Youth Soccer Coach Arrested For Threatening To Knock Parent’s Head Off

If you ever sign up your child to play youth soccer, you’ll likely attend meetings with the other parents, coaches, referees, and league administrators. These meetings usually focus on how youth soccer is all bout the kids, teaching them good sportsmanship, and developing athletic and life skills whether winning or losing.

These youth soccer meetings also often include stories about out-of-control screaming parents, rogue soccer coaches, wayward pets, and other soccer sideline behavior that should be discouraged.

What these youth soccer meetings likely won’t include is what to do if your child’s soccer coach threatens to knock your head off.

But that’s what one soccer parent had to contend with recently when their 6-year-old child’s Long Island youth soccer coach threatened to beat them up in response to an email from the parent, reports the New York Daily News.

Robert Riccuiti, 45, of Glen Head, is the youth soccer coach who allegedly made the threat. Along with coaching soccer and being accused of threatening the parents of his soccer players, Riccuiti is also a public school principal in Yonkers.

According to Nassau County police, Riccuiti likely won’t be doing any youth soccer coaching in the near future, however, as they’ve given him their version of a Red Card with a misdemeanor charge of second-degree aggravated harassment.

Authorities took Ricuitti into custody Friday, and the accused soccer coach was reportedly scheduled to be arraigned Saturday.

According to police, the violent soccer-coach, soccer-parent email interaction unfolded after the father of a player emailed Ricuitti with questions about his son’s playing time on the pitch and the soccer coach’s “philosophy of the soccer program.”

Riccuiti’s response to the father’s email reportedly included colorfully foul language along with threats to beat the soccer parent with a Louisville Slugger baseball bat.

According to ABC 7 News, the threatened soccer dad told them that the coach had “copied the head of the league in both of those emails.”

Riccuiti reportedly has two young children of his own, ages 5 and 7, and has been the principal at a school in Yonkers for the past 11 years where he was reportedly assaulted by four students in less than a month back in 2010.

Along with the charges against him, Riccuiti has also been ordered to stay away from the threatened soccer-dad.

[Images via Nassau County Police and Popular Liberty]