This Boston hockey mom had seen enough.
Fed up with players fighting in a youth Boston Raptors vs. Pride contest and referees standing by doing nothing to stop it, she marched onto the ice and demanded they stop, The Huffington Post reported .
The mom was stopped by a referee, who tried to usher her back off the playing surface, but he too became a target of her anger for not controlling the rowdy players. Though the fight looked ready to blossom into a full-fledged brawl between the teams, referees were standing by watching and looked unwilling to interfere to stop the fight, Yahoo Sports reported .
Her involvement backs a national trend of over-involvement by parents in youth sports . A national survey found that many youth sports players would rather their parents not attend games at all because of the distractions they cause, Miami’s CBS4 reported . The athletes said parents yell too much, make them and their teammates nervous and place high pressure on them to play better and win games, CBS4 reported. Instances of parents starting brawls at youth sports games underscores this trend, the report noted.
For some athletes, the problems with parents continue once youth sports have ended. Bernard Tomic, a 19-year-old professional tennis player, recently had officials at the Sony Ericsson tournament remove his rowdy father.
“He’s annoying – I know he’s my father – but he’s annoying me,” he told match officials, CBS4 reported.
In the case of the Boston hockey mom, at least being annoying achieved something—the players stopped fighting as soon as they saw her on the ice.
