Parents on the sideline: what girls actually want before, during and after the game

In individual interviews with 36 team-sport athletes aged 12-15 (mean age 13.5), three preferences were reported by all 36: that parents encourage the entire team rather than only their own daughter, that they focus on effort rather than the outcome, and that they keep their own emotions under control. The least welcome behaviours were coaching from the sideline (29 of 36 athletes) and arguing with officials (31 of 36) (Knight, Neely and Holt, 2011 — a qualitative study of 36 Canadian athletes, describing preferences rather than measured effects).

Nobody teaches a parent how to behave on the sideline, and most work out on their own that something is off — usually in the car, on the way home. Research has asked the girls directly: 36 athletes aged 12-15 described what they want from parents before, during and after competition, and on three behaviours the answer was unanimous, 36 out of 36. This is not etiquette. It is a map of what actually lands on the other side of the touchline.

Nobody teaches a parent how to behave on the sideline. You learn by watching other parents, who learned by watching other parents, and the result is an oral tradition made of unverified good intentions: cheer loudly, offer a few useful instructions, defend your daughter if the referee gets it wrong, and then in the car go over the game while it is still fresh.

Almost every line of that programme, when researchers asked the athletes directly, turned out to be wrong.

Not for moral reasons — none of these behaviours comes from ill will — but for a much simpler one: the person on the pitch and the person in the stands are having two different experiences of the same game, and neither of them knows it. This article gathers what girls said when somebody asked them, and tries to be precise about something that is usually discussed by instinct.

In brief

  • Individual interviews with 36 athletes aged 12-15 (mean 13.5) in team sports: all 36 ask that parents encourage the whole team, focus on effort rather than the result, and control their own emotions.
  • The rejected behaviours: do not coach from the sideline (29 of 36), do not argue with officials (31 of 36), do not draw attention to yourself or your daughter (28 of 36).
  • Before the game two things are wanted: practical help (30 of 36) and understanding that many do not want to talk about the game before playing it (33 of 36).
  • After: feedback that is positive but honest, in the sequence good things → things to work on → good things, and when she decides (33 of 36).
  • The presence of both parents was associated with higher pre-competitive anxiety in 341 young athletes — but their absence was not associated with lower anxiety. That is not a reason to stay away.
  • Across 69 youth hockey games the average was 105 spectator comments per game, mostly positive: the problem is not the average tone, it is the volume.

What happens when you ask the athletes directly?

Something rare in youth sport research happens: the answers converge.

Three researchers at the University of Alberta individually interviewed 36 athletes aged 12 to 15 (mean age 13.5, standard deviation 1.0), all competing in team sports at least once a month: soccer (12), volleyball (10), basketball (9), ringette (2), softball (2) and ice hockey (1). Each interview lasted 35 minutes on average and asked one thing: what do you want your parents to do — before, during and after competition (Knight, Neely and Holt, 2011)?

The methodological feature that makes this study useful is the count. For every theme, the authors report how many athletes raised it spontaneously. And three themes were raised by 36 athletes out of 36.

Before reading which, it is worth fixing the limits of the evidence, because they matter as much as the finding. This is a qualitative study: it describes what the girls prefer, it does not measure the effect of parental behaviour on performance, anxiety or drop-out. There were 36 participants, recruited at summer camps run by a university in Western Canada, so girls already inside a structured sporting pathway. None of the sentences below is a law. They are requests expressed with surprising agreement by a small, well-defined group of athletes the same age as the girls BAB works with.

What do all of them ask for, without exception?

The three unanimous requests are these.

Cheer for the whole team, not only for your daughter (36 of 36). The reasons given are of two kinds. The first is about climate: when parents know and encourage everyone, the team perceives collective support, and a girl whose family could not make it that week still has somebody cheering for her. The second is subtler and concerns the daughter herself: cheering aimed at one person exposes her, and exposure is precisely what girls this age work to avoid.

Focus on effort, not on the result (36 of 36). The athletes describe the consequence concretely: when parents show they care about effort more than the scoreline, perceived pressure drops and the game goes back to being a game. When attention sits on the outcome, the experience changes sign — the study includes an account from a girl who links her father's criticism at the final whistle to no longer wanting to go to her sport.

Keep your own emotions under control (36 of 36). This is not «do not feel anything»: the athletes want their parents to come, to watch, to clap and to show interest. What they ask is that extreme emotions — positive as much as negative — stay in check. The line they draw is between a parent who is present and a parent who becomes an event in their own right.

