Funny Baseball Coach Talks to Kid

Before the last game of the season, on a cool Texas night, the caput bus of the Sand Gnats gathered his Little Leaguers for a pep talk.

Pointing his finger at the ­ix-year-olds, Scott Bergin told them, "If your dad says it doesn't affair if you lot win or lose, just as long equally you have fun, I hate to say it — your dad's a loser."

Parents took video on their phones. The players giggled. They knew Bergin, the president of a drug-testing company near Houston, was mocking crazy coaches by being someone he isn't.

Merely Bergin, 46, had some other motive. He posted the speech to YouTube, adding information technology to the scores of videos that satirize the increasingly insane $7 billion earth of youth sports, where parents sometimes fight like guests on "The Jerry Springer Show" and losing coaches, as Bergin in one case saw in a T-ball game, bung bats at fences.

"I've been so frustrated with a lot of these other coaches and parents," he said. "I merely had to do this. I had to hammer these people."

Nick Hall, in his Kent Murphy character, correct, offers instruction on bunting during a parody video that has been viewed iii.i one thousand thousand times. (Youtube)

Bergin's video, viewed more than 30,000 times, is the offset in a series of pregame speeches he has posted to YouTube in which he instructs his team to striking dingers, disgrace the other pitcher's family, knock the yellowish from teeth, stomp butts and steal lunch coin. Bergin ofttimes refers to opposing players as fart sniffers.

After he began posting the videos final year, Bergin was startled to find that many viewers idea they were real. "This guy should stop coaching kids and maybe work on his mental attitude!" one YouTube commenter wrote. Because of the magic of algorithms, Bergin's videos often play automatically after genuine videos of parents fighting and coaches losing their minds.

In one real-life clip, a baseball double-decker rants at his elementary-school-age players, "Are you guys little boys anymore?" He reminds them that they traveled to get to their game, significant they are travel players. "Sometimes, in travel ball, it's gonna feel similar a job. This ain't rec ball anymore."

Concluding summer at an elite Maryland softball tournament, two fathers were charged with assault after they traded insults, so punches. The video of the confrontation went viral. The Virginia Soccer League has a post on its website pleading for better behavior from coaches and parents. The title of the piece: "Daddy Came to My Game and Now He's in Prison."

Marking Hyman, a professor of sports direction at George Washington University and the author of several books on youth sports, said it was a distressing commentary on the land of youth sports that viewers struggle to separate reality from satire.

"In the context of the behavior we see every day," Hyman said, "these videos really are totally believable."

Maniacal coaches, travel sports as a status symbol for parents, and the soaring costs of club teams (paid coaches, $300 uniforms) have decimated some recreational leagues and driven youth sports participation to the lowest level in decades, with fewer than half of children ages 6 to 12 now regularly playing team sports.

[Are parents ruining youth sports? Fewer kids play amid pressure.]

In ridiculing what youth baseball game has get, Nick Hall, a stand up-upwardly comedian, invented a foul-mouthed character named Charabanc Kent Potato. He wears 1980s-manner coaching shorts as he mocks the thousands of instructional videos aimed at getting parents to subscribe to expensive online teaching programs.

"You lot hear about these parents of 9-year-olds spending $20,000 a summertime to travel effectually to tournaments," Hall said in an interview. "When I was ix years old, my parents made me get a paper route."

Growing upwardly in Indiana, Hall remembers the simpler days when dads would coach while drinking beers in the dugout, teaching the effectively points of cursing and occasionally offering bits of wisdom, such as "run faster." That's how he styled Omnibus Kent Murphy.

"It's a directly lampooning of instructional videos," he said, "just never revealing that it's all a joke."

In an instructional video on bunting, White potato appears with a shirtless, beer-drinking assistant coach named Chucky, identified as his best friend and an ex-captive. The showtime priority in bunting, Tater says, is getting out of bunting: Step out of the concoction'southward box, await down at the third-base autobus, "throw your bat downwards and stare at him in his stupid eyes."

