What is the thesis of this essay?
Rink Rage
When the Delhi Legion peewees travelled down the highway to play the Port Dover Pirates back on Feb. 25, there was a fair bit on the line for both teams. The series winners would advance to the semifinals of the Ontario Minor Hockey Association's AE Peewee playoffs. And local bragging rights were at stake -- there is a long-standing rivalry between teams from Delhi, a town of 3,900 that claims to be the heart of Ontario's tobacco belt, and Port Dover, 26 km to the southwest on Lake Erie, which boasts it's the world's largest freshwater fishing port. So about 200 parents and fans crowded into the arena in Port Dover and arranged themselves in the stands according to their community affiliation.
It was typical of peewee games at that level -- 12- and 13-year-olds a notch above house league -- enthusiastic if not always polished. Early on, the Pirates won most of the battles along the boards, and took the lead as well. The action got progressively rougher. Several Delhi supporters began hollering at the two referees to crack down on what they saw as the Pirates' overly aggressive body checking, and in fact, Port Dover incurred most of the penalties.
That didn't satisfy some Delhi supporters. With five minutes left, when a Delhi player was penalized for hitting from behind, both of Delhi's coaches strenuously argued the call and were ejected. That provoked a couple of hotheaded fans, who hurled coins and a plastic water bottle onto the ice. Finally, with one minute and 38 seconds to go and Port Dover up 2-0, one particularly loud Delhi fan tossed a broom onto the ice. That was it for the officials. They halted play and, unable to identify exactly who the main offenders were, simply ejected all 200 spectators. The local provincial police detachment sent officers to protect the referees as they left the arena.
On the ice, the players were stunned by what they heard and saw coming out of the stands. "You don't pay attention to that stuff usually, but a couple of people in the stands were getting real mad at the refs," says Pirate defenceman Colton Organ, 13. When the broom hit the ice, Organ says, "we all just kind of looked at each other and shook our heads." The majority of fans did the same. It was, as one of the more composed Delhi parents said afterwards, "embarrassing."
No kidding. It was just a peewee hockey game, for crying out loud. It was supposed to be fun, yet it deteriorated into yet another recent example of out-of-control adults ruining their own kids' games. The bad behaviour is so common in hockey that it even has its own name -- rink rage. In recent months, some B.C. referees cheap drugs no prescription boycotted youth games to protest abuse from fans. A coach in Quebec was hospitalized after being attacked between periods by the father of one of his players. In Ontario, a coach was charged with threatening to kill a teenage referee. Last week in Winnipeg, a police constable -- already suspended from the force for a previous assault conviction -- was arrested and charged with threatening another parent during his nine-year-old son's hockey game. And the worst news is that rink rage isn't confined to the rink. Similarly ill-tempered adults can be found spoiling kids' enjoyment of youth soccer, basketball, baseball and football games, among others.
The offenders are few -- the vast majority of parents are supportive of their kids without being disrespectful of coaches, referees or other fans. And extreme behaviour is rare. There are tens of thousands of kids' games played every year in a variety of sports, and referees and sports associations contacted by Maclean's estimate that they are forced to eject spectators perhaps one per cent of the time. "Most of us just come out to support our kids," Delhi fan David Edmonds said about the incident in Port Dover. "It's too bad, really, because it's just a couple of people making the rest of us look bad."
While their shrill heckling may not always be profane or abusive enough to cause ejection, it poisons the atmosphere and drives volunteer coaches and low-paid referees out of the game. The Canadian Hockey Association says harassment is a major cause of attrition among referees, about 30 per cent of whom quit every season. In soccer, it's just about as bad: Manitoba soccer officials say that two-thirds of new referees recruited and trained in the province leave by the end of their first year.
Not that there weren't leather-lunged louts in the good old days. But experts say hostile behaviour at youth games is far more pervasive -- and sometimes violent -- than it was a generation ago. Consider what happened last summer at a children's recreational hockey practice in Reading, Mass., north of Boston. One player's father was so abusive to the man supervising a pick-up game that the arena staff asked the father to leave the building. But the man, 42-year-old Thomas Junta, came back to confront the volunteer supervisor, 40-year-old Michael Costin. The hulking Junta, six-f
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