Youth Sports Violence

What youth sports should be: sheer joy

I woke up this morning to my usual routine:  coffee and the sports page. Both are necessary for me to get up and going in the morning.   Sport, I think many readers would agree, is usually a source of joy, and so it was with equal measures of sadness and shock that I read about the death yesterday of a soccer referee, Ricardo Portillo.

It’s a heartbreaking story, with a 46-year-old gone, a family fatherless, and a 17-year-old who will soon be tried for murder,  whose life will never be the same and whose own family has been irrevocably changed.

All because of one moment of violence.

Mr. Portillo was working in La Liga Continental de Futbol, a youth soccer organization in Salt Lake City, Utah. Apparently he saw the young man commit a shoving foul after a corner kick; when he cautioned the player and gave him a yellow card, the young man punched the unsuspecting Mr. Portillo in the face.   He immediately fell to the ground and was transported to hospital, where he spent a week in a coma prior to passing away.  The details, including clinical descriptions of the victim after the assault, can be found here.

The article gave me pause and got me to thinking specifically about the incidence of such events in youth sports, which I will discuss subsequently.   The specific issue at hand–how often do referees get assaulted on a playing field–was addressed in the NY Times article: “Reliable data on referee assaults at all levels of all sports does (sic)  not exist, but there have been several violent events worldwide in recent months (my itals),” and the article goes on to enumerate several of these involving referees.  In truth, however, there seem to be no epidemiological data addressing this issue that the reporter could find.

But for one moment, what of the general issue of violence in sports?

Zinedine Zidane in repose

Read more of this post