Why Bullying at Sports Practice Is Just as Serious as Bullying at School
I was sitting in the car reading a library book, waiting for my daughter’s basketball practice to end. Through the gym windows, I could see the girls running drills. It looked normal at a glance—kids moving, a coach blowing a whistle, the squeak of sneakers. But I happened to glance up at the right moment and saw something I almost missed.
One girl, Lily, had just missed a layup. Two other girls, including my daughter, were standing nearby. The taller girl, Maren, said something to Lily with her back turned. Lily’s face changed. It wasn’t sad or angry. It was the look a kid gets when they’re pretending they didn’t hear something. She walked to the end of the line, and Maren and my daughter exchanged a small look.
When practice ended, I asked my daughter in the car, “What was that today, with Lily and Maren?”
She shrugged. “Maren said Lily was a brick wall on offense.”
“Did Lily say anything?”
“There’s no point,” my daughter said. “Coach says we shouldn’t let comments get to us.”
I didn’t say much at the time. I wanted to believe it was just kids being kids. But over the next few weeks, I started watching more closely, and I noticed a pattern.
Maren had a way of giving Lily directions that sounded like team leadership but were actually put-downs. “Don’t pass to her,” she’d tell another girl, loud enough for Lily to hear. “She stumbles under pressure.” The coach was usually focused on the play, and when he did hear snippets, he treated it all as part of the game’s “mental toughness.”
At school, teachers would have stepped in immediately. There were rules against name-calling, exclusion, and social targeting. But here, on the court, nobody said anything. It was practice. Competition was supposed to be rough. My daughter had started treating it as normal too, which bothered me more than the original incident.
I remembered a parent-teacher conference a few years earlier where the teacher explained that bullying usually happens not in obvious moments but in the spaces between activities—in transitions, on the bus, at lunch tables where adults aren’t paying attention. I used to think sports practice was different because there’s a coach present the whole time. But I was wrong. Coaches are present, but they’re often looking at the ball, not at the kids’ faces. And when they are looking, many of them don’t want to interrupt the “competitive environment.”
This is the tricky part about bullying outside of school. You’re paying for the activity. You signed your kid up because you wanted them to grow, learn a skill, and make friends. When something goes sideways, parents often feel awkward. We worry about being “that mom” or “that dad” who complains about a volunteer coach or the team culture. We convince ourselves that a little conflict is good for building resilience.
But resilience gets built when a child has a safe way to process conflict—not when they’re told to ignore it silently.
I decided to say something, but I was careful about how I said it. I didn’t want to label Maren a bully or accuse the coach of negligence. At the next home game, I waited until the coach was alone, filling a water bottle after the game.
“Hey,” I said. “I noticed during practice that Lily gets left out of drill groups a lot. And sometimes there’s some—I don’t know what to call it—teasing that seems to target her specifically.”
The coach nodded slowly. He didn’t look surprised, which concerned me. “Maren’s competitive,” he said. “She rides girls hard, but she’s fair.”
“Maybe she’s fair with the fast kids,” I said. “But Lily’s still learning. I’m not saying Maren is a bad kid. I’m just saying I don’t want my daughter learning that this is how you talk to a teammate.”
I was holding my breath a little. Parents of my daughter’s generation coach differently than the old-school “tough it out” style. But some of that old style still lingers in youth sports, especially when the season is short and there’s pressure to win.
The coach surprised me. “You’re not the first parent to mention it,” he said. “It’s been like that all season. I keep meaning to address it as a team, but we’ve had so many games.” He paused. “I’ll talk to them.”
I nodded and left it there. I didn’t want to be a helicopter parent, hovering over every interaction. But when I got home, I talked to my daughter directly. Not about Maren being wrong, but about the choices my daughter was making around it.
“Your laugh,” I said. “At practice—when Maren says something about Lily, you sometimes look at the ground and kind of half-laugh. Does that feel okay?”
She was quiet for a long time. “It’s like, if I don’t laugh, Maren gets annoyed with me. But I feel bad for Lily.”
“That’s a hard spot to be in,” I said. “We’ll talk about what to do next practice.”
We agreed on a simple move. My daughter wouldn’t say anything big. She would just not respond. Not smile, not laugh, not look away. She would look at Lily’s face instead, and then go stand near her. That was something concrete she could do without risking becoming a target herself.
I also asked the coach if he could rotate the drill partners more often so that no one got stuck in a fixed pair for the whole season. That way, Lily wouldn’t be in isolation, and Maren wouldn’t be able to control who Lily practiced with.
What surprised me was how much changed with those small adjustments. Rotating partners meant Lily got passes from different girls, and a couple of them actually talked to her. My daughter practiced looking at Lily when Maren was in a bad mood, which became a small act of solidarity. The indirect meanness didn’t disappear entirely, but it grew quieter.
But I can’t say it’s solved. Season ended, and next season’s team is different. Another parent in the car line told me Maren was joining a travel team in the spring, so we might have a break. And that’s its own problem, isn’t it? When a kid like Maren moves up, the behavior gets reinforced instead of corrected. Nobody wants to be the one to stop the star player’s edge.
I still don’t have a neat answer for what to do when a coach or an organization signals that winning matters more than how kids treat each other. We’ve decided to keep talking about it with my daughter after every practice, just as a simple, routine check-in. “How did Lily get treated today?” “How were you with her?” It takes ten seconds in the car. It’s not a big speech.
Maybe that’s the lesson I keep learning as a parent. The places we let bullying pass because we assume someone else is in charge—the school, the coach, the club—are exactly the places it quietly grows roots. We can’t fix it all at once. But noticing it and saying it out loud, in a calm, low-key way, is where everything starts.
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