. While a great pre-season parent meeting won’t mean you’ll never have a disagreement, it offers you some excellent opportunities: 

• It shows the parents you respect them in their role. This helps encourage them to respect your role as coach.
• It allows you to articulate the values and goals you share and to invite them to be part of a cohesive team of adults who work together. This includes helping them understand that maligning the coach in front of their children is detrimental.
• It gives you an opportunity to outline your process for resolving any concerns or complaints that arise. They’re very likely to agree to a reasonable procedure because they’re not yet clouded by the strong emotions that come with those concerns.

It’s been a difficult first season, but your daughter and her teammates are fortunate to have you working so hard on their behalf. Thank you for your commitment to youth sports.