A fourth request is almost as widespread: interact positively throughout the game (34 of 36), with a detail worth reporting — the moment athletes say they most need to hear their parents is not when they are winning, it is when they are losing.

Why is «giving instructions from the sideline» the advice that works least?

Because it puts your daughter in a conflict she cannot resolve while playing.

29 of 36 athletes asked parents not to coach during games (Knight, Neely and Holt, 2011). The explanations gathered are not about wounded pride, they are about information traffic: sideline instructions contradict the coach's, and the athlete ends up choosing whom to obey in the middle of a passage of play. The cost is not theoretical — it is reaction time spent deciding instead of playing.

The same result appears in a different, younger sample. In an American study, 57 children aged 7-14 (28 boys and 29 girls, mean age 9.7) described how parents behave at competitions and how they would like them to behave. The analysis produced three «roles»: the supportive parent, the demanding coach and the crazed fan. Giving instructions during play falls into the second role, tolerated only in limited circumstances (Omli and Wiese-Bjornstal, 2011). That sample is younger and mixed-sex: it shows the phenomenon is not unique to adolescent girls, it does not quantify it in them.

There is, however, an exception, described precisely. If the athlete perceives genuine expertise in the parent, or a good grasp of the team's goals, a technical instruction can help — on four conditions: that it is aimed only at their own daughter, that it comes before or after the game rather than during, that it reinforces rather than contradicts the coach, and that it is offered as a suggestion, not as an expectation to be met.

It is worth noting that the same preference had already emerged among 42 tennis players aged 12-15: no technical or tactical advice, yes to comments on effort and attitude and to practical advice (Knight, Boden and Holt, 2010).

Does arguing with the referee actually protect a girl?

No: according to the players, it exposes her.

31 of 36 athletes named parents arguing with officials as a distraction and a source of embarrassment (Knight, Neely and Holt, 2011). The least intuitive part is towards whom that embarrassment is felt: not only towards the other spectators, but towards the team. The athletes describe having to answer for their parent's behaviour in front of their team-mates — a responsibility nobody asked them to take on, and one that continues in the changing room afterwards.

In the younger American sample, arguing with officials, blaming officials for the result and yelling all fall within the «crazed fan» role, the one children reject most consistently (Omli and Wiese-Bjornstal, 2011). That study identifies a single form of raised voice the children considered justified: the protective one, when play turns dangerous and somebody is at real risk of getting hurt.

How much noise is there really on the sideline?

More than it seems to the people making it — and this is the part of the picture that explains why the problem exists even when nobody misbehaves.

In a naturalistic observation in a large Canadian city, five observers attended 69 youth hockey games and coded spectator comments: an average of 105 comments per game, mostly positive in tone and directed at players (Bowker et al., 2009). Another group observed 120 hours of youth soccer with players aged 10-14 (Holt et al., 2008); in the summary Knight and colleagues give of that work, roughly a third of comments were praise or encouragement and another third were instructions, while negative and derogatory comments were a smaller share.

The correct reading of these numbers is not «parents are a problem». It is that the volume is high, that the share of technical instruction is far from marginal, and that across hundreds of sentences it only takes a few badly calibrated ones for a girl to carry them home. The average tone is benign; the individual experience depends on the exceptions.

Does attending games increase anxiety?

Here the data are more awkward than the usual summary suggests, and it is worth reporting them in full.

In a French study of 341 young athletes — 201 in basketball and 140 in tennis — surveyed before an official competition, the presence of both parents was associated with higher pre-competitive anxiety in every subgroup except male tennis players. But in the same study the absence of both parents was not associated with lower anxiety (Bois, Lalanne and Delforge, 2009).

The two sentences have to be read together, because taken separately each licenses an opposite and equally wrong conclusion. The first alone would suggest staying away; the second shows that removing the presence does not remove the anxiety. What does vary, within the same study, is how you are present: directive behaviours and pressure were associated with more pre-competitive anxiety, while praise and understanding were associated with less — and that last result, among tennis players, held for the girls only.

Two necessary caveats. This is a cross-sectional study: it photographs associations at a single moment and does not show that one behaviour causes the other. And the sample covers boys and girls in two sports, with results that differ by sport and by sex — which is itself the useful information: there is no single «parent in the stands» effect.

After the game: when is the right moment to talk?

The one she chooses, not the one the engine starts at.

33 of 36 athletes described their preferences on post-game feedback, and the picture is more demanding than you might expect (Knight, Neely and Holt, 2011). They want a positive response, yes, but explicitly an honest one: they valued parents not saying it had gone well when it had gone badly — being supportive «but not to the extent of lying to you», in one interviewee's words. The structure they describe is a sequence: what went well, then a couple of things to work on, then something positive again.

