The wee hours on WFAN AM Sports 660 can be both a lonely place and a destination for airwave psychos. As the sun rises on Sunday mornings, while many New Yorkers reach for remedies to “take the edge off” the Sports Edge is just coming on. From 8 to 9 a.m. every Sunday for the past dozen years, former coach, author and sports psychologist Rick Wolff hosts “The Sports Edge,” which focuses on issues facing parents of young athletes. And thank God he does.
Wolff played baseball at Harvard, was drafted his junior year by the Detroit Tigers, played some minor league ball, then coached baseball at Mercy College for eight years. He also worked for the Cleveland Indians as a roving coach specializing in performance enhancement skills and the mental approach to the game. New York Family Sports approached coach Wolff by phone to check in on the state of his radio show and to get his take on various youth sports issues.
We figure your Sunday morning time slot has served as a public service time for WFAN given the late-night programming and the voices heard on the station during the wee hours. Do you ever think about the context of your show compared to WFAN’s other shows? No, I mean I’ve been very flattered and gratified by the fact that from very early on we’ve attracted an audience that seems to be focused on sports parenting issues that are more than just talking about the Yankees or Mets or hockey or football. These are issues that sort of transcend the whole sports world, always with of course the focus on youth sports or amateur sports. I’m always amazed or impressed with the kind of calls and questions we receive. We have a few people who are fairly routine or regular callers, but for the most part we have a different audience every week calling about things, and that is really fun over the course of a decade. That really is remarkable.
Do you have a “Jerome from the Bronx” type of regular caller? I have three or four guys who call. I mean, they are very, very smart callers. I don’t know their names other than Tom from Arlington who is a former coach and high school athletic director—I know when his name pops up on the board he’s got something important to say. We have a woman named Denise from Cheshire, Connecticut. She calls and she told me her son is a top hockey player in high school and probably should be drafted this year. We get good coverage and diversity and a fairly good spread and people like the show and they like to ask why the show isn’t three hours long. It’s not my call, I’m just happy they give me a chance to be on the air.
So how did the show come to be, did you create it and pitch it to WFAN? Yeah, I’ve been doing this stuff for 20-some odd years now and at some point in the ‘90s I was writing a sports parenting column for Sports Illustrated and that got a lot of traction and got a lot of coverage. Then at some point I had spoken to [WFAN operations director] Mark Chernoff and he had his own boys who were playing sports and Mark said “yeah, let’s give this a roll and see what happens” and since the first or second week it really caught on well.
Being the parent of three athletes yourself, I guess you will never run out of material? People always ask where you get this stuff from and I say you just read the paper, the Internet, you pay attention. There’s always something. In fact, if the show were longer it would be better because you would get more phone calls. We get four phone lines that come into the FAN, and of the four lines during any show I get to maybe 10 percent of the callers. There’s just not enough time, and there’s always plenty to talk about.
What’s the hot topic this spring for the parents calling in? We always get calls about discipline and the code of conduct—whether the code of conduct in high schools is strong enough. We get calls about the drinking age and whether kids should be allowed to drink under the age of 21 or drinking at home. We get debates on travel teams and how travel teams are usurping high school varsity situations. Steroid usage with high school kids and drug testing at the high school level…hazing. A lot of parents hear that it is a sports parenting show so you must focus on sportsmanship and teaching little kids how to play soccer. No, we don’t deal with that at all. We deal with very heavy duty topics that everybody has an opinion on. For example, there was a high school football coach in Jersey who was very successful who always traditionally in a public high school led the kids through a prayer before every game. Well, somebody protested that and that led to a huge court battle. We get into that. We get into whether or not you should hold your kid out of school for a year so they can become the oldest kid in the class instead of the youngest kid. What I am looking for are topics that people have debates about and there is no clear-cut answer.
Back when you started the show, were there as many hot topics as there are now? Has the scene gotten more volatile? Yeah, I think it actually has. Although I do think what has happened now is that people are aware of these issues, whereas maybe 20 years ago they just didn’t care. Now they are more sensitive to what is going on. I know I’ve been a thorn in the side for many years to Little League Baseball because of their idiotic insistence that aluminum bats are as safe as wood bats, and the fact their pitch-count nonsense doesn’t hold any water when you break it down because of the fact that in the playoffs there are different rules than there are for the regular season and on and on it goes. I don’t mind taking a position or a stand, so long as people understand I am trying to do it for the safety of the kids.