"If you can't get out of it," Tater says, "you're just gonna take to lay downwards a bunt and I'1000 gonna teach you lot how to exercise it even though it'due south [expletive] the worst thing that's e'er happened in my [curse] life."

[Petula Dvorak: Our 10-twelvemonth-old decided to give water ice hockey a try. It was atrocious.]

The video has been viewed
3.1 million times. Hall makes nearly his unabridged living on ads that announced with his videos. He also makes appearances, in character, at youth baseball tournaments and batting cage complexes.

Domingo Ayala is another YouTube star. On his website and in his videos, Ayala claims he is from the Dominican Commonwealth and was selected three times in the first circular of the Major League Baseball typhoon.

In fact, there is no Domingo Ayala. Co-ordinate to U.Southward. trademark records, Ayala is Bryan Resnick, a former Academy of Nevada Las Vegas baseball player who a few years ago, according to his Facebook page, went on his State of israel birthright trip.

Ayala (and Resnick) did non answer to requests for comment.

His videos open up with mariachi music. He wears baseball pants, a practice jersey and a thick mustache. Speaking in a heavy accent, Ayala offers tips and comments on the current land of youth baseball.

In a video titled "travel team parents," a parent walks upward offering Ayala a stack of paper.

"Y'all got the dad coming over there, show me the stats, asking why his child no play," Ayala says. "You wanna know why your kid no playing? He non playing 'crusade he's no expert."

Though his fake accent might strike some equally offensive, Ayala endorses youth sports products and has been hired to appear in character by college baseball teams.

To Bergin, the Little League coach in Texas, Coach Kent Spud and Domingo Ayala are deities. He studies their videos, making notes on their delivery, sometimes even stealing lines to utilize every bit a sort of homage. (Will Ferrell is also an influence.) Bergin writes his speeches in the notes app of his iPhone, and so rehearses them at work after everyone leaves.

He can normally proceed a straight face up, only his assistant coach Colin Edwards, a former professional person motorcycle racer, sometimes struggles. Bergin'due south speeches have get so popular around his local Little League community that parents from opposing teams will come lookout.

"It becomes an event to see information technology," said Leslie Dickson, whose son Brady has played for Bergin several times.

Her son was recently a mark when Bergin went over the starting lineup in a video.

"Batting eighth and playing left field is Brady," Bergin said. "Y'all can pick dandelions out here like you normally do."

In announcing the 7th batter, Bergin said: "The 7-hole is the most important pigsty in the order. Just kidding. It'south like third worst."

Several players laughed. "This is hilarious," one said.

Brady, a fifth-grader, totally gets information technology.

"He's not like the other coaches who always yell and make information technology all well-nigh themselves," he said. "He's really funny. I really like him."

[On Parenting: How to put the fun back in youth sports]

And so exercise his parents. They say Bergin really is the exact opposite of the coach he sometimes portrays. He makes certain all players, even the weaker ones, get experience in the infield and batting high upward in the club. He doesn't yell. He wants to win, the parents say, only never at the expense of hurting a child'south feelings.

In an platonic globe, Bergin'due south videos would be more than only entertainment. He knows firsthand they aren't.

Last flavour, an opposing charabanc from a nearby boondocks recognized Bergin from his videos. As they exchanged pregame lineups, the double-decker told Bergin that he actually nailed the craziness.

"Man, y'all're my idol," the coach said.

And so Bergin'south squad took an early lead.

"His mood really changed," Bergin said.

The coach started yelling at his players. A parent in the stands noticed that one of Bergin's players was missing a mandatory Lilliputian League patch on his jersey, pointing it out to the double-decker, who halted the game to lodge a formal protest.

"I couldn't believe information technology," Bergin said. "He morphed into the exact same person I'g making fun of."

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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/your-dads-a-loser-videos-parody-the-increasing-insane-world-of-youth-sports/2016/09/21/9a3c6a3e-7523-11e6-8149-b8d05321db62_story.html

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