On when, two practical findings. First: immediately after the game, before the team disperses, positive comments are welcome — including from team-mates' parents, which the athletes say carries particular weight. Any constructive criticism, by contrast, should be delivered away from others. Second: athletes ask parents to read them and to accept a postponement. The study records the explicit request to be able to say «can we talk about it later?» and be heard. Many also ask for time with the team first: the huddle after the game is part of the game.

And this is exactly where the most relevant and least known piece of research sits. An Australian qualitative study of 86 parents and children in junior Australian football, based on focus groups and individual interviews, looked specifically at the post-game debrief — what happens as you leave the ground and on the way home — noting that it is a moment largely ignored by research and central to the experience of the people playing (Elliott and Drummond, 2017). It is a study of junior Australian football, so a predominantly male sample in a specific sporting context: it describes a mechanism, not a measure that transfers to girls elsewhere.

The mechanism, though, is recognisable everywhere. The car ride is the first moment parent and daughter are alone, the game is still on both of them, and one of the two has just spent an hour running. It is not a good moment for technical analysis. It is an excellent moment for a single question — «how was it for you?» — and for a willingness to accept silence as an answer.

Why «having fun» is not a vague word

Because it has been broken down and measured.

One study asked 142 soccer players, 37 coaches and 57 parents to list everything that makes playing sport fun, then to sort and rate the ideas collected. The result is a map of 11 dimensions of fun made up of 81 distinct determinants (Visek et al., 2015). Fun, in other words, is not the opposite of hard work, nor a concession to younger children: it is an articulated construct that includes learning, improving, belonging to a group and being treated well.

This matters to a parent for a precise reason. The very things athletes ask for on the sideline — cheering for the whole team, attention to effort, no pressure on the result — are not requests to lower the bar. They are the conditions under which the bar can be raised without somebody quitting. And quitting, in this age band, is not a theoretical risk: among girls registered with a club at 10-14, the share who leave sport without ever returning is 71%.

What a parent can do from next Sunday

Six behaviours, all taken directly from what the athletes asked for.

None of these points requires sporting expertise. All of them require giving up something that felt useful — and that, not ill will, is the hard part.

BAB's role

On this subject BAB does one thing, and it is worth stating plainly: it does not assess parents, does not collect judgements about their behaviour and does not produce reports on any family.

What it offers is a private space for the athlete, where a girl records her own signals over time — load, energy, mood, pain — and sees patterns emerge. If her worst weeks consistently coincide with away games, with certain kinds of match or with periods of particular pressure, that pattern becomes visible to her first. Clubs receive aggregated, anonymous data only, never an individual girl's diary.

The educational half is the other contribution: giving a family precise words for something rarely discussed, so that «my dad argues with the referee» can become a conversation between them instead of a silent embarrassment nobody names. It is the same principle that applies to the words of the person coaching: the frame around a game is not neutral, and it can be changed without asking anybody to love their daughter any less.

When to consult a professional

The guidance in this article is about behaviour, not mental health. If a girl shows distress that lasts for weeks, if she has stopped enjoying something she used to love, if pre-match anxiety also affects her sleep, her schoolwork and her relationships, or if she talks about quitting in a way that does not sound like a change of interests, that is not something to fix with better cheering: it is the moment to speak to a paediatrician or family doctor, who can point to the right pathway. The blog has a dedicated article on performance anxiety and burnout.

Sources

This article is informative and educational and does not constitute medical, psychological or educational advice. It describes preferences collected in studies of groups of athletes and children, not rules that hold for every daughter: the most reliable source on what works with one particular girl remains that girl. If distress connected to sport persists over time, or also affects sleep, school and relationships, speak to a paediatrician or family doctor.

What do young female athletes actually want from parents during a game?

Three things, and on these three the research found a rare level of agreement. In individual interviews with 36 team-sport athletes aged 12 to 15 (mean age 13.5), all 36 asked that parents encourage the whole team and not only their own daughter, that they focus on effort rather than the outcome, and that they keep control of their own emotions; 34 of 36 asked for positive interaction throughout the game (Knight, Neely and Holt, 2011). Note what kind of evidence this is: a qualitative study of 36 girls recruited at summer camps in Western Canada, so it describes what athletes prefer, not what improves performance.

Does shouting technical instructions from the sideline help my daughter?