Do you get the occasional call from a young athlete? Yeah, occasionally young kids will call. I also get calls from coaches, referees and officials and athletic directors—this isn’t the usual kind of [WFAN] call like “Hey Rick what do you think about the Mets?” It is more like “I think if my kid has a problem with a coach, I think the kid should go talk to the coach as opposed to the parents intervening” and that kind of stuff.
When these kids today eventually become coaches, do you think they’ll be a little more well-rounded and we’ll hear fewer of these horror stories? Well, that is a good question. I just don’t know. I think there is a sense that kids today often try to escape—if you will—their parents by playing those sports that mom and dad aren’t really eager to learn more about. So you see kids wanting to get away from the pressures of basketball, football, baseball or soccer so they would go skateboarding or mountain biking or they would do video games—things that parents really don’t care much about. I think that is significant.
You’ve got the degree in psychology, so obviously that must be a great help to you. Is this an extension of what you’ve always wanted to do? I coached college baseball for many years and then I was involved with the Cleveland Indians as their roving psychological coach in the 90s. It was during that time my own kids were very young and just getting involved in youth sports, so I thought this might be an interesting area and sort of uncharted territory.
When you were with the Indians, did you have to deal with one Albert Joey Belle? You bet.
Any Belle stories or lessons from that experience? I will tell you this: he is a complicated guy. I think most people obviously read about his various exploits and temper tantrums and they figured he was somewhat of a thug. Clearly I can’t condone his behavior during those times, but I always thought Albert was a particularly bright guy. He’d come from a family where both parents were educators. He was a top student in high school and he majored in accounting at LSU. This was not a stupid guy. He knew these outbursts and temper tantrums were not good. I always got along well with Albert and I know his teammates got along with him as well. He had some issues, but I was grateful that he was able to keep a lot of this stuff under control so that he enjoyed a pretty good career. If he had played longer, he may still get in the Hall of Fame because he was quite a talent. An interesting guy, though.
Albert came out of the deep south—Louisiana. Is it your experience that the New York area have any specific youth sports issues or difficulties or obstacles that are different than the rest of the country? I think in truth that the epidemic of sports parenting issues are everywhere. New York, New Jersey, Connecticut or wherever are all caught up in the same thing. I’d like to say that it is more focused here, but that is not really true. I do a lot of speaking engagements around the country and no matter where I go, it is all the same—parents just feel that their whole universe revolves around their child. And that’s fine, that is how parents should feel. But at some point sometimes the parents get out of control.
You mentioned before your proverbial “face for radio.” Lately I see every schmoe I used to hear on WFAN is now on my TV on SNY or wherever. When are you going to get your shot? I don’t know! I’ve done a lot of TV. Every time there is a sports parenting incident or flare up in the news, I invariably get a call from the networks to come over and do a 30-second appearance on their shows. I did one not too long ago about the high school basketball game in Texas where one team won 100-to-nothing. I do a lot of speaking in communities and some TV stuff, but I have not really been able to break through the radio-to-TV world in terms of sports parenting.
Knock on wood, but it seems like recently there hasn’t been a really ugly sports parenting incident in the national scene, right? Well, there’s always something. I think because of the advent of cell phones with photos and video, people are beginning to realize that they can’t get away with the things they used to do in the past. There is a heightened awareness, but there are all sorts of horror stories that happen all the time. Just this spring there was a hot-button issue with high school coaches, who in order to make extra cash, would basically offer tutoring or individual coaching sessions to kids either on their team already or who were coming up through the program and will be on their team. You’ve got to understand if you are a high school coach and you are basically getting paid $100 an hour by some kid in seventh or eighth grade who someday is going to try out for your team, that right away puts a real conflict of interest into play. Apparently this happens quite a bit. It is outlawed in New Jersey, but not in New York or Connecticut —that’s a problem. There is always this give-and-take friction between the parents and the coaches and the kids and that’s a problem.
Just when I think I’ve seen it all, something else pops up, but it is good to see we are having some impact in getting parents and administrators and coaches to finally say this is an issue and we really should deal with this, so, that’s good.
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Listen to Rick Wolff on WFAN 660 AM, Sundays 8am-9am
