Nathan Acheson wrote an awesome piece in the last issue about the Miami-FIU brawl that occurred recently. As I normally do, I read each piece in our magazine to see what I can learn from it and then try to apply it to my life and my viewpoint. Amazingly, not long after reading his article, a headline popped up on ESPN.com.

As I read the story, I sat here wondering why it continues to happen. A man, upset that his son didn’t get enough playing time in 6and 7 year old football, pulled a gun on the head coach. The good part is that no one was hurt physically, but emotionally, every child there was scarred for life, and taught a life lesson that they need to quickly forget.

We hear about it at least a dozen times each year where a parent goes ballistic on either an umpire or a coach. They have been shot, beaten up, and threatened, all because a kid on a pee-wee team didn’t get to play enough or because they lost. Where are your values? We have this mentality, not only in sports, but in business and politics as well, of win at all cost and in sports, parents are trying to turn their child into the next great professional athlete. Parents living vicariously through their children have tarnished children’s athletics and robbed them of the joy of playing sports.

Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way that he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it.� Do we really want to teach our children to grow up thinking that they can use violence to get what they want? Do we think that they should believe that winning is everything? Do we long for our children to hurt others who do not do what we want them to do? Truthfully, we don’t. They will never succeed in life with that mentality.

We have to teach our children how to learn in defeat, be gracious in winning, and ultimately, how to compete cleanly. They are not going to learn these things by watching ESPN, as some analysts called Kenny Roger’s cheating in the playoffs “not a very big deal�, and they are not going to learn it from professional athletes who are getting suspended for steroids and whining about money. They will get the lessons that they need from us.

My father and mother taught me early that I only needed to be the best athlete that I could be. As I played sports, they supported me and helped me learn the games, but never did they attack a coach or umpire, nor did they put insane amounts of pressure on me. They taught me about losing and how to play my best, which in the long run did more for me in life than any baseball game or tennis match. I sit here now and press on in tasks as they taught me to never give up. My dad showed me what a healthy lifestyle can do for you. They taught me life lessons through sports which made more of an impact than any box score ever did, and in the long run, paved the way for me to get a college scholarship which helped me get my degree from Mt. Olive College.

It is time that parents begin to act like adults and begin to instill this proverb in their behavior. If they do, we will have less headlines about parents acting foolishly and we will have more boys who grow up to be men of integrity, valuing the lessons that they learned from their parents and from playing sports. It is only then that sports make us a better person…when we learn a lesson that lasts us a lifetime.

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