By Patrick Hayes

Friend of the site and East Lansing High School coach Steve Finamore has a great post on his blog about young players and basketball preparation during the summer. Read the whole thing, it’s worth it, but I wanted to highlight this:

14-Parents: Make sure to tell your parents to behave at your games. Last thing you want is your parents screaming at the refs. Many officials working the team camp or AAU games are young and they are there to improve. Hopefully your parents do not scream at your coach before, during or after games. A college coach will not want to recruit you if your parents are out of control. Believe me, they take this into consideration during the recruiting process.

There’s so much great advice that people don’t routinely consider just in that little paragraph — that referees need time to develop and get better at their craft; that screaming at a coach isn’t likely to result in more playing time for your child; that college coaches can potentially be scared off by not wanting to deal with the out of control parents of a prospective player. Like I said, read Finamore’s entire post, but as someone who has covered sports for quite a while and seen my share of out of control parents, that point really stuck out to me.