It is the behaviour athletes reject most often, and the reason they give is practical rather than emotional: 29 of 36 athletes explicitly asked parents not to coach during games, because instructions from the sideline contradict the coach's and force a player to choose whom to obey while the play continues (Knight, Neely and Holt, 2011). The same study describes one exception: if a parent has genuine expertise in the sport, an instruction can work when it is directed only at their own daughter, given before or after the game rather than during it, consistent with what the coach is saying, and framed as a suggestion rather than an expectation.

What effect does arguing with the referee «to defend her» have?

The opposite of the intended one: 31 of 36 athletes named parents arguing with officials as a distraction and, above all, a source of embarrassment — embarrassment in front of the team, not only in front of themselves (Knight, Neely and Holt, 2011). The same pattern appears in a younger, mixed sample: among 57 children aged 7-14 interviewed in the United States, yelling at officials and coaches fell within the role children rejected most consistently, the «crazed fan» (Omli and Wiese-Bjornstal, 2011). That second sample has a mean age of 9.7 and includes boys and girls: it confirms the direction, it does not measure the size of the effect in adolescent girls.

Should I just stop coming to games, then?

No, and this is where the data dismantle the shortcut. In a study of 341 young basketball and tennis players measured before an official competition, the presence of both parents was associated with higher pre-competitive anxiety in every subgroup except male tennis players — but the absence of both parents was not associated with lower anxiety (Bois, Lalanne and Delforge, 2009). In the same study, directive behaviours and pressure were associated with more anxiety, while praise and understanding were associated with less anxiety in female tennis players. It is a cross-sectional study: it describes associations, not causes. The reasonable reading is not «do not come», it is «come, and change what you do».

When is the right moment to talk about the game with my daughter?

After the time she needs has passed, not the time the driver needs. In the interviews with the 36 athletes, 33 described post-game feedback they want positive but also honest — they explicitly valued parents not pretending it had gone well when it had not — and they described a specific sequence: what went well first, then a couple of things to work on, then something positive again. Many asked to be allowed time with the team first, and to be allowed to postpone («can we talk about it later?») (Knight, Neely and Holt, 2011). The period straight after the game is also the least studied: a qualitative study of 86 parents and children in junior Australian football calls it the *debrief*, and identifies it as the point where the intention to support most easily turns into its opposite (Elliott and Drummond, 2017).

Why does my daughter get annoyed when I cheer, when other girls do not?

Because at this age encouragement and exposure are hard to separate. 28 of 36 athletes asked parents not to draw attention either to themselves or to their daughter: not cheering as such, but cheering that stands out from everyone else's — standing up, calling her name, celebrating conspicuously when nobody else is (Knight, Neely and Holt, 2011). In the study of American children the same thing appears as «fanatical cheering», described as disruptive by the players themselves (Omli and Wiese-Bjornstal, 2011). The practical test the girls describe is synchrony: if everyone is cheering, the noise is easy to ignore; if one person is cheering, that person is your parent, in front of everyone.

Is «come on, you can do better» encouragement or criticism?

In the research it has its own name, and it is classified among the unwanted behaviours. Critical encouragement — delivering a message that is literally true («you can do it», «you can do better») in a tone that signals frustration at how things have gone so far — appears among the behaviours young interviewees found annoying and hurtful, within the «demanding coach» role (Omli and Wiese-Bjornstal, 2011). The reason is that the literal content and the message received diverge: the sentence says «I believe in you», the tone says «what you have done so far is not enough». The sample is 57 children aged 7-14, boys and girls, in the United States.

What can a parent usefully do before the game?

Essentially two things, and only one of them is about sport. 30 of 36 athletes named practical help with physical preparation — arriving on time, having the kit ready, having eaten and drunk — as a wanted parental contribution. 33 of 36 raised mental preparation, and here the most frequent request was that parents understand what they need: several athletes said explicitly that they did not want to talk about the game before the game, because talking about it made them nervous (Knight, Neely and Holt, 2011). Asking «do you want to talk about it, or shall we put the radio on?» resolves most of these cases better than any motivational speech.

How many comments actually come from the stands during a game?

More than the people making them realise. In a naturalistic observation of 69 youth hockey games in a large Canadian city, researchers recorded an average of 105 spectator comments per game; the majority were positive in tone and directed at the players (Bowker et al., 2009). That figure is useful precisely because it is not alarmist: the problem athletes describe is not that sidelines are mostly hostile, but that the overall volume is high and a few badly calibrated sentences stand out from the noise. The study covers Canadian youth hockey, with parents of players aged 11-14.